Turn off, retune, drop out

Which of these quiz shows offers the most depressing proof that Pearson TV had no right to be let anywhere near the last terrestrial wavelength? Is it (a) 100 % (C5, every weekday); (b) Whittle (C5, every weekday); (c) Tibs and Fibs (C5, Wed); or (d) Bring Me the Head of Light Entertainment (C5, Thur)? Answer: all of the above.

Channel 5 has been working hard all week to tell jokes against itself before anyone else can. "Everything to play for," said our host Tony Slattery at the end of Tibs and Fibs, a dismally smutty medical quiz show. "In fact, nothing to play for, because of the budget." 100% even makes a virtue of the precarious state of the channel's finances, dispensing with the services (and salary) of a host altogether. Which gives it slightly more personality than Whittle, hosted by Tim Vine.

Bring Me the Head of Light Entertainment enshrines another joke against the channel in a programme title, as the head of light entertainment basically heads the whole channel. You can ignore the inaugural night, which misleadingly suggested that there is a budget for drama. Even if there were, the rigid scheduling structure that is the channel's unique selling point would find no place for Beyond Fear (Sun) on a normal night. Otherwise the movie would have to go, or the gardening game show, the travel show, the property show and all the other criminally unimaginative magazine formats that on any other terrestrial channel would run, out of harm's way, in mid- afternoon.

The exclamation mark at the end of Hospital! (Sun) announced a debt to the school of surreal slapstick patented by the Airplane! people. So where does this leave Exclusive! (every weekday)? Rather than signalling even the merest iota of irony, the punctuation in this case betrays a fierce desperation to be noticed. In a luckier life, its host Julia Bradbury would have a sporting chance of finding an audience. But Exclusive! strands her on a deserted set and forces her to hand out miserly gobbets of second- hand showbiz tittle-tattle. Still, it's better than Turnstyle (Sun), a sports report show that suffers from the fact that Channel 5 has access to almost no significant sporting events. For its first outing it was reduced to interviewing football fans out on location, and then in the studio, because the good thing about football fans is that you don't have to pay them.

Into this sea of mediocrity comes the clunkily titled Five News Including First on Five (every weekday). The programme's editor, we read, has warned his staff that they will get a bad reception, which has a nice symmetry to it, given that the viewers are getting bad reception too. The one thing you can say about Five News is that money has visibly been spent. Most of Channel 5's programmes limp so badly that they are beneath spoof, but here, at least, an effort has been made to create a style, albeit one that by some freakish reordering of the rota has already been spoofed by The Day Today and Brass Eye.

It's a depressing indictment of our national mindset that Kirsty Young, because beautiful and blonde, has been prejudged as intellectually incapable. She has perhaps overcompensated, stripping away whatever charm she may possess to buttonhole the camera like someone with no sense of humour who wants to talk politics at a party. The other saving grace of Channel 5 is The Jack Docherty Show (Sun, and every weekday). Viewers may have trouble downsizing their expectations for a show that can't be an event every night, or even any night, but Docherty has hit the track at pace and looks weirdly close to being a natural.

The in-joke on his show came in an item called "The Re-Tuners", a reference to the fact that by a random stroke of good luck half the nation has been deprived of adequate reception to Channel 5's squalid float-past of derivative junk. The mood of your reviewer improved perceptibly on about Tuesday evening, when his slightly wavy picture suddenly blew up into a snowstorm. Even as they continue to send re-tuners out to reclaim the television sets that are rejecting its material, Channel 5 are training up an army of de-clenchers charged with reconfiguring the buttocks of the few hundred thousand viewers who have pressed the "5" button by mistake. There is more padding on this station than all the cells in Broadmoor. Get better, or get off.