Gordon Brown has launched something called “Ask the PM” on YouTube. His appeal for questions lasts only 40 seconds and yet each of those seconds seems a second too long. I suppose that it is so bad that it might almost be good. But the problem is that YouTube already has some great Gordo clips such as the all-time classic “Gordon Brown Picking His Nose”. This may be tasteless (though not to Gordon, apparently) but it's riveting.

Not so “Ask the PM”. The only question I had for Gordon after watching it was: “Why?”

The answer, I suspect, has to do with the Prime Minister's quest to be cool. I can almost hear him now, telling his wife about his debut.

Gordon: “Sarah, you'll never guess what I did today! I was in a film for that internet sighting thing MeTube.”

Sarah: “MeTube? Do you mean YouTube?” Gordon: “Me, you, who knows? It's definitely to do with tubes. I haven't felt this hip and happening since I told people that I woke up to the Arctic Chimpanzees on my U-Pod.”

Sarah (sighs): “Not chimps. Monkeys. And not U-Pod, iPod.”

Gordon: “Are you sure? It's all so confusing.”

The truth is that the whole “Ask the PM” venture is confusing, if not for Gordo then certainly for us (at the time of writing, it has had 13,230 hits compared with 249,839 for Gordon Picking His Nose).

Why, for instance, is our Prime Minister sitting in what appears to be the spare room? After all, he lives in Downing Street and so, we must assume, could have his pick of backdrops: sweeping staircases, cosy fireplaces, etc. But instead Gordon is plopped between a printer and a fridge that has (gasp) bottled water. Bottled water? I'm sorry but that is so uncool it's tropical.

The camera wobbles (why? a tribute to cinéma vérité?) as Gordon burbles on about his “new exciting new initiative”. “I will be here to answer your questions, questions you have about how globalisation is working.”

Gordon must have written this “script” himself. No one else would think that the question on everyone's lips would be: “How is globalisation working?” There may be a few other topics (financial meltdown, his odd smile, the polls) that intrude.

No 10 has a series of rules for anyone wanting to respond: the video mustn't be more than 30 seconds long or party political. And then No 10 has the nerve to add this: “Be original, use your creativity and your imagination. Think outside the box!” Or, in the case of No 10, the box room. A few brave viewers have posted questions on such topics as knife crime, Zimbabwe and tuition fees.

And then there is this from a young man named Kevin, who seems to be in a washroom. He asks the PM if he's just trying to prove he's not an analog politician in a digital age. “Prime Minister, do you feel this is the best way to go about things, by jumping on the YouTube bandwagon?”

I can hear Gordon's answer now: “Kevin, MeTube is not a bandwagon, it's an internet sighting thingymajiggy. I thought you'd know that!”

Times Recommends

• Anne Darwin's performance of a lifetime
• Renaissance for canals as new boaters come aboard
• Case study: forced to marry a cousin at 17