The longer it goes on, the more lockdown confirms the supreme importance of the audience. Premier League football is to return, in empty stadiums, with artificial crowd noise for television audiences. Clearly, the “canned” crowd noise is an attempt to get around the fact that a spectator sport sans spectators could severely lack atmosphere. Nor is this problem confined to sport. Look at musicians performing at those lockdown “concerts”. Once you get past gawping at bookcases and patio heaters – the sheer novelty of the enforced domestic intimacy – it starts to feel like a series of lacklustre soundchecks in the soft furnishings department of John Lewis. However much noise is being made, it’s too flat, one-sided, empty. As popular culture fights to survive, something important is missing, and that something is the audience.

This much is obvious, and has become one of the recurring motifs of lockdown: art, music, film, sport, literature, every aspect of culture is horribly isolated and struggling, and not just because of the hideous economic impact. Even politics is affected. Look at Jacob Rees-Mogg frantically trying to get MPs back into the Commons – not least, one suspects, because, without all the braying and guffawing (what passes for crowd-noise in Westminster), Boris Johnson is horribly exposed for what he is: an overgrown schoolboy who’s spent a lifetime not being arsed to do his homework.

Maybe it has taken a crisis of this magnitude to bring home the cultural importance of the audience. Perhaps football fans can still enjoy watching games without crowds, just as teams can enjoy playing them. However, most would probably feel that what football crowds bring (elation, heartbreak, daft singing, humanity) could never be replicated by simply sticking a shouty tape on. The same with gigs, theatre and anything else that needs to feel alive. It’s beyond atmosphere, it’s about communion, and what happens when all that interactive chemistry, the undefinable cultural voodoo of a huge, sweaty, shared moment, is abruptly yanked away.

All this has made me realise that, back in the day as a music hack, I may have been a tad harsh, rolling my eyes and muttering, “Get on with it, I’ve got a Tube to catch”, when musicians would pause and start emotionally thanking the “great crowd”. Whatever’s happening (music, sport, politics), people instinctively look to the action “on stage”, but any decent performer is aware of the importance of the crowd. They know better than anyone that actions need a reaction, and that they’re trapped in a co-dependency; one where one side needs the other so much more.

So, yes, it’s good to get Premier League football going again, however it happens, but don’t expect it to be the same. A key component will be missing. You. Popular culture will doubtless find a way to survive, but it will never be complete without the audience.

It wasn’t power that corrupted Epstein

It would appear to take a strong man to be rich and powerful without being a predator. It was difficult to watch the Netflix Filthy Rich documentary series about the late financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, without feeling nauseated. Epstein so clearly relished how his money and power enabled him to sexually prey on vulnerable young females. Even just via the television screen, the stench of ethical rot coming off this superior, preening man was overwhelming. Yet, for all the horror, it was also bewildering. Epstein had everything life had to offer – he could have done anything, been anything. But he chose to do and be that. How pathetic.

It makes you wonder how women such as the ever-elusive Ghislaine Maxwell (who denies all knowledge of the crimes), could be so impressed by the likes of Epstein. The lifestyle – really? Did anyone ever need to sit in a hot tub sipping champagne that much? For some women, it’s as if alpha male translates as predatory male, and that’s just fine: hey, it’s how the world works; driven, high-achieving men like Epstein don’t play by the usual rules.

The trouble with this line is that there are plenty of wealthy, powerful men who aren’t predators; who manage to be driven and successful without hurting, exploiting or, indeed, sexually abusing, anyone. Clearly, these men have the mental strength and decency that creeps such as Epstein and Harvey Weinstein sorely lack. Contrary to what they say, power is not an aphrodisiac, unless all we’re talking about is powerful narcissists being turned on by themselves. Money and power are all very well, but it takes a certain kind of man to be able to handle them. 

Lockdown is painful and deadly for prisoners

Spare a thought for those locked up during lockdown. Five prisoners are believed to have killed themselves in England and Wales within one six-day period this past month. Four were in adult male prisons in Norfolk, Cheshire, Devon and Cardiff, and one at Aylesbury young offender institution. Overall, 16 prisoners have killed themselves since lockdown began.

For prisoners, lockdown has meant segregation, less than an hour out of their cells each day and a ban on visitors; a painfully stringent regime reminiscent of solitary confinement. Obviously, the point was to contain the spread of the virus, which (although 22 prisoners and nine staff members have died) has been successful.

It’s no wonder that penal reformers are becoming increasingly concerned about the mental and physical health of prisoners. One problem is that, while up to 4,000 prisoners were deemed eligible for the early release scheme (announced in early April), by mid-May, only 57 had been released.

So what now? One would have expected mass-testing, a sensible and gradual relaxation of lockdown measures and more of those eligible prisoners to be released early. Certainly, something must be done to take the pressure off both inmates and staff.

•Barbara Ellen is an Observer columnist