Nice to see Ricky Gervais and The Office win big at the Golden Globes the other night, especially as it should have been the last hurrah for Friends. Unlike some people, I'm no Friends-hater - it may be easy-going, populist and (sin of sins) very popular, but it's made me laugh on far too many occasions for me to do anything but admire it - but a Best Comedy Actor award for Matt LeBlanc would have been the perfect start for his Joey spin-off series.

Not so nice to see is the news that NBC plans to remake The Office for Middle America. Now kids, we've been through this before. You know you always screw these things up. It didn't work with Men Behaving Badly (cancelled as a flop). And it didn't work with Coupling, which dropped from primetime to the sidelines before being cut altogether.

(On the subject of Coupling, the UK version is coming back for a fourth series, but apparently without Richard Coyle as Jeff. I can't help but feel the rest of the cast and writer Simon Moffat will have to work twice as hard to fill the gap he leaves behind. This is, after all, the man who gave us the Melty Man, the Giggle Loop, the Breast Octopus, the Foot-matic artificial limb, and possibly the best strip tease of the 21st century. May his caravan shake for evermore.)

It's not that an American audience is incapable of appreciating British humour. After all, our stuff has made sufficient waves to gain a following and catch the attention of the networks. It's just that American television executives seem incapable of understanding which elements of our TV comedy work and which don't (which isn't to say that British executives aren't often guilty of the same crime).

What makes it more frustrating is that there are so many things they're good at, there should be no need to try and reproduce our successes, period, let alone badly. Yet in their desperation to claim ownership, standardise and sanitise everything, they reinvent the wheel with four sides.

Even using what were essentially the same scripts as the BBC version, NBC's Coupling managed to be deeply unfunny and lose the spirit of the original - how could something so right go so wrong? Maybe they'll give The Office to someone with the same jaded world view as Ricky Gervais - but I doubt it.

Comedy's something I've been thinking about quite a bit in recent days, especially after having got the chance to put a couple of questions to Armando Iannucci at a work event last week.

He was talking about satire and the news, something he's well qualified for, even 10 years on from the seminal The Day Today.

He was pretty bemused that TV news had become more like his outrageous parody rather than take the hint and move away from it, something I've argued for a good many years.

He also laid into Michael Moore, saying that he now seems to believe too much of his own press, and in becoming as self-important as those he targets, has himself become fair game for satire and disdain.

As for everything else he said in the four or five minutes he answered my questions, I'm not entirely sure. I was too busy being in shock after having spoken to one of my comedy heroes. Even though it was an informal thing for the benefit of Beeb people, rather than an official presser, journos shouldn't really be starstruck. But next time I'll take a mic and minidisc just in case.

What would the US networks make of Armando, the unraveling chaos that is Johnny Vegas, or the demented genius of Chris Morris? Let's hope we never have to find out.