I never thought I'd see the day that Jon Snow would be playing at being Chris Tarrant. But all this week he's been one step from asking 'Is that your final answer?'.

It's all very disconcerting. Brought on board to add obvious weight and gravitas, Snow swans about in sparkly suits that have definitley not come from the Channel 4 News wardrobe, introducing 'contestants' in a vaguely manic style - arms gesticulating, voice rising to a crescendo at every possible opportunity - like a true gameshow host. Maybe Jon has found his calling, I don't know.

What I do know is 'Who wants to be an e-millionaire?', running on consecutive nights this week on Channel 4, with the final on Sunday, is something of a curate's egg. It is genuinely engrossing, but I think that this may be thanks to the whole premise as opposed to the sum of any of the parts.

For one thing, haven't Channel Four missed the boat somewhat? At Christmas the papers were filled with feel-good stories of dot.com businesses. The sexy marriage of youth and success was a journos dream to fill pages without any real work, and stories often turned into glorified PR pieces, especially in the tabloids.

Then, as inevitably happens with all transient fads, the worm turned and now dot.coms have turned into dot.bombs in the eyes of the media. Lastminute.com signalled the death knell of the easy ride for Internet companies, and even Amazon lost 20 per cent of its share value last month.

So the logistics of getting a show like 'Who wants to be an e-millionaire?' in place forced Channel 4 to air the show at just the wrong time. Or so the pundits would have you think.

The fact of the matter is this kind of show - a week long TV extravaganza with a £1 million as prize money - is always going to be intriguing. Add to that the new found celebrity status of the Internet (Newsweek wrote the other week, 'The Internet has done for business what Michael Jordan did for basketball and Tiger Woods for golf: made it a mass spectator sport) and you've got a sure fire winner... haven't you?

Well, no. Jon Snow's new found yoof image may be in keeping with how Princess Productions, the show's creators, wish to pitch the programme, but Chris Evans he is not. 'Fast and furious' TV that captures 'the adrenaline of the new economy' was how the show was billed, but they forgot the 'all bluster and no balls' stigma that now attaches itself to any new dot.com venture. Damned by association.

The presentation is immaculate, with panning camera shots and jingles strangely reminiscient of the show's forebearer 'Who wants to be a millionaire?', but behind all the packaging the general concept of the show rests on the shoulders of three members of the public per show, with ideas thought up in the bath or the pub.

And to brutally honest, none of the ideas I've seen on the show have cut the mustard. They all have the fantastic 'why'didn't-I-think-of-that?' factor - in fact the whole show engenders the same thought - but the ideas are either ill-conceived financially, or are relying on some hare-brained leap of faith by the government or by business that only somebody with no experience in that given field can (incorrectly) expect.

Every site proferred has the dubious honour of being proclaimed as the panacea for all ills, but dot.coms often fail in expecting their company to be the major portal for the service they are offering. £1 million start up will achieve nothing if the idea is fairly interesting and needs a weighty marketing campaign to grab the nation's interest.

And this leads us to where the show can truly create engrossing TV. The British public love seeing public figures knocked down, and what better than seeing some passionately-misguided individual throwing away £1 million on a disastrous venture into an area of business that is still veiled and mysterious to many. Sad truth is, it will be even better if the winner was a toff.

PICTURE: Jon Snow: Brought on board to add obvious weight and gravitas, Snow swans about in sparkly suits that have definitley not come from the Channel 4 News wardrobe, introducing 'contestants' in a vaguely manic style