Dara O'Briain, Bruce Forsyth and Charlotte Church have all been guest presenters on Have I Got News For You - and the BBC has decided to stick with the winning formula, writes Brian Boyd

A gaggle of comedians were put out of their misery last week when the BBC announced that it was not looking for a full-time host for its panel show, Have I Got News For You. It will instead be continuing the policy of using guest presenters.

The job has been vacant since the previous long-running host, Angus Deayton, was sacked in October 2002 following tabloid newspaper reports about his personal life, ie "My cocaine and prostitute hell".

Deayton's sacking was acrimonious. Team captains Ian Hislop and Paul Merton both supported the move, with Merton saying at the time that Deayton was "a dull man" whose loss was "not a big deal" and that producers were right to sack him. However, the man who everyone assumed would step into Deayton's shoes, Stephen Fry, shocked the show's producers when he announced that he was going to boycott the show because of how Deayton had been treated.

"It is greasy, miserable, British and pathetic to sack him over this," said Fry at the time. "I'm not going to appear on the show again because I'm very, very cross with the BBC and Paul Merton and Ian Hislop for allowing Angus to go."

Since Deayton's departure, the show has been using a series of guest presenters until a permanent replacement could be decided on. A recent poll of viewers found that most wanted Deayton to return to the job. The second choice was Stephen Fry and the third Clive Anderson.

However, following the ratings success of the guest presenters, the BBC and Hat Trick (the independent production company which makes the show) have taken the decision not to appoint a full-time replacement. It is believed that they were pleasantly surprised by the reaction to one-off presenters such as Bruce Forsyth, Charlotte Church and Anne Robinson. When Angus Deayton was in the chair, the programme averaged about 5.5. million viewers per show; when Anne Robinson guest-presented, that figure went up to 7.3 million viewers.

The managing director of Hat Trick, Jimmy Mulville, had fuelled speculation about a permanent replacement when he told a newspaper last year that the new host "will not be a complete unknown - it may be a journalist whom we all know but who hasn't done TV before or an actor who is not an A-lister".

It's understood that the shortlist of potential replacement hosts included: Conservative MP and journalist Boris Johnson; actor Martin Clunes; comedian Alexander Armstrong; and Irishman Dara O'Briain. Both Armstrong and O'Briain have guest-hosted the show a number of times. Armstrong, considered the favourite, spoke of his disappointment about the BBC's decision.

"It was fairly clear for a while that they wanted a full-time presenter," he said. "But sadly for me, the success of the guest presenters then became extremely apparent."

There was no disappointment for Dara O'Briain, however, who has known for a while that the producers would continue with their guest-presenter policy.

"I think that became clear when you saw the success of someone such as Bruce Forsyth on the show," he says. "The great thing from the programme's point of view is that the guest-presenter idea keeps things fresh, there is a novelty value there, and the existing framework of the show is so strong that you can bring in different faces each week."

If there had been a permanent job vacancy, though, O'Briain says he would have been first in the queue for the interviews.

"I've presented it now three times and I would happily bite off my own arm to do it permanently," he says. "It's just exquisite, it's the most professional operation I've ever been involved in. It's sort of what I imagine working on the Sid Caesar show must have been like - having Woody Allen as your gag writer and all of that."

So, just how scripted is the show?

"It's the least scripted show I've ever worked on," says O'Briain. "It's a lot less scripted than, for example, Never Mind The Buzzcocks or They Think It's All Over, where teams of writers prop up the guests. None of the jokes are worked out in advance - there's a crew of 40 working on the set and you just wouldn't have time to rehearse and redo segments. Guests are shown photographs in advance, but nothing else. The only scripted part of the show is when the host is looking directly into the camera."

Have I Got News For You returns early next month. Dara O'Briain will be guest- presenting the second show in the new series