I HEARD a song the other day on the radio. The chorus claimed “the revolution won’t be televised, and neither will your death”.

Don’t be fooled by the apparent bleakness, it’s a surprisingly cheery number called Moulding Of A Fool by former Beautiful South members Paul Heaton and Jacqui Abbott, and the lyric stuck in my head.

Back in the 1960s, soul and jazz poet Gil Scott-Heron wrote The Revolution Will Not Be Televised as an angry anthem for the downtrodden and the eager for change, and the gist – as I understand it from my place thousands of miles and decades of political change down the line – is that there’s no hiding place. Change is coming and you’re going to be stuck in the middle of it with no commercial breaks and no light-hearted ‘and finally…’ to let you know when it’s over.

The lyric stuck in my head (though for the life of me I can’t recall the rest of the song), because it got me thinking about what is televised these days, and how we deal with it.

It’s easy to suggest the revolution will not be televised because nobody would watch it.

Important changes are made on a daily basis to our lives, our countries and our world, and thanks to the abundance of 24-hour news channels and ‘you heard it here first’ websites, they are easier than ever for us to access, but we’re still not that interested. Instead, we’re celebrating giving awards to unscripted television shows that make us watch unlikeable people watching television shows we can’t be bothered to.

Our Government talks about wanting to be transparent and open, and allows cameras into the House of Commons and a whole host of inquiries, but the first time 99 per cent of the public hears about them is when some comedian on a long-past-its-prime panel show makes a flippant innuendo over a picture of one of the politicians.

We have access to literally thousands of pages of information which affects our lives, shared with us at the expense of peoples’ liberty, but we’re all too busy reading the Mail’s sidebar of shame or anonymously attacking people we’ve never met on online forums to care. It’s tempting to say we’ll wait for the film, except we won’t, because while it looks worthy and like something we know we should watch, there’s a cookie-cutter superhero sequel with explosions and spandex showing on the other screen.

In fairness, I tried watching Prime Minister’s Question Time last week, and it’s a difficult watch. It’s hard to take seriously the braying, jeering spectacle, rife with laughter when you sit and think these people are supposed to be running our country. There was even a joke about Cameron wearing Speedos, for crying out loud!

Everyone’s out to get a brief, public nod of recognition from Call Me Dave for the work they’re doing in their communities, so everyone’s comment is practically the same (“would the PM recognise my work in wherever, and how well I’m doing for the party”). Meanwhile, the opposition take any opportunity to scrape a point by highlighting some problem they helped create and which still hasn’t been fixed.

Shouldn’t we have been angrier at the announcement a couple of months back that Jeremy Hunt can close down any hospital he wants within 40 days without any public or staff consultation, despite being told by the High Court he was acting outside of his powers by trying that with a facility last year? We were too busy watching the news speculate hopelessly on what happened to Malaysia Airlines flight 370 to notice.

Why aren’t we outraged when Tony Blair, no longer a man with any credibility or power in our country, urges our leaders to take us into another war in Iraq because the illegal one he led us into didn’t work? Because the rumpled buffoon and publicity magnet Boris Johnson has hilariously called Blair “unhinged”! It would be funny if it weren’t so sad.

There are protests by the poorest people in Brazil while the biggest sporting event in the world takes place around them? Aw, that’s sad. Hey, there’s a three-year-old episode of a laugh-tracked American sitcom on E4, we can squeeze that in before kick-off!

So long after the beat poet predicted it, it turns out the revolution isn’t just being televised, it’s being done in such a way that we barely notice.