Whose Line Is It Anyway? remains one of my all-time favourite TV shows. If you’ve never seen it, the show starred four comedians proficient in the art of improvisation. Host Clive Anderson would have the comedians perform in various games, with loose themes and behaviours, often based around suggestions from the studio audience.

Although initially a little pedestrian, the show found its stride during the second and third series, and although it was heavily biased towards American performers by the time the run ended in 1998, it never lost its edge (even if some of the regular performers showboated for laughs a little too often).

The show was reworked for the US in 1998, lasting for around a decade, but the format surprisingly never returned to British screens (although many Whose Line performers appear live as the Comedy Store Players in London). That hasn’t stopped various producers trying to shoe-horn in the concept elsewhere though. Thank God You’re Here made its way over from Australia to ITV in 2007, but lasted only six episodes. Perhaps this was down to the overly regimented structure, based around lengthy scenes and a single game (performer enters unknown scene and has to improv their way through). Whose Line creator and producer Dan Patterson also clearly tried to bring some of the show’s magic to news panel show Mock the Week. Quickfire rounds like Scenes we’d like to see (where performers are given a basic scenario and have to reel off one-liners) are almost direct lifts from Whose Line, but the overly scripted nature of Mock the Week (the performers are stand-ups who typically cut-and-paste most of their responses from their stand-up routines) makes the show a fun enough watch (at least if you don’t actually go to any of the performers’ gigs and realise you’ve heard all the material before) but unsatisfying in terms of a comparison to Whose Line.

The latest attempt at the genre is Fast and Loose, a BBC Two show helmed by Hugh Dennis, devised by Dan Patterson, and with a set-up quite similar to Whose Line. Having heard promising noises about the show, I’d had most of the series sitting on the PVR for weeks, but was thinking it’d suffer by comparison to Whose Line. And it does, but this is the best shot yet at a spiritual successor to Patterson’s original improv show. Its plus-points are many: the performers have a lot more freedom than in similar shows, there are more games and there’s clearly more actual improvisation. There’s also some innovation, not least in a game called Sideways Scene, where the performers improvise on a set flipped ninety degrees by the magic of television—in other words, they’re lying down, but it appears to the audience like they’re in a basic room. The set-up provides plenty of potential for turning basic routines into something surreal and funny.

It’s not all good news though. In an attempt to not rip off Whose Line wholesale, there have been some odd additions. Every other game has host Hugh Dennis ‘finding out more about the performers’ by asking them questions—time that would be better spent on actual games. And of the games themselves, there aren’t enough of them. There’s also a bit too much scripting evident, and some of the performers forget themes when they switch genre, instead moving directly into basic parody of a movie or TV show (rather than integrating ideas from said shows into the improv). This would be fine if the same genres and shows didn’t crop up regularly throughout the show.

Still, it’s early days yet, and the show’s had a mere eight episodes to make its mark. In those eight episodes, it’s managed to beat the first series of Whose Line in terms of laugh-out-loud moments, if not in terms of balance. It’s the first time it’s felt like Whose Line was alive again and I’d certainly like to see more (especially with extra games and fewer scripted moments), although I remain wondering why no-one’s bothered to resurrect Patterson’s original show, since it’s clearly a concept that still has legs.