If ITV2 had a face it would look like Keith Lemon. Thanks to the success of Celebrity Juice he bestrides the channel like a comedy colossus. Well, I’m certainly glad it’s him rather than Dapper Laughs. 

I guess if Celebrity Juice is his take on Shooting Stars than Keith Lemon’s Sketch Show is his version of The Smell of Reeves and Mortimer. I doubt – snob alert! – if most ITV2 viewers are that bothered about surrealism, postmodernism and meta-narrative but it's definitely there in the sketches here that take celebrity culture and twist it until the pips squeak.  

And as much as I’d like to be snobby about Keith Lemon there are some great freewheeling comic moments. I particularly warmed to his David Dickinson as a spluttering, permatanned grotesque. Like Vic and Bob, Lemon (actually the very smart Leigh Francis) doesn't go for direct impressions. He just latches onto a particular characteristic and then runs away with it. His Simon Cowell, for instance has an unexpected penchant for cheap cars, while Holly Willoughby’s bosoms gradually pop out of her dress during a well-observed This Morning send-up. Harry Styles has a big nose for no particular reason.

It might be a good idea if he avoids duos with Geordie accents though - his Hairy Bikers and Ant & Dec really are too close to Vic and Bob for comfort. And Lemon's Pharrell-living-with-Daft-Punk sketch has a whiff of Slade in Residence about it. I wonder if he would dare to do a Masterchef send-up as Reeves & Mortimer came up with the definitive one two decades ago.

There are some bits that don’t work and his Kardashians-as-gypsies selling roadside tat mocks gypsies who don't deserve it as much as rich airheads who do, but the hit rate is not bad and the pace never lets up. A quickfire nature programme spoof on Ed Sheeran is such a good idea surely it has been done before. By Big Train perhaps? But almost nothing outstays its welcome – at times it makes the Fast Show seem slow (old Fast Show regular John Thomson, incidentslly, pitches up alongside good sports Carrie Fisher, Phillip Schofield and Eamonn Holmes). 

Francis is clearly obsessed with pop culture and reality TV. He can be cruel, but there is less of the really twisted darkness of his early work here. I first saw him on late night TV when he had Big Brother’s Craig chained up in a cupboard and went on about, what was it, his "sex piss"?. Yes this sketch show is derivative, yes it’s a bit vulgar. But who would you rather have filling up ITV2? This or Dapper Laughs?

Thursdays, 10pm, ITV2.