Last Friday, I watched all sixth episodes of The Friday Night Armistice, in an attempt to cleanse my mind from having watched 10 O'Clock Live on Channel 4 the night before. It was something of a train wreck, and one of my tweets about asking Channel 4 for The Daily Show back got quite a few retweets by the end of the hour.

And yet I watched it again this week.

I want the show to work, for a variety of reasons. Have I Got News For You should have been taken out back and shot almost a decade ago, and Mock The Week is little more than a comedian showcase (in the moments when it is somewhat amusing). It's a little embarrassing that the best TV political satire over the past few years came from John Bird and John Fortune. Plus, Channel 4 needs to atone for The 11 O'Clock Show. And Tonightly.

Anyway, 10 O'Clock Live. The worst part about last week was that you could see the glimmers of a half-decent show peeking out from the junk being televised. Links being dropped, the audience going wild over Jimmy Carr's awful gags, Brooker's abysmal Sarah Palin segment that almost made me feel sorry for her, cutting off interviews just as they were starting to get interesting, and, although I love Lauren Laverne as much as I love chocolate digestive biscuits, her input to the show would have been better if she had stayed at home. But…but…David Mitchell turned in a reasonable performance, and you could see how, with trimming a bit here and there and letting things like interviews breathe a little more, it could work.

This week didn't quite work, either. But it was much improved. Yes, I'm never going to like Carr's opening monologue, mainly because I don't like his humour all that much - but this week he seemed to be engaging with the live format instead of just trying to get from his lines as fast as possible (though he still needs to work on the interviewing part - or they should only have one interviewee per show - cutting off the economist just as he was going to explain the deficit made the entire segment pretty worthless). Mitchell got eaten alive by Alastair Campbell, but the interview seemed to flow better than last week, and his monologue about the Olympic Stadium was quite strong. Brooker is trying to get his Lewis Black impression down pat and not quite succeeding, but at least it wasn't as bad as his Palin VT…and then there's Laverne.

I still don't think they know what to do with her; the criticism from the papers last week centred on Lauren being saddled with the secretary position (mostly ignoring the WNN sketch...which I would love to, but the bleach hasn't quite reached that part of my mind just yet). That didn't really change very much tonight - she was still in the role of 'keeping the boys in order' and 'well, what have we learned today, children?'. The SERCO segment seemed to be an attempt to give her something more to do, and hurrah for that…but we needed a bit more evidence - maybe a VT segment with Laverne trying to get information from the company or something, rather than the out-of-the-blue talk we got from her.

But quite an improvement from last week, even if it still has deep problems. By the time it finishes its run in April, it might even get quite good…