Romesh Ranganathan's Parents' Evening review: See me - ITV's new Saturday night shiny floor show simply must do better

Host Romesh drags his mum into the mix, as usual these days, so we get a bit of off-colour humour about the mechanics of having sex in space, and a few light swear words, which the audience laps up with the kind of reaction that makes you think they're being regularly poked with a cattle prod.

The game itself takes a few bits from Pointless, some ideas from Family Fortunes, even a few from Who Dares Wins, the National Lottery game show.

In this uneasy stew sit three celebrity pairs – one team member a parent, the other a child.

The parents are shown a question board and have to estimate how many of the questions/clues their child can answer/solve and whichever team bids the highest gets the chance to answer, winning cash for charity if they succeed.

If they fail, the cash is divided between the other two teams.

This goes on for quite a while, in between the banter and the laughter and whooping and the hollering, before a final round in which both parent and child get involved.

In this first episode, Alison Hammond gives the impression that she thinks her son is an absolute thicko, and refuses to bid any of the categories, but because the other children – actually grown adults, comedian Iain Stirling and Carol Vorderman's son Cameron – are absolute thickos, Alison and son Aidan gather so much consolation cash that they actually win.

This outcome hardly seems to be what the producers would have wished for, but the whole thing seems so forced that it's difficult to divine what they were aiming for in the first place.

You can tell we're after the watershed, because of the repeated sex/space debate, the regular, if mild, swearing, and the rounds based on naming types of underwear, but the more adult content adds nothing to make it more entertaining.

In fact, the whole premise would be better at an earlier time, when parents and younger children could actually play along, running through the whole game at home.

It's hard to see teenage kids getting involved, but certainly parents with younger children could have a whale of a time watching along and seeing how much their kids are actually learning at school.

The ad breaks reinforce that idea it would be better aimed younger, as the show is sponsored by camping holiday company Eurocamp, whose little sponsor films all feature young families grinning in splash parks – with not a grumpy teen in sight.

Meanwhile, the mechanics of the show quickly get boring.

The rounds themselves are very similar, with the answer boards rarely appearing, making it difficult to play the game while watching at home – at least in Pointless they stay in vision all the time, so you can test yourself, and whoever you're watching with.

And Romesh is inordinately proud of a bit of business which sees the 'child' in each team sliding backwards on a mechanical chair so their parent can't see them when estimating how many answers they'll get right.

This might be impressive if, on BBC1 just an hour earlier, we hadn't seen a massive illuminated wheel rotating round Michael McIntyre while members of the public are lifted up from below with a great fanfare and a billow of dry ice.

And, as any parent of a teenager will know, the show-offy swearing, the banter, the half-bakedness of the ideas quickly become irritating, and you wish the producers would just go off and do their homework.

In the end, it's their own time they're wasting and if ITV think they have a rival to The Wheel then they're deluding themselves – they simply must do better.