SO what can we learn from the grandstanding performances of a pompous, well-padded egotist, whose ambitions are fatally subverted by his appetites and vanities?

This week’s news that Frasier is about to re-enter the building, in a new version of the US sitcom to show on streaming TV, brings some welcome relief to our current moment. And maybe some nervousness.

I have a very exact, even intimate, relationship with this show. As a touring musician, it is my burden to wake up bewildered in unfamiliar hotel rooms after a night of relative success or failure. Wondering where the hell I am, or even who the hell I am.

Reaching groggily for the remote, and after a few hopeful stabs, I am often recomposing myself by means of some American sitcoms on Channel Four. And if I rouse between 8.30 and 10am, that’s going to be Frasier.

In these fragile moments, the show has never failed me. For one thing, it’s a spectacle of two pretentious brothers, deeply supportive yet innately rivalrous, bursting to make discriminating points about French vineyards or Freud vs Jung (for my brother-partner Greg and I in Hue And Cry, you can substitute funk grooves of the seventies or Coltrane vs Getz). I deeply recognise this kind of exchange ...

Frasier: “Oh, by the way Niles, if you were stranded on a desert island, what would you choose as your favourite meal, aria and wine?”

Niles: “The Coulibiliac of salmon at Guy Savoy, ‘Vissi d’Arte’ from Tosca, and the Coutre Roune Chateau Neuf du Pape ’47.”

Frasier: “You are so predictable.”

Our compadre and sound engineer Rab revealed that my brother and I were generally nicknamed the “Niles and Frasier Kane” of the Glasgow music scene. No gong has ever been more esteemed.

So another therapeutic function of Frasier (as my nose peeks over the Premier Inn duvet) is its beautiful predictability – both the settings and the humans. The penthouse flat is always there, with its impossible view of the city (apparently no such tower exists in Seattle).

Frasier’s Eames chair is echoed by the lime-green, duct-taped recliner, from which his working-class dad, Martin, loves to watch football games.

The kitchen is over to one side (just after the port carafes). This is the place where schemes are hatched and truths despatched. Somehow, it’s magically sound-insulated from their hapless victims in the living room.

Frasier’s broadcast booth at the radio station, with the lovelorn Roz producing behind the glass, transmits surely the most dysfunctional and counter-productive therapy show ever made. But on the other side, their regular coffee shop, Cafe Nervosa, evokes all the warmth and civicness of Seattle, the birthplace of Starbucks.

And in these bourgeois environs, the cast play out exactly as we know them to be, in scenarios that are farcical, romantic, often insightful and moving.

I guess the neurotic Niles – from episode one, whipping out his cloth to wipe down a chair before sitting on it – is my slight favourite over his brother Frasier.

Part of the laughter comes from enjoying their cultural references and snobberies – did they say that in an American mainstream sitcom? – and also enjoying them being utterly upended by the ridicule of their father and his carer, the Mancunian Daphne.

I knew I would always love Frasier from season two, episode 20. Niles, a milquetoast at the best of times, turns up to their log cabin holiday swathed in brand-new winter clothes and fishing paraphernalia, including an oversized fur hat. (“You look like a skinny Elmer Fudd,” Frasier later notes).

But Niles has the perfect entry line, padded arms outstretched: “Call me Ishmael!” These are the first words of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, the epic American classic of whale hunting and unmitigated adventure.

As I’m watching him, I laugh and yearn at the same time. How many times have I wanted to appear at a door, making the perfect literary citation, yet demurred for fear of general ridicule? Yet at the same time, Frasier (the series) is one of the great celebrants of humour and mutual dethroning, as the best cement for relationships and friendships.

(As the scene goes on to prove. Martin: “Yeah, quite an outfit, huh? The fish’ll see him coming! Daphne: Yes, well the salesman certainly did.”)

AS I gently hoist myself into a sitting position in the hotel bed, a Frasier episode is always a useful tool by which you can measure your enduring limitations. Frasier himself, as a psychotherapist, is fabulously blind to his own greed, jealousy, arrogance, resentment—you name the emotional vice.

By the time I get to the last minute of 90 minutes of this show, I am able to face the rest of my working musician’s day with unheroic determination. We may cock it up, take the wrong musical or conversational turning, trip over the tracks of our own prejudices

and biases. But there’s always another gig (or episode), by which you can have another go at taming the incipient chaos.

And one of the epic things about Frasier – and what bodes well for the new show – is that it did allow some chaos to be properly tamed.

Niles’s all-consuming love and lust for Daphne, who is the very opposite of his own snobby primness, is properly consummated with both marriage and child. By the final episode, Frasier realises that, just as he fled the Cheers bar in Boston, his next flight from Seattle (to San Francisco? Chicago? We’ll see) is part of his restless, itinerant cycle. “The more we’re willing to risk, the more alive we are,” as he says on his last KACL show.

There’s much speculation on how the forthcoming new show will arrange its elements. Will Frasier be a professor, a practising shrink, a TV producer? More interestingly, will he still be a high-maintenance, cosmopolitan liberal, given the preceding decades?

Some have noted Frasier’s incarnator, Kelsey Grammer, and his recent and robust support for Trump – though Grammer was always one of the rare and explicit Hollywood Republicans, even in the show’s heyday. (It probably helped with maintaining an ironic distance from the character).

As Scottish comedy writer and performer Sanjeev Kohli said on Newsnight, it would be daring to have Frasier respond and grapple with the major forces of the day: #BlackLivesMatter, #MeToo, atomising technology, the constraints of climate on a gourmand’s lifestyle. (What? No easy access to his beloved “Chilean sea bass with an aggressive Zinfandel?”).

Will Frasier defend his high-cultural ramparts – the French cuisine, the Italian opera, the European psychoanalysis – against the “woke” hordes massing around him?

Or will he try to find bridges between his version of “the best that can be thought and done” and the insistent demands of younger and coming generations? And if not bridges, then at least some instructive stumbling and clowning across the tramlines?

All of which sounds like good reason to attach a writer’s room to the old franchise again – and also, perhaps, not to round up the old extended cast either. As I know all too well, Frasier does its richly conservative job extremely well. It’s dependably flawed, in an overly-demanding world.

However, like much else around us, it might be good for certitudes and assumptions to be shaken up – and let some new light enter into the old Frasier building.