If you’re unfamiliar with Mock The Week, it’s a panel show populated entirely by stand-up comedians. There are a few rounds, which aim to showcase the skills of the stand-ups, and it must be doing something right, because it’s now on its eighth series.

The problem with Mock The Week isn’t the show itself, which has now dispensed with awkward rounds from the first couple of series, and concentrates on more quickfire (and therefore funny) rounds and banter. The problem is the performers.

On watching Mock The Week, you might initially be surprised how good the stand-ups are, and how they come up with great stories off the top of their heads at a moment’s notice. But there’s always a nagging feeling that the show’s over-prepared, which becomes more apparent as the show goes on and the responses become more obviously canned and contrived.

Things get worse when you see any of the performers live, and realise that any given Mock The Week clearly largely comprises the performers getting the questions in advance, then figuring out which bits of their stand-up routines they can cut and paste into the show. With the exception of host Dara Ó Briain and occasional guest David Mitchell, Mock The Week always ends up resembling a déjà vu express train, battering you with micro-repeat after micro-repeat if you’ve watched any of the performers’ shows, or even Live At The Apollo.

Ultimately, Mock The Week is still a reasonable half-hour of entertainment, but it increasingly makes me yearn for Whose Line Is It Anyway?, a Radio 4 show that ended up spending a happy decade on Channel 4, before the plug was mysteriously pulled and an inferior US version was produced. WLIIA? was similar to Mock The Week, but didn’t bother with a topical hook, instead concentrating on a number of ‘generic’ games (‘hoedown’, ‘questions only’, ‘scenes from a hat’, and so on) with themes often chosen by the host (Clive Anderson in the UK version) from studio-audience suggestions. Performers would improvise their way through a scene or game until the host decided to move on. While regulars on the show undoubtedly had material or ideas to draw from, you never got the cumbersome ‘trying to weld a chunk of a stand-up routine into a supposedly off-the-cuff TV show’ problem Mock The Week suffers from.

With WLIIA? clearly not being the most expensive show in the world, and there still being plenty of capable UK-based performers (Comedy Store Players, most people who appear on QI, and people like Ó Briain, Mitchell and Jimmy Carr), it’s surprising that the show’s not made a come-back. Sadly, though, producer Dan Patterson reportedly fielded a question about WLIIA? at a Mock The Week recording last year, confirming that it’s not a rights issue holding up creating more of the older, better series—it’s that no British channel is interested. Although there are too many panel shows on the television, I feel that WLIIA? would nonetheless be a great show to bring back to British screens. Sure, it was hit-and-miss at times, but I’d sooner watch a half-hour of genuinely creative and new improvisational comedy than yet another half-hour of clips from a half-dozen stand-up routines.