hat is the point of TV? I’ve always thought – and, as one of the Guardian’s most beloved, or if not beloved then at least one of its most frequent TV previewers, my opinion finally holds some weight here – that television fulfils one of two functions: either to entertain or inform. Come Dine With Me, or Attenborough. Ant and Dec, or Panorama. Occasionally you will see a crossover between the two – when the families on Gogglebox are forced to watch the news, for instance – but more or less, there’s a clear binary. That was until I watched Keir Starmer on Piers Morgan’s Life Stories, which, over the course of 50 minutes, didn’t really manage either. What was it, then? Well, gun to my head, I would describe the genre as “what if they did a panto version of Frost/Nixon?” – as we were introduced to Keir, Just Keir, he told us that this performance was his first as Labour leader in front of a live audience, which the audience warmly applauded. Later he told us he was married to a woman, and the audience applauded. In fact, so much of Life Stories was geared towards the studio audience – even after all these years, Morgan’s presenting style is still very “eerily precocious child, who wears a shirt and tie, has come down after dinner to sing in French to you” – that I almost forgot the only audience at home was me and about 60 other shift journalists. All of us watching and typing out any quotes in case they turned out one day to be usable, and instead just getting “DONKEYS????” over and over again. What do we think of that, ladies and gentlemen? The format, in case you didn’t watch it: Piers and Keir do a bit of pre-roll, to-camera, jolly stuff about how Piers doesn’t know who Keir actually is and Keir says nobody knows who he actually is, and this is his chance to show them, show them all. Then Starmer then dropped a clanging football analogy – a hint of how often this would veer into the territory of “middle-aged dads making Peroni small talk at a barbecue” – that was so workshopped I had an intrusive image of a filled-up flipboard pad being dumped into a skip. Excruciating to think about, but Keir had to spend actual human minutes learning the line, “Piers, it feels like we’re in the tunnel at the Emirates stadium about to come out ... so see you pitch-side!” in the mirror. There is no dignity in being Labour leader. Then we learned about Keir, Just Keir: a hard, sad, but crucially not tragic childhood; a sense of ruddy duty (the word “duty” was mentioned three times – we also had one “bootstraps”, one mention of his “forensic PMQs”, and about five mentions of the word “moisturiser”, which he uses daily); a flawless academic record without being smug about it; a classic har-har ho-ho tearaway period during his adolescence (two bad haircuts and the firm hint that he might have once smoked a joint); then a smooth transition into proper tie-and-a-job adulthood: lawyer, married, and being on first-name terms with a famous couple (the Clooneys). Before this aired I was idly wondering “what sort of life could Keir Starmer have lived to make the British public like him?”, and it turned out he already had lived it. He just neglected to tell anyone for the last year and a half. As an episode of television, it wasn’t great – mawkish, paint-by-numbers sentimentality, chummy pre-planned banter, that particular brand of sycophancy Morgan so excels in, and some really quite unbearable football chat along the way (Starmer is apparently a “combative midfield general with a silky left foot”, and just from that descriptor alone I feel like I know the man – exactly how he moves over the Astroturf, exactly how hard he clunks into tackles, exactly how pink he goes after two minutes of running, the exact promptness with which he sends out a PayPal link for the £9 each the pitch cost for 45 minutes, the one you had to catch two trains and a bus to but is very near his work). But as a PR move, I have to concede it was a smart one, at least for the hundred-or-so non-journalists who might have seen it. Aha! Piers Morgan’s Life Stories said, for 14 months you thought Keir Starmer had no personality at all. Well, get this: he very slightly does have one, actually! But if this semi-successful pivot to being slightly likable on ITV is part of a new Labour strategy to actually say things and not be weird about it, then the message has not yet filtered through to Batley and Spen in Yorkshire, where Kim Leadbeater (with the support of Anneliese Dodds) is laying the groundwork for an upcoming byelection. “People are really keen to have a conversation with Labour about national issues, and local ones, too,” Dodds said this week, in a strange, almost haunting campaign video that made me feel like I was experiencing some kind of sleep paralysis vision. “They’re really pleased to hear from Labour,” she continued, as reality started to shake around me. “They want to have a discussion about their views about Labour, and what they want us to be doing.” Leadbeater’s pamphlet wasn’t much better: “I am listening to local people,” it promised, semi-ominously. “I will act on the issues you raise.” Yes that’s … that’s what an MP is supposed to do, isn’t it? It’s as if you went to a restaurant where the owner earnestly and repeatedly promised to cook whatever it is you order and serve it to you so you can eat it. What’s on the menu? “No menu,” a ghost in the body of a waiter says to you. “We just listen to what you want – what local people want.” A burger, maybe? Chips? “Labour promises to do its absolute best to listen to you and make you some chips.” All right, well. Cheers.