Watching Michael Gove launch his Tory leadership campaign perched awkwardly on a plinth, delivering half-gags to a silent audience, stirred up traumatic memories for me. Mercifully little footage has emerged of the Channel 4 series I co-presented with Gove in 1992. The prophetically named A Stab in the Dark was devised as a polemical, opinionated, anti-consensual blast of topical comedy, a fiftysomething commissioner’s fantasy of merging The Tube and That Was the Week That Was. It was built around the then-rising comedy star David Baddiel and newcomer Gove, a precociously confident journalist with a sharp mind and a wardrobe full of bell-shaped High Tory suits.

I was drafted in a couple of weeks before the show started as a replacement for the Guardian’s Catherine Bennett, who – understandably – had last-minute doubts. Each week, we three presenters would deliver would-be satirical monologues in a starkly lit studio.

Off camera, Gove’s famous courtesy and elaborate good manners were fully developed. We all worked separately on our monologues, coming together only for weekly planning meetings with Michael Wills, who owned the production company and went on to become a Labour MP. Gove would listen politely to our ideas, but kept his powder dry, rarely engaging with my half-baked lefty bleatings, although I remember him gently correcting me for misquoting Mrs Thatcher.

Gove’s politeness was so marked, it was a shock each week to witness his cold-blooded taunting of guest politicians, who turned up for the live programme believing they were taking part in a current affairs show, and left ashen-faced after a Gove bear-baiting. Quite what the late-night audience tuning in for The Word made of a fogeyish 24-year-old mockingly interviewing Sir Rhodes Boyson about education can only be imagined, while his icy demolition of Peter Bottomley gave an early glimpse of his subsequent career as a political assassin.

It was pretty clear from the first week that the show was a turkey, with any humour that may have appeared in our monologues stifled at birth by a shooting style that exposed the presenters as three sarcastic students shouting in an underground car park. It looks now like a Big Train parody of a politics-based 90s yoof show, somewhere between Brass Eye and Ben Elton’s Nozin’ Aroun’ in The Young Ones. I’ve blanked most of it out, apart from a few hallucinatory fragments, but the clips that exist capture the horrible, echoey silence with which most of our monologues were received by the bemused studio audience. I’ve forgotten most of my own feeble jabs at such urgent targets as men who pee in public places; turns out it’s a good idea to have very strong opinions about stuff before signing up to do a polemical TV series. Gove’s self-confessed lack of charisma may have been amply showcased on Stab, but I fear he was by no means the worst performer on the show.

David and I did share the occasional canteen sandwich with our mysterious colleague, but we might as well have been lunching with a unicorn, so different was he from us or anyone else we knew. Apart from his politeness, and his apparent acid reflux problem, he didn’t really register as an actual person. It came as a surprise when a big group of his friends turned up to cheer him on from the studio audience, loudly applauding at the end of his sections and staying silent at the end of ours. At the time, I remember being amazed that he had friends at all, and that they looked relatively normal. But in retrospect maybe it was an early attempt at a putsch.

Did we miss other signs that this baby pundit would grow up into the Conservative party’s traitor-in-chief? I do recall being taken aback to see a trailer for the show that featured Gove alone, beadily addressing the camera while striding through what appeared to be a sewage tunnel. I remember thinking: Hang on, how come he’s doing the trail and not all of us?

As the show limped through its interminable run, it was clear there was no question of it returning for a second series. However, David, who was by far the best thing about it, recently told me he was approached to do another series without me and Gove

I’ve only bumped into Gove once since then, just before the 2010 election, when we were both browsing the new non-fiction hardbacks in a book shop. He was as elaborately courteous as ever. “Wow, you have done amazing things …” I said, which felt just about neutral enough. “Not yet!” he protested. Well, he has certainly done things now.

There’s a Change petition in circulation, calling for Channel 4 to repeat A Stab in the Dark. I may just sign it. At least, unlike Michael Gove, I can look back at that show and say it’s easily the worst thing I’ve done in my career.