If humanity survives this cursed century, I imagine our future ancestors looking back and wondering if it wasn’t the way we entertained ourselves which created so many of our troubles.

In my lifetime, a gateway closed between a world of entertainment within which there was at least buried germs of intelligence, a message, wisdom; and a world of entertainment with no other purpose than to wallpaper our lives.

This isn’t simply some nostalgic gripe about returning to a time when great minds came to think out loud – not sell themselves – on talk shows like Parkinson; or TV’s Play for the Day set the week’s political agenda; it’s more an expression of yearning for a great artist to emerge who speaks for our time.

Today, we must often seek art from the past to explain the modern world. Artists today seem terrified of relevance. One barometer of cultural death is music. Not musical form, or style, or the fashions which follow music, but the intellectual ‘content’ of music.

Long before I was born, political anger so often motivated musicians. Ain’t We Got Fun mocked the super-rich in 1921; Strange Fruit indicted Jim Crow in 1939; Woody Guthrie’s guitar read "this machine kills fascists" in the forties.

Then protest exploded in the post-war era musically and kept exploding throughout my teenage years and into the 2000s: Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan, Gil Scott-Heron, Punk, Bronksi Beat, Public Enemy, Two-Tone, Two Tribes. On it went.

Protest was entertainment. Until is wasn’t. Around the mid-2010s, it died. Social media isn’t merely coincidental.

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Another reason, evidently, is the loss of the........

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