Greg, you're just an old romantic.It hasn't been like that for getting on for a century. As soon as song became recordable that old world vanished. Outside the tiny world of the traditional folkies no one, certainly not the working class, bothers with it anymore. They never did really. I grew up listening to family gatherings singing old music hall songs and popular ballads, as valid a tradition as any. One of the only places you find communal adaptation these days is on the football terraces, but I don't suppose you think they're quite folk.
Shepherdlass makes a good point about the rest of the country enjoying a folk scene at the time of the revival that was hardly mentioned. I was a part of that and it was hugely exciting, particularly all the new songs that surfaced, recording how our lives were. There were sad ones, political ones, funny ones and all the varieties, it was a building in construction to be lived in, not a period piece preserved by the National Trust.
I think the young people rightly featured in the third programme are buiding something new. Good luck to them and their songs. No doubt the future will stumble on them one day and add them to the National Trust too(songs section).