Channel 4 has been gagging for a populist news show for a while and in the wake of what was possibly the most TV influenced general election in history, the twitter generation who hashtag along to BBC’s Question Time and every Thursday night were ripe for the picking.

Guardian columnist Charlie Brooker was joined by comedian David Mitchell, who has written for the Guardian,  other comedian Jimmy Carr and Lauren Lavernealso settles into the Guardian writer section of the Venn diagram and is the only one of the four who has any significant live TV experience. The show patchworks their relative strengths together; Brooker’s VT commentaries, Mitchell’s monologues, Laverne’s…I’ll get back to you, and Carr’s acerbic interview style.  The four were also lumped together in an awkwardly scripted round table debate which felt like four rejected job interviewees meeting in a Wetherspoons to lick their wounds.

The pre-recorded ‘World News Now’ sketch was awful, as was Jimmy Carr’s tourism bit about Tunisia. Both were one liners which had been stretched like Juicy Couture on a Jeremy Kyle participant, and were less appealing to the audience.

Ah, the audience! Mostly between 18 and 35, they would have been a perfect addition to the show. The viewership for 10 o’clock Live tweet and blog.  They want to participate in news, that is why news and current affairs are back on the agenda for the 18-30 demographic. They weren’t invited to this party though, viewers were relegated to a scrolling tweet log. There’s a wealth of funny and intelligent bloggers and tweeters who could sit in that audience and be thrown to. They can react quickly and succinctly to information because that’s what twitter is about. If 10 O’Clock Live can use them they’ll have an angle which other channels’ current affairs programmes will find hard to replicate.

David Mitchell’s interview with David Willets was a high point, as was Jimmy Carr’s chat with Environmental Economist Bjorn Lomborg. Mitchell barely put a foot wrong throughout the show, but the same can’t be said for autocue allergist Charlie Brooker who has a few rough live TV edges to shave off. Lauren Laverne was supposed to be the live TV veteran but in the final round table discussion she struggled with transitioning smoothly between topics, which is pretty much the whole point of her being there. She did get the line of the night though, when she replied to a question about Ed Balls wife Yvette Cooper MP keeping her own name with “Nobody wants to be called ‘Yvette Balls’.”

With practise of course the show will run smoother. If they bin the rubbish sketches and involve the audience more, including bringing in more voices from online media, they might just pull it off. People like Cory Doctorow, Gia Milinovich and Graham Linehan are smart, opinionated, informed and respected online. Bring them in with some normals who actually do jobs as well as provide thoughtful commentary, and make this a news programme which doesn’t jut pay lip service to the idea of modern current affairs TV.