I had to tell the cleaner not to bother coming in this morning. Nobody should have to face the consequences of me having to watch ‘Piers Morgan’s Life Stories’ other than myself. Altruism aside, I’m fairly sure some kind of human rights breach would have taken place the moment I asked her to deal with the broken glass/blood/toilet ‘problem’.

For those of you who, like me, were unable to find ITV in their listings because it was removed from your favourites in 2003, but unlike me, didn’t persevere due to writing commitments, congratulations on an enjoyable Sunday evening. Even if you suffered a relapse of your prolapse and spent nine naked and humiliting hours in A&E, I can only offer you my best assurances that you enjoyed yourself more than I did.

The Prime Minister’s face loomed large and orange in the pre-match montage. His body language tense, his tenses confused. “Well Piers’ a bit tough isn’t he? He doesn’t ask pretty direct questions. He’ll throw it at you and you’ve got to respond.” Clearly, this is a man well-briefed on the concept of interviews. Not to be out-rubbished, Morgan laid down the gauntlet: “If he thinks I’m going to come bearing sweeties then he’s in for a bit of a surprise.” Yes that would be pretty weird. ”He’s about to face the biggest challenge of his career.”

Five minutes in, as promised, Piers Stefan Pughe-Morgan went for the jugular. “Do you have your own private loo?” The laughter track was faded out as the Prime Minister explained that he shared it with other people. Morgan, having thought he had at least this in common with his hero, was thrown. Children, he thought. We’ve both got those. ”Each time I see your son Fraser he looks at me and says, ‘I don’t like you’”. Gordon chortled. “I can’t say he’s a good judge of character.” “Au contraire!” wailed a nation. “Haha. Haha” went the canned laughter, as is its wont. There was a distant explosion as politics crashed to the bottom of its grief pit.

There were some revealing moments. PM (minus the definite article) still hasn’t got over his triple punch from Jeremy Clarkson. Like the last boy to be picked for the worst team, he tried to get Brown on his side. “Jeremy Clarkson called you a one-eyed Scottish idiot”, as if the PM somehow needed reminding of his ailments. But Piers had already forgotten Brown’s sporting credentials (despite having made another lovely montage complete with appropriately blurry reconstructions of his accident), and he wasn’t moving over to the angry team. ”Yes well Jeremy Clarkson is a Conservative who is putting his views and I think he may have apologised for that I don’t know. I think people thought that was unfair.” Cue applause.

Piers cranked the heat up and moved to the subject of receiving presents, wherein it emerged a Middle Eastern government had once sent brown a fully roasted pig. One might have thought this odd, given Middle Easterners’ tendency to not eat much pork. Obviously, the man responsible for giving the PM “The toughest challenge of his career” wasn’t going to let this one slide. “Really?”, he countered. Cue laughter. PM segued into another montage.

As if we weren’t already re-examining the need for all of television, Peter Mandelson then appeared on the screen. “Politicians are not meant to be slick”, he opined, as satire rolled over and died. “They’re meant to be good at running the country.” “Precisely”, murmured the nation.

Several minutes of hard-hitting journalism then followed, on a different channel, while PM and PM continued their patient-visiting-senile-family-member-in-hospital routine (either way round). But then, quite out of nowhere, something interesting happened. The Prime Minister talked openly about the death of his daughter, Jennifer Jane. Sarah Brown was visibly moved by her husband’s openness and his own sadness, as one could not fail to be. Not even a cut shot to Morgan’s weirdly inappropriate face/ial expression, which looked as if he had got the cheat codes for ‘compassion’ wrong, could ruin this genuinely authentic moment. It came pretty close though.

One thing this disturbing hour of television left me sure of is that Piers’s diary must be chocka with celebrities in need of redemption. Taking a man who is in dire need of public support and traditionally lacks the human touch and sitting him opposite Piers Morgan was a PR masterstroke. ‘Life Stories’ will be with us for some time, I fear. Despite his brave and surprisingly human performance, I don’t think the same can be said of the PM.

Image courtesy of Daily Mail.