Everyone is so media trained these days that we love a Mike Coupe moment

Pity the poor person in the Sainsbury’s press office who was responsible for Mike Coupe’s media training. That hapless member of staff must have sat with head in hands, cursing themselves for failing to tell their boss that while sounding concerned about job losses as a result of the company’s merger with Asda, he must also avoid singing about money between interviews.

“We’re in the money, the sky is sunny,” Coupe sang absent-mindedly as he waited for the mic to go live again. Except, the mic was already live, and ITV broadcast it. Sainsbury’s hastily – and rather unconvincingly – protested that Coupe was merely singing a song from the musical 42nd Street and “to attach any wider meaning to this innocent, personal moment is preposterous”.

Who knows what was going on in Coupe’s head as he thought about his company’s merger. He certainly now knows that innocent, personal moments are best not taken when there’s recording equipment nearby.

Isn’t it rather telling, though, that media trainers have been so effective that the most interesting bits about many interviews are the bits that weren’t supposed to happen? To avoid making one false move, business leaders and politicians have developed a habit of chaining together meaningless phrases to create a protective armour for surviving the interview intact.

Former Liberal Democrat minister Danny Alexander was a master of this art, managing to talk a great deal in broadcast interviews without saying anything that could possibly move a story on, even in a positive way. Alexander has struggled with his own innocent, personal moments: he was filmed breaking wind while sitting in a Sky studio in 2011. Perhaps after that the Chief Secretary to the Treasury decided that he would never do or say anything to cause a stink in a studio ever again.

Most MPS are less worried about farting, and more worried about accidentally being recorded calling a voter a “bigot”, as Gordon Brown was in 2010. But us grubby journalists have a lot to answer for too. We practise a willing suspension of disbelief when reporting more innocuous remarks. We know exactly what someone actually meant, but we write it up as though we don’t.

Take Anne Jenkin. The Conservative peer was one of the speakers at the launch of an inquiry into food banks, and she chose to discuss one of the group’s findings. “We have lost a lot of our cooking skills, and poor people don’t know how to cook,” she said, immediately looking terrified by what she’d clumsily said.

In the stories that followed, the Baroness was pictured standing proudly in a kitchen that had two ovens, making her the Conservative equivalent of John “two Jags” Prescott. The only problem was that Jenkin had merely been clumsily repeating a line in the report itself about cooking skills – and the kitchen was in the House of Lords, not her own home.

It’s no wonder that people in the public eye try to create such a division between their on-mic persona and their real, unconstructed demeanour. The stakes are too high for anything else.

But we too pay a price for being so demanding: we now very rarely know what anyone we are listening to really thinks.