Cold open: an Oxford police station. Maybe a guy with a long scarf bicycles past with a pile of books and an oar on each shoulder. Inside, we find a black woman attempting to report a crime to a police inspector, who is theatrically banging his head on the desk and shouting: “Bo-ring!” Could she just tell him about how – . No, she couldn’t, he says, because this is a lovely country, so her experience simply hasn’t happened. He wants us to come together. Why doesn’t she? She needs to stop being the – what’s the expression? Fly in the ointment? Skeleton in the closet? It’s on the tip of his tongue. In fact, if anything, says the inspector, he has been the victim of a crime. Warming to his theme, he rules that the real criminal is her for raising it.

Cue opening titles of ITV’s big new Sunday night detective drama: HATHAWAY.

In any sane world – I know, right? – this show would already be in production, because that’s the way it has always been, meaning it’s the RIGHT way. First, there was Inspector Morse, starring Inspector Morse, and he was deferentially assisted by Sergeant Lewis. Then, when Morse went to the great whodunnit in the sky, Sergeant Lewis made inspector and, in due course, he got his own show: Lewis. Inspector Lewis was in turn deferentially assisted by Sergeant Hathaway, who I assumed was real, but was apparently played by the actor, musician and thought leader Laurence Fox. In due course, Inspector Lewis himself bowed out, by which point Hathaway had been promoted to inspector.

And yet: no eponymous Sunday night show of his own. No deferential sergeant of his own. It’s a scandal. This was the way things were – but now they are not. Similarly, just as there had always been iconic roles for James Fox back in the day, so there would surely always be the same for his son Laurence.

But now, evidently, there aren’t. So I want you to forget everything you think you know about what happened since Laurence went on Question Time last week and told a mixed-race audience member she was being racist to him by making boring charges of racism. Tempting as it might be to misdiagnose, this is not just the sort of midlife crisis you would expect from one of the lesser telly chefs.

No, THIS is the reality: Laurence’s story is a tale from acting’s rust belt, about the hollowing out of the theatrical heartlands, where the job and dignity your father could count on have been stolen. By whom? I don’t know. Sikhs maybe? We’ll get onto that later. For now, it is increasingly clear that the old certainties have evaporated. And there are some people who are going to feel very, very left behind. We should listen to these actors.

Indeed, this is why Laurence could be found on Julia Hartley-Brewer’s TalkRadio show by Monday morning, expanding on his QT rant, going: “We lay all our troubles on the working man. And the working man has had enough of it.”

Damn straight. I’ve always felt Laurence has huge second-toughest-at-Rada energy to him. And just like him, I’m sick of these elites who have never done a tough day down t’acting pit. The hardscrabble truth is that the theatrical economy no longer works in the way it did for your daddy or his daddy before him. Or, to put it more specifically re Laurence’s situation: how come HE’S not admiring Hitler in Remains of the Day, while Tony Hopkins has to miss his own dad’s death because he’s got the dinner to serve? Instead, Laurence feels as if his only choice is going on James Delingpole’s podcast to lose his shit that there’s a Sikh in Sam Mendes’s 1917 movie. I mean, I guess it’s zeitgeisty. But set against his dad’s zeitgeisty stuff, it’s not exactly sharing some acid and a French chick with Mick Jagger in Performance, is it?

And, of course, when hope moves out, Trump moves in. I think this is why Laurence recently announced that he put on a Maga hat and walked round wherever he lives in south London. He says one woman told him he was crazy. A bit like that scene in Die Hard 3 where Bruce Willis has to stand in Harlem wearing a racist sign or everyone’s going to get blown up by villain Jeremy Irons. (Sidenote: a contempo version of that is exactly the sort of part Laurence should have had. But they have skipped him and gone straight for Tom Hiddleston, haven’t they? The shits.)

As for what attracted Fox to Trump, maybe it was the president’s deathless comment: “I love the poorly educated.” And putting my own public school heritage to use, I want to attain the levels of empathy Laurence rose to on Question Time. So I’ll just inform him definitively that a huge amount of his bitterness springs from the fact he went to a minor public school. (Harrow. I will not be taking letters on this classification; thank you.)

Certainly his outsider shtick is my favourite since Jacob Rees-Mogg (who didn’t go to a minor public school) told last year’s Conservative party conference: “But as I grew up in the British establishment, I know how awful it is. I see its faults perhaps more clearly than most do, and its determination, its anti-democratic wish to cling to its power come what may.” Then again, I think we all have to make a lot of time for the latest effusion from Lily Allen (Bedales), who reacted to Laurence’s nonsense by announcing she was “sick to death of luvvies forcing their opinions on everybody else” and advising him to “stick to acting”. Say what you like about this story, but it really has brought all the preposterous pricks to the yard – and yes, I certainly count myself in that.

As for where Laurence could have gone after QT, I suppose he could have donned the Black Poloneck of Poorly Essayed Contrition. I refer of course to the night that Dapper Laughs opted to become Dapper Tears, and appeared on Newsnight to apologise for “pushing the boundaries”.

Instead, Fox decided to double down, telling Delingpole of the “oddness” of casting a Sikh in 1917. “It is kind of racist,” he honked, “if you talk about institutional racism, which is what everyone loves to go on about, which I’m not a believer in, there is something institutionally racist about forcing diversity on people in that way.”

When the contribution of Sikh soldiers to the first world war was later mentioned to him, he replied: “I’m not a historian.” But luv: you don’t NEED to be a historian. You honestly just need access to the website google.com. Because if you search the words “Sikhs” and “first world war”, every single result from the very first one down will tell you how Sikh soldiers arrived on the Western front from 1914, how they were instrumental at Ypres, and so on for miles and miles. It literally couldn’t be easier to find out about. But you see, basic investigations aren’t the Hathaway MO. The Hathaway MO is to be profoundly incurious, to not ask any questions at all, or attempt to learn anything, or to think that people with different experiences may have a different point to make from yours. You just accuse the Sikh of ruining the movie.

As for where people of colour go after their latest tedious schooling, perhaps they could take #inspo from Laurence himself. After all, this is a man who has repeatedly hawked his divorce experiences round the TV interview sofas, in return for the show plugging his band or whatever – yet who begrudges people of colour having the temerity to have their own problems.

Yet again, I think the conclusion is that people of colour need to be EVEN more creative in the way they talk about their experiences to snowflakes like Laurence. Just spitballing here, but would it help if they got caught up in a celebrity divorce, then had a crap album to promote? Because I feel like then it might finally be permissible for them to speak. Until then, his message is clear: you’re still doing it wrong, guys! Pipe down.