I ALWAYS thought Nipper the dog looked rather sad, as if he was worried that the gramophone he was examining was actually a vet’s cone heading for his neck.

Never has the His Master’s Voice pup looked more sombre, however, than how he does now: up high in Oxford Street wondering where it all went wrong.

The big façade, pictured, still hangs outside HMV’s old branch near Bond Street Underground station, but it is obscured by a banner for… I’ll give you three guesses but you’ll only need one… “American Candy”.

Yes, the one thing that wasn’t missing from “the nation’s high street” – as the post-Covid recovery plan for the West End calls it – was yet another sweet shop.

The guidebooks, a little hopefully, still send tourists down there, but do visitors really need 101 places to buy wine gums, bon bons and, as it happens, cherry vape sticks?

It’s true that HMV had lost its purpose and I never quite worked out why they wanted me to head to the basement to pay £14.99 for something called a “Blu-ray disc”. Nonetheless, you can’t blame the dog on the wall for looking so despondent at seeing it bandaged up in such nauseous colours.