The X Factor vision spells disaster for Brown

In Hollywood, producers let you know their intentions for a movie script by calling for certain "types". It's pretty euphemistic. Scripts looking for "a Nicole Kidman type" might persuade Naomi Watts to become attached to them. A Renee Zellweger type? You might get that one in Grey's Anatomy. A Lindsay Lohan type? Honey, these days Lindsay Lohan's taking scripts meant for a Lindsay Lohan type. The past year has not been kind.

The practice of managing expectations in this way came to mind this week, says Marina Hyde, when it emerged that Gordon Brown has been approached by the BBC to judge a young talent show called Junior PM, aimed at what its producers describe as "an Apprentice meets Maria/Strictly Come Dancing audience". You couldn't help thinking they were looking for "an Alan Sugar type", and after being rejected by several cheap imitations, eventually sighed: "Well, I suppose we could settle for the prime minister."

And weren't they in luck? Whereas Sir Alan would never have lowered himself to even read the proposal, Junior PM's producers only had to raise it with Hazel Blears for her to take it all the way to a bleeding cabinet meeting. Her special adviser confirmed that the communities secretary intended to raise it "in the margins of cabinet". I suppose we should be grateful it wasn't item one on the agenda at the table around which political titans of yesteryear once sat. But you are formally dared to imagine Barbara Castle turning to Harold Wilson and saying: "Ooh, now, the Beeb has come up with a great idea in which you judge a telly talent contest. Hughie Green's turned it down, so unless Monkhouse fancies it, you should start looking grateful." In fact, it's difficult to decide which is more hilarious: that the running of Britain has now been relegated to the status of a telly prize, or that the BBC thinks the prime minister might actually say yes.

Put delicately, the idea of spending licence payers' money on a Gordon Brown vehicle is up there with Alan Partridge's legendary Monkey Tennis. The entire country knows Gordon is not what you'd call a TV natural. For the past couple of months he has only worn one expression: that of a man watching his legacy being torn down in slow motion. His telly outings already make us squirm in vicarious discomfort; it would be positively excruciating to see him dispensing a Simon Cowell-style verdict on some precocious little horror: "That was the worse post-neoclassical endogenous growth theorising I've seen in the Birmingham auditions ..."

This isn't the Beeb's vision, apparently. "It is a golden opportunity for the PM to gather a youth manifesto and become more popular than Alan Sugar," ran its pitch, and at some level you have to admire the misplaced confidence that Brown can afford to be worrying about the nine-year-old demographic, when his need to appeal to the already enfranchised would seem rather more pressing. "It is a very worthy programme idea," a Blears spokesman insisted, as though the entertainment potential were not sufficiently moribund without a government press officer describing it as "worthy". "The idea is to get more young people interested in politics."

But of course it is, because it is one of the orthodoxies of the age that more young people vote in reality TV elections than in general elections. Complete cobblers, as it goes, though I won't trouble you with the statistics. That said, you'd think our mathlete of a prime minister might be aware of them, because he is absurdly, uncomfortably obsessed with reality TV. Last month he appeared on American Idol, but two years ago he was already outlining his vision of "an X Factor Britain", a comment that managed to combine fatuity, neediness, and a total failure to understand what these kind of talent shows are really about. They don't make dreams come true; they sell you disappointment, which is why every series includes more and more of the episodes focusing on deluded clods auditioning.

And increasingly, doesn't Mr Brown's torment remind you of one of these tone-deaf unfortunates, whose painful progress makes you shriek "How on earth did he think he could do this?", and whom you can hardly bear to watch for the transferred embarrassment? Watching PMQs can feel like intruding on private grief, while the prime minister cannot seem to reverse the perception that he is faintly ridiculous. There is a sort of momentum to it now, where every one of these mooted stunts plays atrociously for him. It's just so easy to turn his gimmicks against him, a fact not lost on the Tories, who not only spent this week's PMQs making jokes about the electorate telling Mr Brown "You're fired!", but gave Strictly Come Dancing host Bruce Forsyth a special ticket to watch proceedings from the gallery. They do like to sledgehammer home a point in Westminster.

Need they even have bothered? The episode barely needed glossing. Everything about Junior PM feels hackneyed, knackered and devoid of ideas - the format, the thinking behind it, but most of all its intended star. As Sir Alan would say: he hasn't got a bladdy clue.