Although skulking around the world of politics is my day job, over the past week I have been forced into a bit of agonised rethinking by two political dramas, one on the stage, one on TV. The first came when I interviewed Martin Freeman and Tamsin Greig, stars of James Graham’s Labour of Love, currently playing at the Noel Coward Theatre in the West End; the second was watching David Modell’s documentary, also about Labour, in the run-up to the recent election.

Both the play and the documentary focus on part of a politician’s life that is central but hardly ever discussed — still less filmed or dramatised. That is, the constituency office. Labour of Love spans 25 years of politics, seen through the relationship between a local agent — Greig — and her MP, Freeman/James Lyons, all played out against a backdrop of his office in a struggling, economically depressed northern English constituency. I don’t want you to think it’s worthy: it’s very funny indeed.

Modell’s BBC documentary The Summer That Changed Everything followed Labour MPs Stephen Kinnock, Sarah Champion, Ruth Cadbury and Lucy Powell from before the election — when they expected humiliation — through the Corbyn surge, to their reflections afterwards. Had they got Jeremy wrong? But again, it was essentially based in their constituencies, from Wales to Manchester, Rotherham to Brentford.

When I spoke to Freeman (you know, Bilbo Baggins in The Hobbit; Dr Watson to Benedict Cumberbatch’s Sherlock Holmes, Tim in The Office) I found him passionately eloquent, even agitated, about the tough life MPs actually live.

Freeman had made himself a kind of spokesman for Labour but his argument was non-partisan. It was that given what we ask of them — the long hours and the pressures of Westminster — and the abuse we hurl at them, it’s astonishing that anyone sane goes into politics.

This is the kind of argument often made by politicians while the rest of us snicker and shrug. But when a bright outsider says the same thing, perhaps it’s time to listen. Also, I think sane people in politics is quite a good idea.

Modell was making subtly different points in his BBC documentary. It was more about the effect of the Corbyn revolution on the Labour Party. And yet, watching harassed politicians and their helpers scurry from door to unwelcoming door, hammer unresponsive phones and plead with derisive voters, it was hard not to feel a twinge of sympathy. A glamorous life, this is not.

In particular, the plight of Ruth Cadbury, the MP for Brentford and Isleworth, was almost heartbreaking. She was seen, clearly nervous, with an unhappy smile, trying to hand out leaflets to commuters, most of them violently rude to her. One attacked her for not answering an email, which turned out to have been sent years before to the previous MP — and then dismissed her as “crap” anyway. Next we saw Cadbury crouched in a tiny, bleak office pleading with people to vote for her — and wearily putting the phone down on yet another conversation. Then, there she was again, sprinting along wet streets, thrusting leaflets into doors and begging for support. She thought she was going to lose. In fact, thanks in part to Momentum activists, she won. But my heart went out to her.

And it isn’t good enough to say: “Well, they chose to do it.” The personal abuse that MPs get online, by letter and face-to-face, as well as the hard work that good MPs do for their constituents, must surely now put off uncountable numbers of talented, quietly decent people. If the only ones who go into politics are the ideology-fixated and power-crazed folk determined to become Prime Minister, then our democracy is doomed to continue to come apart at the edges.

There are some obvious answers. The main parties must spend more time working out how to support MPs at local level — better computers, better security and some system of passing best practice on that doesn’t rely on random conversations in a Commons coffee bar. How do you make sure all your letters get answered within a fortnight? How do you deal with people who persistently turn up at an MP’s house and are abusive yet never quite threatening enough to involve the police?

A good MP not only has to be a brilliant administrator and office manager, and an advocate for the poor and powerless, but has to be a media-savvy communicator, a parliamentary operator and be able to absorb and understand complex policy questions. It’s the difference between being a decent amateur sprinter and competing in a national decathlon. Some people are good at some bits; few are good at all of it.

We educate and train people to do almost everything, except politics. Shouldn’t some college or university open an MA course on practical politics? Andrew Marr

Here’s my suggestion. We educate and train people to do almost everything, except politics. Apart from poncing about at the Oxford Union pretending you’re Benjamin Disraeli, or grinding away in a trade union research department, there is no training. That’s why more people try to become research assistants or bag-carriers to MPs — thus, of course, missing out on real-world experiences that would make them savvy if they ever did the job.

Shouldn’t some college or university open an MA course on practical politics? Former MPs, constituency agents, number-crunchers and even journalists could turn up to offer advice.

The Institute for Government sometimes comes close to this, but it’s more focused on ministers and top civil servants than the poor bloody infantry of Parliament. In the end, political parties would still select the candidates they wanted, but perhaps people who already knew the best way of helping constituents effectively, and had thought seriously about how to combine that with the demands of law-making, would be more appealing to them?

Perhaps it’s a mad thought. It would certainly be widely mocked. But what politicians do matters a lot to the rest of us. Getting even slightly better prepared and more effective MPs would be as big an advance for Britain as a productivity revolution in engineering, or EU negotiator Michel Barnier deciding that he wanted to give us a brilliant deal.

So thanks to the team behind Labour of Love and thanks, David Modell: you really made me think.