Recently, Fern Britton interviewed Tony Blair and now, in a similar turn, we’ve got Piers Morgan’s Life Stories: Gordon Brown (ITV1, Sunday, 14 February, 10.15pm) which may as well have been called ‘Making a Human Out Of The Prime Minister‘. This was clearly a chance for Gordon Brown to show everyone that, behind that awkward smile, is a real life, walking and talking man. The problem was, sadly, that he was being interviewed by a subhuman.

This show was obviously the first nod that Gordo was kickstarting his fight to win the next election. We The People needed to know there was more to this bloke beyond the clunky YouTube videos and that funny gawp he does when he finishes a sentence.

In Piers Morgan, he was faced with a man not known for asking anyone anything remotely important – ever. His big pillow of a face is more prone to burping up questions about boob jobs and extra marital affairs… what on Earth was he going to do with someone who is actually important?

Well, in true Piers Morgan style, he went about asking the most dimwitted questions you could ever hope for… and it was weird.

Gordon Brown is obviously an old-fashioned bloke who likes to be private. So watching him sitting there while Piers gleefully asked him what it felt like to be called “a Scottish one-eyed idiot” by Jeremy Clarkson was uncomfortable viewing to say the least. It made me wonder if he’d do that with anyone with a disability. Would he walk up to Simon Weston and say “What’s it like having a face like boiled ham?” I wouldn’t put it past him actually.

He also talked about some supporters of a young Gordon Brown who were called ‘The Brown Sugars’, who seemed to be groupies of his way back when. When Brown, looking fondly at old pictures of him looking like a Monty Python member, said that he still knew them all, Piers retorted with “Let’s get back to the raunchy student parties, Gordon…”

It was hardly Frost versus Nixon.

When Morgan actually got to something interesting… notably, Brown’s tumultuous relationship with Tony Blair, it was pretty much skated over in two minutes. That’s because Morgan wanted to get to the real meat and bones of Brown, which essentially meant repeatedly asking him about how he Gordon proposed to Sarah.

There was a moment which was quite powerful though, concerning the Browns’ loss of their daughter. Both Gordon and Sarah cried on our screens which was horrible to watch. Alas, it almost feels like something like this is needed in our current celeb-climate to make apathetic voters connect with politicians. A sorry state of affairs really.

Of course, there will be detractors that think this whole thing is contrived – which it is – and that a serious politician shouldn’t be doing wishy-washy stuff like this. However, that’s the place of play now… David Cameron was doing a very similar thing on Scottish TV over the weekend, choking back the tears over the loss of his son. Let’s not forget that he’s appeared on Jonathan Ross too.

So back to the first point. If this was an exercise in humanising Gordon Brown, did it work? You’d have to argue that it did… but will it be enough to win him an election? It’s hard to imagine that anything involving Piers Morgan could win anyone an election.

This was a strange show that neither hit the mark nor was it one to watch through the fingers.