Part of the fun of Piers Morgan’s Life Stories was watching some of the biggest names in showbiz bump up against one of the biggest egos on television. Morgan was a surgically precise interviewer – but excelled, in particular, at making celebrities squirm when he brought up some awkward misstep from their past.

His replacement, Kate Garraway, is a presenter of a very different stripe and the first episode of Kate Garraway’s Life Stories (ITV) was built in her cheery image. Though Garraway started as a reporter, the Good Morning Britain star has spent most of her career in lifestyle TV rather than in hard-nosed journalism. So it was perhaps inevitable that her Life Stories debut should be altogether fluffier and sweeter than was the case with Morgan, who has left ITV for a new morning gig with Rupert Murdoch’s forthcoming talkTV startup.

Then again, could even Piers Morgan have resisted a celebrity as charming as John Barnes? One of the greatest footballers of the Eighties has, in his later years, become a charismatic national treasure as well as a thoughtful and passionate commentator on racism.

But nobody’s perfect and there were one or two skeletons in his superstar closet that Garraway could have rattled had she been inclined. Barnes’s first marriage, for example, fell apart amid multiples reports of infidelity on his part. With his children in the audience she broached this awkward topic, though only briefly.

“I was a terrible husband but I always tried to be a good father,” said Barnes. Garraway asked how the deluge of tabloid “love rat” headlines were received by his late father, an officer in the Jamaican defence forces and someone with a strict sense of right and wrong. Barnes’s reply was that his father ultimately knew his son was a good person. It was a considered answer. Nonetheless, it was hard not to feel that Morgan would have dug in and pitched one or two tricky follow-up questions.

Garraway does not have it in her to be a journalistic villain, however. And so the tone throughout the first of three episodes was upbeat (Charlotte Church and Nadiya Hussain are the other guests lined up this season). She certainly wasn’t afraid to go out on a limb in order to lighten the mood, as she did when jiving on the spot as Barnes reprised his rap from New Order’s 1990 England World Cup song World in Motion. It’s just a guess but Morgan probably wouldn’t have jumped to his feet and grooved while clicking his fingers. And if he did, would anyone want to see it?