When Gordon met Piers

"Politics is show business for ugly people" Jay Leno

Politicians have embraced celebrity for more than 50 years. From Richard Nixon to Tony Blair, those in the highest corridors of power have, since the advent of television, sought to gain an advantage over their political rivals by performing to the media.

However, with the arrival of David Cameron and Barack Obama things have reached crisis point. Politics now increasingly resembles a talent show, where participants pour their hearts out to the nation in a desperate struggle to regain the public's short-lived attention span.

This reached a nadir on ITV1 at the weekend when prime minister Gordon Brown followed in the footsteps of Sharon Osborne, Katie Price and Richard Madeley by appearing on Piers Morgan's Life Stories. Fronted by Britain's Got Talent's personality-vacuum, the show had all the glitz and glam more readily associated with the channel's Saturday night output.

In a celebrity-style format - complete with a stock studio audience and what appeared to be canned laughter - the hour-long special seemed destined to become another public relations setback for Brown. But somehow the prime minister managed to come across as a human being, something which has evaded him throughout his entire premiership. Gone was the bumbling, weather-beaten basset hound caricatured by thousands of newspaper cartoonists - replaced by a confident, pragmatic leader.

Speaking eloquently and emotionally about the tragic death of his first child Jennifer Jane, Brown recounted how days after her birth he realised that she wouldn't survive.

He said: "It just gradually dawned on us that something, something was going wrong and she wasn't getting any bigger.

"I turned to the doctor and I said: 'She's not going to live, is she?' and he said: 'No, I don't think so. She's not going to live.'"

That isn't to say that it the show didn't contain a few cringe-inducing moments. I'm sure voters around the country were grasping for their remotes when Morgan asked the serving prime minister whether he had joined the mile-high club - an image no viewer would ever want implanted in their mind.

Laughably Morgan - who oozed charisma in the way that bullet holes leak blood - stated before the interview that Brown would face the toughest hour of his life. I doubt that this was even the toughest hour of his day. Jeremy Paxman he was certainly not. The closest Morgan came to really grilling the prime minister was on details about his engagement to wife Sarah in 2000, which was more voyeuristic than investigative.

Writing in the Guardian, Anne Perkins described the glorified party political broadcast as indicative of the "celebrity debasement of politics".

She said: "All that these toe-curling TV therapy sessions (remember poor Nick Clegg and the outrageous question about the number of women he had slept with?) tell us is how terrified politicians are of failing to match the pornography of the lowest common denominator."

The programme was watched by more than four million people - roughly two million viewers less than Holby City attracts on a weekly basis. Whether it will make any difference for Brown on polling day at the next general election is therefore questionable, but it has raised serious questions about whether we want our leaders to be personable or productive.