I'll admit it. There was a point when I didn't quite 'get' ­Shooting Stars. There were so many questions. Why was a man who looks like a pickled walnut dressed as a baby? And why was he playing the drums? Why were they asking: "True or false: Bill Cosby is the world's first black man?" And why was the answer false, but only because the correct answer was "Sidney Poitier"? Why did the hosts - Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer - occasionally hit each other with comedy homemade ­objects, and make noises ­resembling a llama giving birth, as if they were talking? Just what was Mark Lamarr?

Then I saw an episode where they made Ulrika Jonsson stand in the centre of the stage and swung a stuffed bear at her. On a rope. From the ceiling. Shooting Stars made no sense but once you mentally tuned in, it was brilliant - a panel show that took surrealist comedy mainstream for the first time since Monty Python. And now, 12 years after disappearing from terrestrial TV, it's ba-ba-back. With Ulrika-ka-ka... you get the point. So, is it as good as ever?

Well, yes, because beyond the bizarre rounds (tonight: who's disguised as Hitler?), surreal questions ("name someone with a face") and off-beat skits (what Care Home: The Musical would be like), you remember the real ­reason for Shooting Stars has always been satirical. The clue's in the double-edged ­title, for the hard of thinking.

Hence, Ulrika - the kind of person who'd make love to herself and sell the kiss-and-tell to a tabloid - remains as target practice as a team captain ("You're writing a book, aren't you?" says Bob Mortimer. "The first thing you need is a pen. And some ideas. Could come together.").

But far better than the celeb guests who "got" Shooting Stars, were the ones that really didn't. Step ­forward ­tonight's guest, DJ Ironic. He dresses all in black, wears shades in the studio, has a small fluffy toy on the desk he calls his mini-me, and is called DJ Ironic. I mean, could he be any more of a tosser? Oh wait, yes. Because he spells his name DJ Ironik. THAT'S how ironic he is: incorrect, phonetic spelling. He may as well add a question mark at the end and be done with it

But here is the thing: celebrity satire, especially with people like DJ Impossibly Massive Dickhead, is all too obvious. Slugging them with surrealism they aren't smart enough to get or quick enough to parry is the sucker-punch they never saw ­coming, and is very funny indeed.

Of course, there is a slight hitch to all this celeb-baiting fun. Namely, Vic Reeves's appearance on I'm a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here, which could have made this the equivalent of Angus Deayton on Have I Got News for You trying to be all ­clever-clever about the excess of celebrity after a night with call-girls and Colombian bam-bam.

But somehow it doesn't - because Shooting Stars never took itself seriously in the first place. Looking silly was ­always the point.

On the Tube into work this morning, I saw a woman who must have been in her late eighties with bright, fuschia-pink hair, piled on the top of he head and held in place by matching fuschia-pink butterfly-shaped hair grips, a white dress with enormous red polka dots and what looked suspiciously like a ra-ra skirt, and shoes that wouldn't have looked out in place in The Wizard of Oz. By trying so hard, she just looked tired and out-of-date - a fitting metaphor for this completely unnecessary (and, criminally, unfunny) revival of something that was once the funniest show on television. Reeves & Mortimer return with Ulrika Jonsson and Jack Dee as team captains and Matt Lucas's George Dawes keeping scores.

After a one-off Christmas special, someone had the bright idea of bringing back Shooting Stars for a new series. It was an odd decision, as this surreal, not-a-panel-game feels threadbare and tired. Sadly, time has not been kind. Team captains Jack Dee and Ulrika Jonsson do their best, but they don't have much to work with. The guests, particularly The One Show's Christine Bleakley, are game and do their best but it's a slog. Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer still have their moments, of course; Reeves's impressions of an unintelligible club singer are still funny; and it's good to see Matt Lucas again as the excitable big baby George Dawes. At least he looks like he's having fun. But generally the humour is too scatological and the madness that characterised Shooting Stars in its heyday and which made the show feel fresh and unlike anything else, now feels forced.

If they conducted a national poll to find which panel show the public thought best bridged the gap between Have I Got News For You and Family Fortunes, this would be the hands-down winner.

Host Jimmy Carr returns to deadpan his way through an eighth series of more current affair-based quipping.

The show's traditional opening round to try and guess which headlines have been exercising the public jawbones this week should be pretty easy. And you can bet team captains Sean Lock and Jason Manford have spent the week happily polishing ad-libbed one-liners about Britain's Got Talent, Susan Boyle's meltdown, The Apprentice and the Big Brother launch.

As with HIGNFY, the only flaw in this format is that the panelists then have to patiently EXPLAIN these hot topics to us as though we've just recently touched down from Mars. "She was this woman with bushy eyebrows who lived with her cat in a village in Scotland and then she became the most famous woman in the world and it all went a bit wrong..."

Chipping in with their two-pence worth this week will be Johnny Vegas, Ulrika Jonsson, Jodie Kidd (not known for her rapid-fire humour, but she may surprise us) and Jack Whitehall, who'll be secretly hoping that the nation will be talking of nothing other than what a shame it is he won't be hosting Big Brother's Big Mouth this year.

Shooting Stars 'back in autumn'

Surreal comedy quiz show Shooting Stars will return to the BBC this autumn, according to its stars Vic Reeves and Matt Lucas.

Reeves, 50 - real name Jim Moir - told the Daily Express the show would return with Ulrika Jonsson and Jack Dee as team hosts.

You know just what you're getting with Does the Team Think..., Radio 2's quiz game - Bob Mortimer and Ulrika Jonsson are panellists, and it's all held together by host Vic Reeves's surreal whimsy, so it's basically Shooting Stars remade for the airwaves. Not that this means it's unsuccessful - its half-hour of panellists fielding unlikely questions from the studio audience passes in congenial fashion, with the fact that its participants are old friends making things very cosy (in a good way). Jonsson comes in for lots of flak from her pals - after she confessed to a horror of reading instruction manuals, Reeves chipped in: "Couldn't you get a man round to do it? And then marry him?", but she was more than equal to the task of sending herself up. Asked if she uses slaves in her house, she suggested, "My husbands?"