Entertainment

Man who would be King

VISA CARD: Piers’ sandpaper attitude made fellow judges Sharon Osbourne and Howie Mandel look nice on “America’s Got Talent.” (Justin Lubin/NBC)

THE KING:“Larry prided himself for years on winging it in interviews.” (AP)

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The meeting was barely underway, and already talk had turned from scheduling to flirting.

“There was proper flirtation — I was flirting with Condoleezza Rice and Oprah on Week One,” Piers Morgan declared, as a producer ran down the A-list roster of interviews planned for the launch week of his new CNN show, “Piers Morgan Tonight,” which debuts tonight in Larry King’s old time slot.

“I asked Dr. Rice, hypothetically, if I was to seduce you, what would I have to do?”

Morgan sat in a leather armchair beside the conference table where his staff was planning future episodes and hashing out ideas. Even from the corner, he dominated the room, joking, swearing, boasting and batting the discussion from subject to subject like a cricket ball.

The topic turned to Week Two. But somehow, Morgan was back on flirting.

“This may be the main difference between me and Larry, actually,” he observed. “The 32-year age gap is proving to be quite beneficial with the ladies.”

Morgan — a British former newspaper editor best known here as the no-pulled-punches judge of NBC’s “America’s Got Talent” — was crowned as King’s successor last September.

Since then, he and his executive producer, Jonathan Wald, have proceeded at a breakneck pace, hiring a booking staff even as they booked some of the biggest names around — Oprah Winfrey, Howard Stern, Rice, Ricky Gervais and George Clooney all appear this week.

He listed painstaking research and “cheeky impertinence” — not to mention flirting — among his trade secrets.

For the Oprah sit-down that airs tonight, he spent days watching two decades of past interviews with the talk-show diva. This, he said, helped him find her fault lines, inspiring him to ask how many times she’s been “properly in love.” (Two, not counting Steadman.)

“One difference between me and Larry is, Larry has prided himself for years on winging it in interviews,” Morgan said in his office, a sparsely decorated corner nook with sweeping views of Central Park. “It worked brilliantly for him. I’m a very different type of interviewer.”

Wald, who previously worked at CNBC and the “Today” show, agreed.

“It’s not anything that’s so outrageous and crazy — it’s more the natural questions that you would ask yourself,” he said.

Like when he asked Rice if, when she was in the highest levels of government, she could go out to dinner with friends and get “a little tipsy.” (No, never, because she always had to be ready to work.)

A Union Jack decorates Morgan’s office wall, and he admits he’ll be leaning on his staff for some of the finer points of American culture.

He was stumped when, while brainstorming questions for the megachurch pastor Joel Osteen, Wald suggested “Ginger or Mary Ann?”

“That one went right over the head of our British friend,” Wald recalled at the ideas meeting, held in his office on a snowy day last week. “He had to be brought up to speed on ‘Gilligan’s Island.’”

The cultural barrier goes both ways, as they found when Morgan asked Colin Firth and Geoffrey Rush about their “bromance” and they compared themselves to Hinge and Bracket — the stage names of female impersonators well-known in the UK.

“There was a terrible silence in the studio,” Morgan said.

So far, there’s no typical day at “Piers Morgan Tonight,” where the New York team shares a high-ceilinged, white-walled office suite with “Anderson Cooper 360,” and the finishing touches were just put on the black and white set.

While they’re taping shows in advance, they also plan to upend their schedules when breaking news — like the shooting massacre in Arizona — strikes.

“We’re on the ground there, so we’ll be perfectly positioned if something happens,” Wald announced at another meeting last week, preparing for Morgan’s session with Rudy Giuliani Friday.

They discussed lessons learned from the Rice interview: Have more photos ready for the display screens (“We got lucky with Condi, because she kept referring to her parents”) and be prepared for last-minute changes. (“We can’t go from super-heavy weapons of mass destruction to ‘Why aren’t you married?’”)

Morgan, 45, has a reputation for being opinionated and combative, particularly in Britain, where he was infamously fired as editor of the Daily Mirror after it published faked photos of Iraqi prisoner abuse.

His bitter feud with Omarosa Manigault-Stallworth, a co-contestant on “The Celebrity Apprentice” (which he won), is the stuff of reality TV legend. But he aims to be impartial on his show.

“I will not be screaming hysterically about my partisan views,” he said.

With the first few weeks booked, the staff is looking to the weeks ahead.

Producers were negotiating with Lorne Michaels for an interview, as well as the makers of the Broadway show Spiderman, with possible guests Julie Taymor, Bono and The Edge.

Someone at the table pitched a show about the Kennedy family featuring Katie Holmes, who starred in the miniseries “The Kennedys,” which History recently dropped.

“I think it’s fascinating,” Morgan agreed. “No Kennedy in power for the first time in 60 years.”

Morgan suggested a show focused on Twitter — “Turns out that Jack Dorsey who founded Twitter is a friend of a friend, so he’s on. And Perez Hilton, I just approached him on Twitter and asked if he’d be on the show, he agreed. So we can have Perez and Jack and maybe one or two other stars, and we’ve got a Twitter show.”

Also on deck: Mitt Romney, Anthony Hopkins, Kim and Kourtney Kardashian and Barbara Walters.

“I’m going to make her cry,” Morgan predicted. “I am.”

“They’ll hate you even more,” one producer joked.

“No, they’ll love me,” Morgan said. “They’ll love me if I make her cry — if I make her cry for the right reasons.”