The British Culture Secretary, Ms Tessa Jowell, will hold further talks with the Independent Television Commission to assess its complaints procedure following Channel 4's Brass Eye spoof documentary on media representation of paedophilia.
After meeting the chairman of the ITC, Sir Robin Biggam, yesterday, Ms Jowell said issues of programme content and regulation were a matter for the ITC and not the government, but the watchdog had a "heavy responsibility" to safeguard public trust and confidence.
Indicating it would not be rushed into a decision on the programme, the ITC said it would assess the complaints and comment as soon as possible, stressing that Channel 4 had to be given time to put its case.
More than 2,500 people have complained about the documentary, which satirised anti-paedophile campaigns using MPs, celebrities and former policemen.
It was first shown on Thursday and repeated the next day despite receiving many complaints from viewers immediately after the original broad cast.
However, one of the programme's writers, David Quantick, defended the show, saying it did not mock victims of paedophilia and was intended as a satire on the way the media dealt with sex abuse.
"I think a lot of people complained because it just had the word paedophilia in the title and that a lot of complaints seemed to be related to a programme that didn't go out," Mr Quantick told BBC news.
As Ms Jowell said she had a responsibility to ensure the ITC was "equal to the task" of representing viewers' concerns to broadcasters, the Prime Minister's spokesman said watchdogs should be able to act "flexibly and quickly" rather than taking several weeks to deal with complaints.
Stressing the government was expressing a view and not an official position, the spokesman said: "We are not talking about censorship. We are not talking about the government dictating what should or shouldn't be broadcast . . . The point for the government is whether the regulatory framework is sufficient to deal flexibly with issues like this, particularly when we have a situation where a programme is broadcast, a huge number of people complain and it is repeated."