When quizzing was dodgy

On Sunday, Richard Goodwin passed away. He had a distinguished career, partly spent as an advisor and speechwriter in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations in the 1960s. However, my primary interest in Goodwin centres on his role as a Congressional investigator into the Twenty One quiz show scandal in the 1950s, which was dramatised in the 1994 Robert Redford film Quiz Show. As an erstwhile quizzer of very minor note, obviously it’s a movie I have a particular interest in. However, I’ll go further. Quiz Show is one of my very favourites, a bona fide prestige film. It’s much better than the romantic comedy Starter for 10, notionally based around University Challenge, yet hampered by a paucity of actual quizzing (in fact, the whole movie could have been better had it been reoriented around the Benedict Cumberbatch character, but that’s a whinge for another time). 

The un-Britishness of Brexit

“Two World Wars and one World Cup, doo-dah, doo-dah”. Did they really mean it? On one level I had always assumed they didn’t. About the World Wars, that is. Even as a child, with limited awareness of the war, it struck me as obtusely solipsistic and historically dubious. But there are often moments when I’ve been left wondering. At the time of writing, the UK government is conducting an intense internal debate about customs union options that are either impractical or delusional, and in any case have been rejected by the European Union. Just as they have previously rejected the cherry picking “three baskets” proposal. That being one of many phrases, along with the likes of “ambitious managed divergence” and “Canada plus plus plus”, that have fallen by the wayside over the last few months. As one observes this farcical nonsense unfolding, an obvious thought is to wonder how it came to this – yes, of course, it is in large measure the dilettante Cameron’s fault. But another thought is to behold how many members of the cabinet, along with the architects of the Leave coup, are so unlike my experiences of the British people over a decade. There just seems to be something fundamentally un-British about this whole Brexit caper.