Last night was the first episode of a new comedy series on BBC2, Broken News.

It’s a satire on the current state of television news made in the form of a channel surfer switching from one news channel to another. It includes a BBC regional programme, a BBC News 24’a like, ITN, entertainment channel, sports channel and an american TV station (with the anchor woman played by Claudia Christian, best known as Commander Susan Ivanova in Babylon 5).

Yes, it was very funny. However, I can see the format going stale extremely quickly as after you’ve made the same jokes about how content is presented in news programmes once you can do nothing but repeat it and then it becomes unfunny. The only way I can see that they could keep it fresh is to take a leaf out of “Drop the Dead Donkey” and satire current news stories using the Broken News format as a vehicle.

Of course, whether the news producers see this programme and react to change their output so that it’s less full of pointless, stupid, dumbed down content is another matter.