First Night: BBC3

BBC3 may live up to its mission, but not with these chat shows

"I've watched so many people attempt to host entertainment shows and screw them up that I thought it was time for a change. So I've taken your licence fee and spent it wisely for once," the comedian Dom Joly explains at the start of his new BBC3 chat show.

"Now I know a lot of you won't have watched a BBC programme in a while," he adds. "I personally haven't watched one in over 10 years."

This joke cuts to the heart of BBC3's mission. The 18-30 age group is the least likely to watch television, and the least happy about paying the license fee. This is a serious long-term threat to the corporation: we under-30s are more susceptible to the anti-BBC propaganda being spewed out by the Murdoch press and the Daily Mail than anybody else, and research suggests we aren't becoming much more pro-BBC as we get older.

A huge amount is therefore riding on this new channel: its task is to lay a firm foundation of support for the BBC among young people; a bridge to keep us with the corporation in the transition from Children's BBC to flopping in front of BBC1 after a hard day raising our own kids.

Will it work? I gathered friends to pig out on popcorn, swill beer and check out the channel's first night and the preview tapes of its future attractions. Getting Johnny Vaughan to front the first night was, by general consent, a good idea. He has been floundering since he joined the Beeb, with a disastrous sitcom called 'Orrible (it was) and a chat show that never took off. But introducing the first shows and chatting to celebrities, he seemed to regain the easy charm that made us love him on The Big Breakfast.

Whether he will work as a regular chat-show host for the channel is harder to predict. It's not Vaughan's fault – he is genuinely witty. The problem is that in Britain we just don't have good enough celebrities to support regular chat-show formats. For example, on a night when David Letterman had Sarah Michelle Gellar (Buffy), Dom Joly's show had as its "star guest" Wayne Hemingway, founder of the Red or Dead fashion label.

Even the British hosts who can pull mega-stars – Michael Parkinson and Graham Norton – can't maintain watchability for long: Parkinson's series are brief, and Norton's show has become execrable since he went five-a-week.

It's also a moot point how long Joly will keep pulling in even these rather anonymous guests if he continues to surprise them with secret footage of them in their homes, filmed from their gardens as they wandered around in their dressing gowns. (It wasn't clear if the celebrities were in on the joke). Chat shows, although cheap to make and easy to watch, will not be the making of BBC3.

The first night's great strength lay in its comedy. To have a new Pauline Calf show from Steve (Alan Partridge) Coogan was a great coup. Coogan is not only one of Britain's authentic comic geniuses – the equal of Tony Hancock, John Cleese and Ricky Gervais – he is also 100 per cent a child of the BBC.

Coogan was nurtured carefully from his earliest radio performances and given enough latitude to experiment and find his own comedy style (including, crucially, the licence to fail a few times before hitting his stride). A harsher commercial environment would not have created this extraordinary writer and performer.

Another unexpected asset is BBC3's documentary-making. Jailed by the State is presented by David Akinsanya, who was sent to a young offenders' institute in 1984 when he and his gang of friends in Basildon trashed his sixth-form college, causing more than £2,000 of damage. Now, nearly 20 years on, he returns to the scene of his crime and tracks down his fellow gang-members to see what became of them. I won't ruin the outcome for you, but the show, if nothing else, exposes the idea that the BBC is part of a liberal elite – which won't allow, for example, pro-prison voices on the airwaves – as nonsense.

The corporation has also had the nerve to put some of its most valuable jewels in the BBC3 safe. EastEnders will be available at an earlier time, as will 24, whose second series is as narcotically addictive as the first. The prediction of my focus group is that BBC3 will soon be the most popular button on their remotes.