By Finlo Rohrer BBC News Online entertainment staff

A new entertainment show set in a bar, featuring a "zany", controversial radio DJ turned television host sounds crushingly familiar.

Five's Live With Chris Moyles was billed as part of a new wave of programming that would help the channel firm up a distinct identity.

Instead, Five has been lumbered with a format that is a watered-down version of Channel 4's defunct TFI Friday, right down to Chris Evans' presence as executive producer.

It is often said funny, live television is near impossible to pull off, but Moyles does not give himself a head start with a train of bad games and tepid jokes that would be more at home at an irritating freshers' night than on primetime television.

The DJ had first night nerves

The BBC Radio 1 DJ starts off with a perfunctory run through the funniest headlines of the day, fluffs the telephone number for the competition and keeps referring to how things had run smoothly in the "pilots".

He makes much of running in the previous day's 10km fun run, flashing up a sign reading "knackered" that seems perfectly in tune with his performance.

The low point of a well below sea level show is a game where the audience are electrocuted through finger stalls because one of their number can't slide pints down a bar with any level of accuracy.

But it is run close in a bizarre segment, when for no obvious reason, Moyles first talks to Five's head of entertainment on the phone and then runs "backstage" to find the bespectacled commissioning editor waiting in a stairwell.

Protracted death

While TFI Friday's viewing figures were never phenomenal, it tapped into a key audience, became a major talking point and initially performed well in a difficult timeslot.

But TFI died a painful and protracted death as it was deserted by its viewers and even its host, and this show tries to replicate its forerunner on a lower budget and without the celebrity guests.

Even the most bullish personalities eventually find themselves out of their depths, stuck in their own version of the Peter Principle.

Chris Evans has returned with more of the same

For Evans, it was when US "shock jock" Howard Stern's remarks about the TFI host's ex-wife changed his demeanour to that of a quivering schoolboy waiting outside the headmaster's office.

For Moyles, it seems like the transition to television has caught him out.

As a DJ he is used to live performance, but his feelings on how the first show was going seemed to be telegraphed by his hands, which fluttered like leaves in a hurricane every time he held something up.

And when the highlights of the show are an account of his bleeding nipples and some antediluvian jokes about the audience of 16 student nurses, you realise entertainment hosts are as bad as they were 30 years ago. They just have better haircuts.

Live With Chris Moyles may improve in the coming weeks after teething troubles and nervousness are overcome, but for Five that may be too late.