Is it because of Liam Neeson, I wonder, that John Humphrys has announced he’s going to retire from the Today programme? Was Neeson’s astonishing interview in the Independent what finally made the great Radio 4 inquisitor realise quite how much you can get out of an interviewee if you give them a bit of space to speak?

Interviews and interviewing have been in the news a lot. Not only was there the extraordinary confession Neeson volunteered in the middle of what was supposed to be a perfectly vacuous press junket, and Humphrys’s equally unexpected proclamation, but also Maureen Lipman, writing in the Radio Times, had a pop at the modern style of chatshow. “The sofa is crammed, like a chapel pew, with English actors telling their juiciest genitalia stories while the host sniggers in a three-piece suit,” was how she described the genre.

I don’t think Neeson’s anecdote would have amused Graham Norton though. I can imagine him glazing over in horror and wishing that, instead of putting Neeson on the sofa, he’d been seated on that red tippy chair. If the producers of his new film Cold Pursuit had been able to pull a big chair-tipping lever before Liam could say “black bastard”, they wouldn’t have needed to cancel the premiere.

By now, Neeson’s words will have been subjected to more scrutiny than some moderately controversial Bible verses, but I don’t think the very first piece of analysis, from Tom Bateman, his co-star, who was also being interviewed, has really been bettered. He went with: “Holy shit.” Come to think of it, that’s also a workmanlike gloss of a lot of Bible verses.

Neeson’s remarks are, more than anything else, colossally surprising. They seem completely disconnected from the entire narrative of what’s supposedly happening to public discourse at the moment. You know, the whole feeling that celebrities “have to be so careful”. The sense that anyone saying anything publicly needs to tiptoe round the sensibilities of dozens of interest groups; that you never know when you’re crossing some line or other without meaning to; that basically, whatever you say, no matter how bland, “you can’t win”.

Frankly, I think those fears are often justified. I think freedom of speech is sometimes hemmed in unnecessarily and perfectly nice people who have said something slightly careless can get into unfair trouble. Then again, I’m an affluent white man and I accept that I don’t necessarily get all the ways in which certain statements can subliminally reinforce prejudice against historically oppressed sectors of society. But that’s been the debate, right? It has, hasn’t it? I wasn’t imagining it?

And then, quite calmly, under no pressure, in the middle of a press junket, when he could’ve just droned on about how the filming conditions were really chilly or something, a movie star baldly announces that he once went round with a cosh for a week in the hope of killing someone black. It feels like a hallucination.

We’re all minutely attuned to the subtle ways in which things people say are or aren’t deemed acceptable, our ears straining for the faintest whisper of a dog whistle, and then “Bang!” It’s like the moment in Fawlty Towers when Basil starts miming to trick Mrs Richards into turning up her hearing aid and then suddenly yells at her. Liam Neeson seems to be asking: “Is this a piece of your brain?”

In their befuddled shock, many commentators have reached for the obvious question: “Is Liam Neeson racist?” He says he’s not. Many say he is. Others have defended him. The trouble is, even if he is racist, it doesn’t come close to being an adequate explanation of why he said what he said. Being racist might explain why he hung around with the cosh 40 years ago, but it doesn’t explain why he’d tell anyone now. Out of doing it and telling people, in some ways it’s the latter that’s hardest to fathom – and it’s also only the latter that we definitely know happened.

I haven’t got an explanation, by the way. I’m still on “Holy shit.” It’s just incredibly weird. Was he stuck for something to say? How frightened of an awkward silence can a grown man be? But could it possibly be social anxiety? And a little racism? A mixture of racism and social anxiety? Now he really sounds like Hitler.

I think the modern chat show has it right: the best way of enjoying a film is to know nothing at all about the actors

Or was it the fact that the film he was promoting is about vengeance and so was his story? Did he say it all simply because he couldn’t get over how extremely apposite it was?

One thing is clear: he shouldn’t do interviews. Some people are saying he shouldn’t do films, but he certainly shouldn’t do interviews. Except possibly, if Lipman is to be believed, the modern sort of chatshow. On them, she claims, there are far too many guests, “so we learn nothing about any of them. Nada. Except that they are famous and good sports.” “Oh, if only!” the publicists of Cold Pursuit must be thinking.

I’m not sure I really want to learn much about the actors who are in the things I watch. I know a lot of actors and most of them are nice people, but I don’t think knowing them helps me enjoy whatever they’re acting in. It makes it more likely I’ll have to bloody turn up and see it, but it doesn’t improve their work, even when they don’t have a history of violent racist plotting.

It’s illogical really that, of all the people involved in making a film, it’s the actors whom we’re encouraged to know lots of real-life stuff about. It would be much easier to buy into the fictions they depict if we weren’t so fully informed of the reality. Why not tell us about the private life of the designer or the cinematographer? Knowing about their affairs, divorces, strange opinions or huge houses won’t make the fictional characters on screen less believable.

So, if you like cinema, I think the modern chatshow has got it just right. The best way of enjoying a film is to know nothing at all about the actors. Except that they’re famous and good sports.