That doesn’t mean I don’t adore reality TV. I’ve loved it in all its forms; the talent shows (The X Factor), the boss shows (The Apprentice), the scripted soap shows (TOWIE) and even the awful squalid ones about hoarding which seem to be the mainstay of Channel 5. I’ve never had a sex dream about an actor or pop star, but at the height of his Kitchen Nightmares I had one about Gordon Ramsay which lasted three consecutive nights. I’m hazy on the details, but it was immensely enjoyable and there was a lot of swearing.

But Britain’s talent shows ran out of talent a while ago: Simon Cowell cancelled The X Factor last year, after 17 seasons; The X Factor: Celebrity (2019) attracted fewer than 3 million viewers during its first live show — its lowest ratings ever. Compare that with the Will Young/Gareth Gates Pop Idol final, which was watched 20 years ago this month by 15 million people; I remember voting ten times for Gates before my husband hid the phone from me.

It’s never hurt that the sort of people I loathe — pretentious, pompous, right-on Lady Mucks — hate reality TV. See Annie Lennox, sneering that The X Factor is “a factory, owned and stitched up by puppet masters”. Lord forbid that people should want to watch something which amuses rather than lectures them.

Though the stories about My Gran Dying And I’m Doing This For Her got a bit much in the end, there were many beautiful moments backstage at the talent shows when a contestant’s working-class family could be seen embracing and praying, giving lie to all the snideness that the masses generally provoke from commentators.

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The kids were refreshingly down-to-earth, too; 20 years ago, reality TV was just a gap year for fit proletarian youngsters. As Saskia Howard-Clarke, from season six of Big Brother in 2005, told me while I was making a documentary called Reality TV Is Good For You: “I knew when I came out of the house there wouldn’t be a limo waiting to whisk me off to Hollywood. I got some nice clothes, a couple of nice holidays. I’ve already got a nice boyfriend out of it. And soon I’m going to get back to work.”

But with the rise of social media, things have changed. Love Island is a springboard for smart, sexy young women (and men to a lesser degree) to monetise their youth and beauty the way a sportsman utilises his skill for that mayfly moment before wear and tear takes over. The suicides of Michael Thalassitis and Sophie Gradon were a field day for loathers of reality TV, but the idea that it was the uniquely empty and narcissistic milieu which caused these young people to take their lives doesn’t explain why, say, farmers — as far from reality stars as one can imagine — have such a high rate of suicide.

There was a great deal of self-righteous crowing when, in 2018, it was claimed that there were more applicants for Love Island — around 150,000 — than there were for Oxford and Cambridge combined. “What is happening to us?” wailed BBC Breakfast’s Dan Walker from his cushy billet. But in an age where social mobility is moving backwards, and in a country where the dull spawn of the famous pick up the few enjoyable and well-paid jobs once open to bright working-class kids — actor, pop star, model, journalist — should we be surprised? There’s also hypocrisy to all the shrieking: it’s fun and easy to be paid to be yourself — that’s what we columnists do.

So when the academic Danielle J. Lindeman, in her new book True Story, damns reality TV with faint praise as “a pop-cultural touchstone that… can help us to make sense of complex social forces”, you can’t help but feel her point is decades out-of-date. Today, reality TV has informed all parts of our culture and democratised it, adding greatly to the confusion and gaiety of nations.

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We live in a world where Margot Robbie obsesses over Love Island; where Kim Kardashian retires from her show to become a lawyer and hold meetings with The Apprentice’s President Donald Trump. Then there’s Meghan Markle and Prince Harry, who have become their very own reality TV spectacle: they are of interest only because they have us on the edge of our seats wondering who the heck they’re going to turn on next. The same is true of Boris Johnson — policy has become less important than whether Carrie Made Him Do It and his ongoing feud with Dominic Cummings.

Faced with these fantasies, both the Left and Right join in condemnation of reality TV’s hold over the youth of the nation, who should be stuck away in their bedrooms studying for Oxbridge rather than having a laugh in swimwear. But as in so many issues, politics has been left behind and the Great and Good can no more hold back the tide of populism than a Love Islander can walk past a beauty salon offering 50% off spray tans.

A recent survey found that those aged 18 to 24 are more likely (42%) than their elders (9%) to believe that “income level is the greatest indicator of someone’s class” and that a major decider of whether one is “upper class” is “going on luxury hotel holidays” and “multiple overseas holidays per year”. The mass exodus of Love Island alumni to Dubai during the first Covid lockdown so they could carry on their “work” as “influencers” personified this dream of being posh.

And in a way, it’s not as foolish as Victoria Beckham being called ‘Posh’ — chasing the sun is what the idle rich specialised in before they had to make it look like they were working. Faced with this new reality TV class, it’s interesting to see how many of the privileged, privately educated youngsters of Made In Chelsea made a reverse journey, choosing to enter the world of commerce rather than cruise on their trust funds.

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More striking, though, was how it was one of the best and brightest reality stars who brought the Dubai influences down to earth. Olivia Attwood — of Love Island, TOWIE and Olivia Meets Her Match fame — was scathing in her mockery:

“So basically being an influencer is actually really hard and I can’t create content for you guys here at home, so I am going to have to go on holiday…. People literally can’t feed their children, and are being given these sad little bags of food from the government… Your ‘hard day’ is creating content that might get nasty comments and someone else’s hard day is a 12-hour shift and zipping up body bags at the end of it.”

It proved that, at a time when real stars of screen and music increasingly scold from the same hymn sheet behind the high walls of their privately-policed gated enclosures  — capitalism is evil; transwomen are women; Palestine is real — the reality stars, unschooled in hypocrisy, can still be a breath of fresh air.

Let other critics sneer at the dreams of ordinary people reflected in reality TV — I’ll take a talent show over a Quality Drama showing the working-class being happy with their place below stairs any day.

That was how, at the age of 13, I became aware that the placid politics of the 1960s would be replaced by class warfare. And that behind the facade of Seventies respectability, the establishment lived secret lives according to different rules.

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Soon, my dad’s prediction came true. The miners’ strike forced power cuts and the three-day week. I remember my schoolfriends, sent home early, pilfering from market stalls in the pitch dark.

But I don’t think the outbreak of class struggle would have had the same radicalising effect on me had it not coincided with my discovery that Catholicism was a sham.

At my school, the priests who taught us railed every day against the twin evils of masturbation and homosexuality. But on arrival we were told by older boys to avoid entering a room alone with some of them, in case we got “touched up”. And in the name of gentle Jesus meek and mild, some were in the habit of inflicting random, psychopathic violence.

This atmosphere of political crisis, combined with the daily experience of hypocrisy and menace at school made me search for answers. And by coincidence, answers were already lodged into my brain — because at the age of 10 I’d played one of the newsboys in Noël Coward’s play This Happy Breed.

Coward’s portrait of a working class family during the General Strike, the Depression and the Munich crisis includes a character called Sam Leadbitter, a caricature communist from central casting. Sitting in the wings at night after night, I found his lines the most vivid. My 10-year-old brain did not see Leadbitter as a caricature at all, but rather the only honest character among a bunch of “apathetic, unthinking, docile supporters of a capitalistic system which is a disgrace to civilisation”, as Sam himself puts it.

These lines stuck with me. Unwittingly, and from beyond the grave, it was Noël Coward who steered me from hormonal teenage revolt to a real and lifelong engagement with the world’s most coherent liberation theology: Marxism.

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I read The Communist Manifesto in the school library, together with an introduction by A. J. P. Taylor designed to convince us that it was bullshit. One priest noticed what I was doing and tried to engage me in a discussion about Catholic social teaching. I curtailed the discussion by telling him that Catholic social teaching was bullshit, and that belief in God was irrational. But my Marxism remained, at this stage, book-learned and pretty basic.

Then, aged 15, I went to a youth club disco. At the edge of the dancefloor were some very tough looking kids — Irish, black, Italian — who I’d lost touch with after primary school. A record came on that cleared all the Slade fans off the dancefloor: crackly silence; a black man’s voice wailing. Then a crunchy R&B tune kicked in, and all the rough lads threw themselves into a dance that was a mixture of kung fu, shuffling and acrobatics. They did the splits; they spun like ballerinas. This was the Northern Soul culture in its heyday and within a couple of minutes, I was part of it.

I now discovered that it was not just the establishment and the Catholic clergy that could live a double life, but everybody. There was a mass criminal underworld selling drugs all over the North of England, organising thefts from pharmacists or shipping “backstreet” drugs from Amsterdam. To get to the Northern Soul all-nighters you had to catch the last bus and stay out all night, and hunch in doorways at first light until the bus and train services restarted.

Suddenly I was part of a vast working-class Bohemia, operating with absolute solidarity in the face of police raids and searches. We idolised the black kids on our scene, and we venerated black performers like Major Lance and Jackie Wilson. We were white working-class kids curating the R&B music of Detroit and Memphis, and the rest of the world could go to hell.

So when the National Front started holding their racist “anti-mugging marches”, we knew what we had to do. I remember waking hand in hand with my girlfriend as a military-scale convoy of police riot vans sped past us, on the way to confront an Anti-Nazi League protest. I told her: “Next time, I’m joining in”.

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That was how I ended up on my first political demonstration: a 25,000 strong Anti-Nazi League demo in Manchester, in July 1978. My mum told me not to get into trouble. I went alone, spoke to no-one apart from to say “no thanks” to a Left-wing newspaper seller. I marched, I chanted, and then I got hit in the face with a heavy banner pole after the wind snapped it. It took a lot to convince Mum that I had not become some kind of anti-fascist rioter.

That is how — via atheism, soul music and strife — I became politicised.

Looking back, across 40 years of political engagement with the Left, some of the ideas that crystallised in my head at the age of 15 have remained pretty constant: a total lack of deference to authority figures; the default assumption that politicians and religious leaders are corrupt liars; a general preference for spontaneous action; a lifelong revulsion against racism.

Another legacy is that I always understood the importance of counterculture in working class life. Northern Soul, punk and later hip-hop and garage for me had a political meaning, embodied in the taking and holding of physical space at night, for the breaking of rules and the mixing of ethnicities and sexualities.

There are people on the Left who fetishise the old working class culture I come from, and who construct a nostalgia project around it. But for me, alongside the official signifiers of beer drinking, football and respectability, real working class culture has always included a counterculture — of drugs, music, iconoclasm and evading arrest.

I think that’s what inoculated me from the nostalgiafest, and allowed my political commitment to adapt in an age where political opposition movements are full of diverse, networked, educated people.

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With hindsight, it also looks like the work of that progressive priest was not in vain. To defeat the Catholic humanism of Rerum Novarum, I had to build, out of the texts available to me at sixteen, a Marxist humanism, with ethical and moral implications. This has strengthened throughout my life.

Today we are faced with anti-humanism on all sides: from the far-Right, with its race science and violent misogyny, to Silicon Valley, where humans are seen as “already algorithms”, lacking agency and free will. At its most extreme, the post-humanism movement seeks to replace homo sapiens with hybrids of machines and flesh.

My opposition to this is based largely on the conclusions I reached in the school library in the Seventies: human beings have evolved as imagineers, teamworkers and linguists. On that basis it is possible to propose they will free themselves through technological change and self-liberation. If you strip out all the specifics about class, economic crisis and poltical tactics, that’s the basic proposition of Marxism.