I’ve tended to dip in and out of Mock The Week in recent years, viewing it as part of the comedy furniture and regarding it as good fun though not essential viewing. But in Stuart Goldsmith’s recent Comedian’s Comedian interview with Dara O’Brian the stalwart show’s fast-talking Irish host made a strong case for the show being different now so I thought I’d better give it a watch.

O’Briain said that in its tenth year Mock The Week was in its fourth generation. There were the early John Oliver – whatever happened to him? – years, the Frankie Boyle years and the competitive years. Now, said O’Briain, it was less controversial, more “conversational” and featured younger comedians. Maybe I was lucky and I caught it on a good night, but in the third instalment in the current series featuring O’Briain, Andy Parsons, Hugh Dennis, Sara Pascoe, Gary Delaney, Ed Byrne and James Acaster, the show was on strikingly good form. With a few caveats.

Firstly there was certainly a less testosterone-fuelled atmosphere. Though only slightly less. Ed Byrne still punched the air triumphantly when he got a laugh and, while it might have been ironic, it was still a punch in the air. Elsewhere the gags flowed and the stand-ups were generous, allowing each other to get their punchlines in. There was still an air of competition but I guess that’s in the DNA of every comic. It is hard to resist topping a joke when you come up with a better one. And without sounding patronising Sara Pascoe easily held her own, though that’s no surprise. As well as being very witty she has had more TV exposure recently than others on the panel so had reason to be relatively relaxed.

The humour is not as tasteless as it once was. One can’t imagine any of last night’s guests making gags about the Queen’s fanny being haunted as Boyle did. But that did not mean they were entirely cuddly. There was a running gag about the Greek debt which some people on Twitter felt was uncomfortable. The panel might not have been singling out individuals as Boyle may have done, but given the state of the Greek economy this was very much punching down.

There didn’t seem to be too much shoe-horning in of old routines that I’ve seen on MTW in the past. James Acaster did a tiny bit of his “schmoozing/ice-breaking” riff from his live show, but we can excuse that as it was very funny and few viewers would have seen it. Acaster also got the laugh of the night with his gag about a trailer for the ultimate mash-up movie coming to a cinema near you - “robobongocuckoocop”.

Compared to The John Bishop Show the faces were over-familiar, but you need to be a pretty assured TV performer to do a programme like this so you can hardly pluck relative circuit newbies as Bishop has done. Will I be watching again? Yes. Has it changed enough to be called a fourth generation? I’m not so sure. Maybe call it Generation Three-And-A-Half. 

Mock The Week, Thursdays, 10pm, BBC2. 

Watch a clip of James Acaster's gag here.