ANYONE setting themselves up to be the new Scrap Saturday is just asking for trouble, but that is just what The Emergency, the new weekly satire on Newstalk, is doing.

Nostalgia, after all, has made Scrap Saturday the perfect comedy; we agree to forget that actually it wasn't always all that funny, and that sometimes you could see the jokes coming a mile away.

When you think of it, it's as if no time had passed. Nearly 20 years after Scrap Saturday played fast and loose with the brittle reputation of Charlie Haughey, here we are listening to another radio satire lampooning yet another golden circle, and yes, still poking fun at fat people.

The Emergency team comprises Joe Taylor, famous for his tribunal impersonations of Bertie Ahern; actors/ comedians Morgan Jones, Dermot Carmody and Karen Ardiff; writer and blogger Nick McGiveney; and Eoin Byrne, who wrote scripts for Scrap Saturday, so there's a bona fide pedigree.

Newstalk boasts that "no one will be safe as all sides of the political divide and the shady cabals in our midst are exposed and lampooned". Let's hope so. No cow should be too sacred for ridicule.

Mind you, there are some cows that we're well and truly sick of laughing at. The problem with The Emergency, on the basis of a hasty appraisal of yesterday's first episode, is that it seems better served by its performers than by its script.

There's surely no need, for instance, to keep trying to raise a laugh out of the fecundity of Miriam O'Callaghan - "Miriam O'Christnotanotherbaby", as she's called in the show. It's just not funny any more, if it ever was.

Similarly, there must be better things to do with Seánie FitzPatrick, former chairman of Anglo Irish Bank, than have him move in next door and ask to borrow 370,000 pounds of sugar. Aren't there? And mocking Sam Smyth for his stammer, or Mary Harney for her weight, now that's just schoolyard.

Yet, in a shameful double standard, having a go at Brian Cowen for his traditional Fianna Fáil build is funny. Enda Kenny, in the last sketch of the show, serenades the Dáil to the tune of the Leonard Cohen song, 'Hallelujah'.

"Baffled Biffo, he doesn't have a clue, yeah... you flushed the feckin' country down the loo, yeah," he sings, adding the aside: "You're not the only one in Dáil Eireann who can sing you fat boll*x". Tee hee.

The actors, though, are positively brilliant ? Brian Cowen's baleful snarl; Enda Kenny's tense enunciation of "teeshick"; Dave Fanning's verbal incontinence ? and there were hilarious moments.

Among those that stood out were the interview with Dutch Bono about U2's new album, 'No Tax on the Horizon'; the reference to ministers' "idiot children masque­rading as Oireachtas secretaries"; Rolf Harris making wobbly noises with a cardboard cutout of Conor Lenihan, which prompts Leo Varadkar to say: "Woof! Privatise the wobbly noises!" Like Scrap Saturday, The Emergency might soon become necessary listening. Like Scrap Saturday, it may not always be all that funny, but these are serious times: it only has to be funny enough to be going on with.