Then, just as we troop into the mock-Tudor Clement Attlee Hall, I feel her guiding hand on my back, just above the coccyx, and the heat of that hotel-room coupling floods my senses with arousal and dismay. Let it rest, I tell myself, there’s a night’s work ahead.

The hall is packed and the front rows have been well oiled. Mayor Froggatt burps out a few words of welcome before staggering back to his seat, well satisfied. His guests are port-cheeked and growing merrier by the minute. Three pitchers of water and six glasses await the judges on a trestle table, stage left. At each place-setting there is a mimeographed sheet containing short biographies of the six contestants. We open our ledgers and prepare to judge. This is not the nail-bitten Tchaikovsky Concourse in Moscow, or even the homespun Leeds Piano Competition. There is no pit full of orchestral tedium and suppurating intrigue. There is not even a proper scoring form, just a ream of Tawside Council-headed notepaper on which I draw four columns then circulate it to the other judges, indicating that they do the same. We shall mark separately for technique, interpretation and musicality – or how accurately, innovatively and engagingly they play the seen-better-days Steinway grand piano, or whatever scratchy violins their harassed parents can afford. Add the marks together, divide by three, top average is the winner.

I have done this sort of thing before and never with an easy conscience. Combatants are assessed less on skill and vision than on metronomic exactitude. Personality and artistic penetration would be penalised by the professors as technical faults and by the rest of us as irritating quirks. There is no fair way to rate a winsome ten-year-old against a pimply matriculant, and on different instruments to boot. Injustice is inbuilt, but the public demands a winner and we must deliver one. Everyone knows the system is rotten, but we perpetrate a consensual hoax in the hope of filching a few prime-time seconds to remind viewers that there are greater heights in life than politics, sport and pop stardom.

No one gets hurt by the hoax. The contestants, or so we tell ourselves, have nothing to lose. This, for them, is a one-in-six chance of breaking out of a Tawside council block or semi-detached and reaching for a better life. They look upon music as their ticket to freedom – just as it was for shtetl-dwellers in the Russian pale of settlement who, in dire want, turned out a Heifetz and a Horowitz, David Oistrakh and Isaac Stern, Nathan Milstein and Mischa Elman. Tawburn is no Odessa, but its children can dream and we do no harm in encouraging their escapist fantasies.