What odds on ever curing our gambling ills?

‘This country’s hidden epidemic”, Tom Watson calls our addiction to gambling. An epidemic it certainly is, though Labour’s deputy leader cannot really believe it is hidden. There’s evidence on every street in every town, and corroboration may be found on radio and television. As a nation we are obsessive, reckless gamblers.

Are we more reckless than we were? Coming across a musty hardback last week in Scarthin Books of Cromford, one of Derbyshire’s great secrets, it was bracing to read this: “I learnt that... sport was merely an adjunct of gambling. I had previously imagined that gambling, at least in this country, was an adjunct of sport”. Can you hear those bells ringing?

The words belong to Beverly Nichols in News of England, published 80 years ago at the end of Auden’s “low, dishonest decade”. In 1938, apparently, we blew £400million a year on gambling; equivalent, as Nichols indicates, to spending in England and Wales on elementary and higher education, hospitals, libraries, asylums, police, sewerage, waterworks, cemeteries, fire brigades, highways, and other important parts of what is now called “infrastructure”. Nichols quotes the Belgian writer Maurice Maeterlinck who thought that gambling was “the imaginary, squalid, mechanical, unlovely adventure of those who have never been able to encounter or create the real, necessary and salutary adventure of life”. That’s powerful stuff, but it contains the germ of an important truth.

There’s nothing new under the sun. Where once we offered sacrifices to please the gods, we now seek salvation in a hobbled nag or an injury-time winner. Watson is right, resoundingly so. But what odds would you offer when reason enters the ring with fantasy? Human kind, as Eliot knew, cannot bear very much reality.

Michael Palin is a proper chap, who has cheered us up mightily over the past five decades. A courtly man, who wears his gifts lightly, the Salopian has opened a few doors on his televised travels, and, in a modest way, enabled nation to speak unto nation.

So what was our favourite globetrotter doing in North Korea? For all the bluster about venturing into “uncharted territory”, viewers of his Channel 5 documentary could see the territory had been charted all too clearly. He was shown what they wanted him to see. Not even the coat-hanger smiles of his handlers could alter that.

Who wants to see anything in North Korea? Better to have stayed at home in Gospel Oak than fall for the guff of shiny, happy people, whose business is rejoicing. (Note to C5: they say that Mablethorpe is very interesting at this time of year.)

We’ve just had the festival of banality with the Mercury Prize, soon we shall be force-fed the carnival of mediocrity known as the Turner Prize. Until then we must endure the froth and bubble of the Man Booker, the self-styled Olympics of fiction. Judging by the shortlist that was announced last week they should send in the drug testers.

This year we have, ahem, an “experimental” novel set in Ulster, an “exploration of race” in Canada, a verse novel about a disturbed soldier, and something about “gender, class and poverty”, subjects left entirely untouched in recent years. What fun they must have had, coming up with that lot! Ah, the cry goes up, these are important matters. Once again we must turn to Kingsley Amis: “Importance in literature is unimportant. Good writing matters, and only good writing”. Kingers won the Booker in 1986 with The Old Devils, which was tender and extremely funny. It was well received, and also impressed a general readership. Moreover it was written by a man who never woke up without a hangover. Better a true writer in his cups than a worthy dullard sober. The Booker is now so self-parodic, all one can do is laugh.

When it comes to catchphrases – which will stick, which will pass – it’s wise to heed William Goldman’s line about Hollywood: “Nobody knows anything”. Looking back to the dim and distant past, who now can believe that Ken Platt set many a table a roar when he announced himself thus: “I won’t take me coat off, I’m not stopping”? Or that Albert Modley raised titters by asking: “In’t it grand when you’re daft?”

Those front-cloth comics were defined by their catchphrases. Others were trapped by them. Wilfred Bramble, the wizened star of Steptoe and Son, a promiscuous homosexual, was taken aside one day in the BBC bar by a friendly producer and told “if you like that sort of thing, the Wheatsheaf (a well-known pub in Shepherds Bush) is the place for you”.

Off he toddled, nosegay and carnation in place, for Bramble was a natty dresser. Having ordered a pink gin, he was preparing to sip it when a gruff voice from the end of the bar bellowed, to general amusement: “You dirty old man!” Bramble put the glass down and departed, never to return. A catchphrase had caught him out.

‘Where once we offered sacrifices to the gods, we now seek salvation in a hobbled nag or injury-time winner’