What does it mean to be a ‘good’ sports presenter? Really, it should mean nothing. They aren’t important. They should have a sense of perspective, a sense of remembering that they are peripheral to the most popular consumer product and human activity that we have come up with.

Of course, it doesn’t work like that. Look at Gary Lineker. The BBC paid him £1.3 million to ask Danny Murphy things like ‘Bournemouth look to have run out of steam a little bit?’ for 75 minutes a week. Such is our infatuation with sport that we end up really caring about who asks this kind of question. That person gets to be the highest-paid broadcaster in the country. We inhale sports commentary because there simply isn’t enough sport to watch, dependent as it is on people made of flesh who get ‘tired’.

Last year saw us take this to its logical conclusion. Lineker’s thoughts on Gaza became as important as the Prime Minister’s. Some generations get Isaiah Berlin as their public intellectuals; we got Gary........

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