If watching old TV panel shows on iPlayer isn’t fulfilling enough procrastination for you, the four-night residency of ADC’s lateshow Have I Got to Mock the Buzzcocks Ja Vu will no doubt prove a welcome attraction. This sequel to a show put on in February – with some of the same cast –  combines elements of well-known radio and TV programmes, the names of the games changed “partly for fun, partly for copyright reasons.”

In the standard panel show set-up, two teams of Cambridge comedians compete across five rounds, in a format they have rehearsed but with entirely improvised topics and questions. Unfortunately, perhaps due to it being the first night, the show was slow to get started. The ‘Would I tell the truth to you’ round was not especially engaging – the panel coming across as a little insular (“that would be so you, Yaseen” etc.) – despite throwing up an interesting, if not actually funny, anecdote about one of them seeing Amy Winehouse at a party the night before her death.

Luckily, after the first round the pace of the comedy did pick up. The ‘I’m sorry I haven’t the title’ verbal charades segment was a particular hit – pairs of panellists using suggestions from the audience for which book, film, and song titles to act out. It was an opportunity to show off some very sharp and occasionally edgy improvisation even if, perhaps wisely, the line was drawn at attempting to act out the Quran. From this round onwards panellist Patrick Wilson began to really stand out – enjoying a consistency and response from the audience considerably beyond the other five.

Host Lily Lindon also seemed to come into her element more as the show went on; drawn out of a slightly one-dimensional ‘straight man’ role, she wisely avoided making it a one-woman show, and made the comic most of it being her boyfriend (not always flawlessly) doing the tech.

While the later rounds did little to bring consistency, they certainly provided the stand-out gags that had been lacking earlier. Arguably the low point of the evening, ‘Whose rap is it anyway?’, which seemed under-rehearsed, with Lewis Brierly – conspicuously absent through much of the show up until that point – struggling especially.  However, Brierly and co. were able to end on a high with the safer territory of ‘Just a bit more than 59 seconds’. An alarm flashing up on the screen when audience members suggested Brexit as a topic to speak on, and another alarm for Trump, was a clever addition, along with a running joke around borrowing an audience member’s phone to do timing. It was also at this late stage that Yaseen Kader seemed to find form; though funny throughout the show, he seemed in his element here – his suggestion that a fellow panellist who had the topic of ‘The Tab’ mention journalistic integrity (“that’s sure to get a laugh”) was surely a contender for ‘line of the night’.

Whether it was due to it being the first performance, the mixed fortunes of the panel, or the choice of games, Have I Got to Mock the Buzzcocks Ja Vu never quite lived up to its potential. If it can sharpen up over the course of the run and show more of how it was at its funniest, it could do very well indeed