Chasing Rainbows

In the year of my birth, commercial TV broadcast the first edition of a game show called Take Your Pick. Rather neatly, it passed into broadcasting history in the year I entered my teens, so it is firmly rooted in the cabinet in my memory labelled "childhood". The format included a section called "The Yes-No Interlude" (Does anyone use that word any more? Did it die with cinema matinées and wearing a suit to the theatre?). The host - Michael Miles - fast-talking and engaging, in the mode of a flea-market swindler, would ask the contestants quick-fire questions, to which they must respond without using the words 'yes' or 'no', nodding or shaking their heads. Any transgression was signaled by the sound of a gong, held in front of them by the co-host throughout the interrogation, thus winding up the tension. The sound of the gong signalled elimination from the game

The childhood cabinet was prised open while I was listening to a podcast about Brexit. The interviewee rather amusingly likened the current omerata on using the word in Westminster to that surrounding the words in Lady Chatterly's Lover that made it the subject of an obscenity trial, during the time that Take Your Pick was at its zenith. "Would you want your servants to read it?" the prosecution asked the jury

The people who didn't want Brexit are not happy, of course. A lot of the people who did want what they thought was Brexit are not happy either - what they got is not what they expected. Two British people in three now think that what has happened was a mistake. Westminster politicians from the major parties can't even address this, let alone try to resolve it, because they can't bring themselves to talk about it. When some of them tried to question the current settlement this week, they were silenced by the gong

The Scottish people were asked if they wanted Brexit and said 'No', but were handed it anyway. The Scottish government wants to ask them if they would like to leave the Union that forced this on them; the supreme court says they cannot. In truth, I think that result was expected - may even be welcomed - by the nationalist campaign, and is merely a step in their broader plan. I can see why Scotland is exasperated by the Take Your Pick politics of Westminster but, in another phase of that long-gone show, the winning contestant had to choose between 'taking the money' (that they had already won) and 'opening the box' to receive a prize of unknown value instead, which might turn out to be worthless

If we have learned anything, it is that Take Your Pick can be a poisoned chalice