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.

The BBC reports that a cartoon pig will now have to wear a seat-belt in future episodes, due to a stupid person. It doesn’t expicitly say this, but that’s the gist of the article. The sequence of events seems to be:

1. Cartoon pig in fictional cartoon world doesn’t wear fictional cartoon seat-belt.
2. Child ‘refuses’ to wear seat-belt because Peppa Pig doesn’t wear one.
3. Stupid person (a.k.a. a parent) complains, rather than, you know, explaining to their kid that Peppa Pig is a cartoon and that everyone has to wear a seat-belt in the real world.
4. Production company caves, and says they’ll also (at presumably great cost) reanimate all old episodes “to reflect the change”.

Let’s hope the stupid parent’s kid never watches Tom and Jerry, or the parent will presumably petition Time Warner, rather than telling their little tyke that repeatedly attempting to kill the cat is wrong, regardless of whether it happened in a fictional cartoon world.

Cnet recently asked is the iPhone hurting AT&T’s brand? The reasoning? Network complaints and AT&T’s general incompetence means iPhone owners are getting terribly angry, and because iPhone is very newsworthy hardware, people report these problems with much gusto.

Quick answer, Cnet: no. The iPhone isn’t hurting AT&T’s brand. The only thing hurting AT&T is AT&T.

See also: O2 and iPhone in the UK. Again, some reports have suggested that ‘poor little O2’ has somehow been suckered into taking on iPhone and that those nasty iPhone users have somehow made the wonderful O2 look rubbish. O2 may have been taken by surprise with high data usage, but to blame Apple or its hardware for O2’s shortcomings is just stupid.

Man, sooner or later, people will look at something wonderful like BBC’s iPlayer and somehow suggest that the BBC is somehow at fault for making lots of shoddy ISPs look like the idiots that they are, due to not being able to cope with the traffic the fantastic iPlayer creates.

Oh, right—that’s already happened too.

Ever since videogames crawled, bleary-eyed, from a pond full of pixellated scum soup, mainstream media has had it in for them. Perhaps it’s the threat—when people become hooked on doing something interactive, they seldom return to passive entertainment so regularly. So while many dedicated gamers might consider the sedate life-in-a-PC ‘game’ The Sims to be roughly equivalent to terminal boredom, it’s still a major step up, in terms of keeping your brain alive, from watching the dreary inhabitants of Albert Square go about their mundane and depressing existence. Play something more exciting and evening soaps will be about as appealing as being sanded down.

Non-gamers assume videogaming is just an outlet for teenage boys, whereas the mainstream media considers it a genuinely corrupting influence, with millions of games ‘out there’ that somehow ‘train’ youngsters to mutilate, maim, kill, shoot, KILL, SHOOT, KIL KILL KILLLLLL!!11!!11! But, as Charlie Brooker’s rather wonderful one-off special Gameswipe ably showed last night, that’s just bollocks.

Videogames are like any other genre: mostly full of crud, but with utter gems sprinkled about, and with a suitably diverse array of products to choose from. The resurgence of classic gaming (usually described as ‘retro’ or ‘casual’ gaming) has also reintroduced a range of relatively safe games for wee kiddies that are also simple enough for them to enjoy, leaving the more brutal and violent titles for older gamers. And, as Brooker noted more than once in his show, gaming is all about suitability, just like movies. You wouldn’t let your five-year-old watch Saw, so don’t let them play Kill Death Maim IV; but kids can happily watch cartoons, so let them play Super Mario. (And, like Pixar movies, quality fare suitable for kids can also be enjoyed by adults.)

On Twitter, Brooker says another Gameswipe one-off might happen at some point, and I sincerely hope so. Videogaming has been vilified for too long on the TV, and it’s about time the genre had some intelligent programming dedicated to it. For now, go and watch Gameswipe on iPlayer and then tell the BBC you enjoyed it.

So there I was at the cinema yesterday, bracing myself for a hateful YOU WOULDN’T STEAL A BABY’S RATTLE AND THEN USE THE RATTLE TO KILL A POLICEMAN AND STEAL HIS CAR AND THEN USE THAT CAR TO RAM-RAID THE TOWER OF LONDON AND STEAL THE CROWN JEWELS advert, offering a typically slimy, inaccurate representation of reality and law, trying to create an analogy with film bootlegging, when, surprisingly, it didn’t happen.

Instead, I got Martin Freeman affably thanking me for coming to the cinema and asking nicely if I’d perhaps let the staff know if someone was ‘camcordering’ the movie, because, really, that’s not a very nice thing to do, is it?

Aside from the idiot copywriter who decided that ‘camcorder’ could be used as a verb (nous camcordon, vous camcordez), this was a pretty good ad, and, in a tip to irony corner, far more persuasive than the braindead YOU WOULDN’T STEAL legalese crap cinemas have been shoving down our throats for the past few years.

So, please take this across to DVD ville, rather than that moron ironmonger, and make it skippable, and then I won’t hate you, media producers.