'Mena, I made this pie for you'....

So Never Mind the Buzzcocks is back. This makes me fairly to quite happy - not as happy as it would have done in days gone past, in the days when Bill Bailey was a team captain and the show could still pull relatively interesting guests. But it’s half an hour of fairly amusing, ‘irreverant’ entertainment that lasts approximately as long as it takes me to paint my nails and gives me another choice of background telly while I’m eating dinner.

This week, Jack Whitehall is the host, and, surprisingly, the show has managed to pull the relatively impressive feat of booking Mena Suvari - actress of American Pie and American Beauty proportions - to sit side by side with Noel Fielding, and this is pretty exciting. Man, that woman must have some stories - and american guests are always fun, partly because you get the sense they’ve never seen the show, and thus are unprepared when the bizarre and mocking questions start coming their way.

Unfortunately, Whitehall failed to make the most of this mega-booking (though the writers certainly didn’t, making nearly every feature in some way American Beauty/Pie related). Instead, he spent the majority of the show making lewd sexual jokes at Suvari, at one point presenting her with a ‘drawing’ he’d done of his cock encircling her like a snake, and in another instance giving her a pie, apparently decorated with her face, but with a hole at her pastry mouth, in reference to that infamous pie-fucking scene.

When Shooting Stars was in its heyday, there was a bit where Vic Reeves would go up to an attractive female contestant and come on to her by rubbing his knees and making strange faces. It was hilarious. Reeves was ridiculous and ineffectual, not predatory and powerful, and it was funny without being threatening. No-one was ridiculing the woman. The audience (and often the woman being ‘rubbed’ at) was laughing at Reeves.

On the other hand, Buzzcocks jokes were fairly lazy, not massively funny, weirdly sinister and, oh my god, so relentless. Throughout the whole show, Suvari was low-level sexually harassed in a way that was making her seem visibly uncomfortable. And Whitehall hardly had two words to say to the other female panellist - Celia Pacquola - an Australian comic who was all but edited out of the show. It reminded me of an insight Caitlin Moran shared in an interview with Tim Minchin on Radio 4 a few months ago; Moran has been repeatedly asked to appear on panel shows but consistently refuses because they’re ‘a boys game’. And I think she’s probably right. A little bit of ribbing, sure. But maybe vary your content just a little bit. Half an hour of sex jokes and you just wind up looking boring and a little bit sinister.

All in all, getting a woman onto your panel show to simply sit and be the butt of your sex-jokes is not ok. And, unfortunately, unless you’re a connoisseur of LADbanter, it’s unlikely to be that funny, either.