Fluffy, cynical and informative, a new magazine show has the common touch The One Show BBC1

What people remember about Nationwide, the BBC1 current affairs magazine programme that aired on weeknights between 1969 and 1983, is not its dogged coverage of labour relations or its nimble reaction to breaking news, nor its consumer investigations. They remember the skateboarding duck. In the end, the duck and other sillinesses were the undoing of Nationwide. The BBC installed David Dimbleby in the seat where once sat the gravel-voiced populist Michael Barratt. The idea was to stop the dumbing down (although the phrase had yet to be invented). But just as Mikhail Gorbachev would later tinker with the apparatus of the Soviet Union and see it collapse around his feet, Nationwide did not survive the refit. Sixty Minutes failed after a single season and the slot was assumed by a 30-minute Six O'Clock News. Thus began the sad death of the prime-time current affairs magazine and the irresistible rise of news, news, news.

One of several things that have impressed me so far about The One Show, the long-lost son of Nationwide currently running each weekday at 6.55pm, is the absence of what journalists call "pegs". Dan Snow is sent off to explore the mysterious tunnels beneath Dover Castle, even though Dover Castle is not celebrating any particular anniversary. Kate Humble swims with grey seals off Lundy, even though no environmental pressure group has, as far as I know, announced they are endangered. These items reminded me of Bob Langley's long walk along the Pennine Way on Nationwide, embarked upon for no better reason than that the path was there.

The One Show's more serious items are not exactly news either, though still relevant. We know there is a shortage of transplant organs, but having a toddler in the studio who is alive only because of such a transplant brought the issue alive. There are villages all over Britain that would dearly like to ban heavy lorries: The One Show found one that had. The average state pensioner has £8.49 a day to spend on food and treats, so Carol Thatcher went off to live on that budget for a week. Her nicely judged package informed us about her lifestyle and that of OAPs: the two Britains.

The One Show has its own ideological brief to unite the country and, like Nationwide, it makes a fuss of ranging across the whole of this sceptred isle. In Barratt's time, the presiding visual metaphor was a set filled with television screens showing the BBC's regional studios; today we get electronic maps. What is lacking is the sense (and the reality) that the reporters are based in the BBC's local newsrooms. In one respect, however, The One Show's commitment to regionalism exceeds its predecessor's. It is anchored from Birmingham, described at the beginning of the first week as "the heart of Britain" and by the end, after numerous viewer complaints, as "the heart of England and the groin of England".

Its first week contained some dodgy items, including an interview with Ronan Keating, who had a song to plug, and a love-in with Lynn Faulds Wood and Esther Rantzen, who had a programme to plug. The grammar of its scheduling presents other problems: it follows the local news but does not give us the national headlines (as is normally the case at 6.55pm); instead, we wait for a local newsreader to give them at 7.30pm. The format should run: titles, hellos, back to the BBC newsroom for the headlines in 60 seconds, an item responding tangentially to the top national story, and then whatever it wants.

But it gets a lot right: specialist reporters with presence, viewer interaction and an intelligent but breezy tone. For this last, most of the praise is due to Adrian Chiles. While his sidekick, Nadia Sawalha, so far is doing little more than supplying him with a giggly audience, Chiles is proving himself Michael Barratt's equal, perhaps superior: a cynic with the common touch; an open-necked presenter with the authority of a suit. The programme's weird structure means it ends without the usual roll of credits. So, let me name its editor: Chris Rybczynski. I have faith she can make it work.

Andrew Billen is a staff writer for the Times

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