'Pop! Goes the weasel' chaotic and unpredictable fun

Who the hell is the weasel? Well, I can tell you what he looks like. He's whippet-like, sports a 'tache and appears to go about covered in baby oil.

But who exactly this mad bugger is, this creature that springs from a manhole at the end of every round in C4's new game show Pop! Goes The Weasel (8pm), is a mystery wrapped in what looks like a loincloth.

The weasel is simply the maddest bit in what could well be the second maddest television show to be made in New Zealand (the first is, and shall always remain, the late, lamented Back Of The Y).

But then the weasel is simply the most chaotic and unpredictable element in a show which does chaos very well and game show very badly. This, of course, is intentional.

Pop! Goes The Weasel, hosted by C4's biggest talent, Jaquie Brown, is knowingly naff, consciously shoddy. And it revels in its trashiness.

The show's formula is, as formulas should be in game shows, simple enough.

Four local musicians from across the spectrum - hip-hop to alt-rock - are roped in each week and formed into two teams (inventively called Team 1 and Team 2) and put through four, points-earning rounds.

I had visions of the thing involving questions like "Who played bass in Quincy Conserve?" or "Where do you score the best drugs?"

Fortunately, Pop! Goes The Weasel is made by more imaginative people.

The first round in the first show was called "Whose Ass Is This?"

It involved Chris Knox and Rodney Fisher from the band goodshirt trying to identify a mystery bum in an excerpt from a music video clip.

"We're nice boys," Knox objected. "We don't look at asses."

"Sure," Brown said. "Rodney, you love ass, what's your call?"

It's fair to say that this set the tone for what followed. This included the weasel (who hands out the points in the most alarming ways) smashing a mystery musical instrument while silhouetted on a screen, Knox describing some sexual conquest, and, in a section where each team had to come up with a song about a worst day, Knox singing about an unseemly episode in Toronto.

Last week's second episode had difficulty living up to the first, but it still rated about eight guffaws on the laugh-o-meter.

But tonight's episode, involving Andrew Fagan, holy water and weasel vomit, goes off the scale.

Viewers with weak stomachs, prudish dispositions and fear of weasels should not watch.

While the weasel's name is on the marquee, this is Brown's programme. Adopting a style that's somewhere between Madame Lash, a flirty temptress and a bemused bystander, she manages to keep the thing on the rails - just.

She is very quick, very funny and seemingly bonkers. There is nobody quite like her in New Zealand telly.

I understand this show originally ran on the now-defunct radio station Channel Z (more or less reinvented as KiwiFM) for some 18 months.

I never heard it so I have no idea whether the television version is simply radio with pictures.

What it is, is weasel television at its best.