No wonder Theresa May likes to watch The Chase – she knows what it's like to be pursued under pressure

Six months before Brexit, and days before the official deadline to strike the deal, the PM is under more of it than any game show contestant since a wounded gladiator found himself sharing the Coliseum stage with a tiger

The sadness for the makers of last night’s Panorama, if for nobody else with a vestige of taste, is that Noel Edmonds isn’t on telly right now.

When you make the effort to a) subtitle your documentary Deal or No Deal? and b) coax Theresa May to be filmed watching a teatime game show, it seems too cruel that Nolly’s programme wasn’t available – especially when it was such a neat metaphor for the Brexit cabinet: 25 people with red boxes talking gibberish through a game of random guesswork almost guaranteed to end in savage disappointment, and overseen by someone who believes that consciously wishing for something will make it a reality. What Nolly calls “cosmic ordering”, May knows as “I will get my Chequers plan accepted. I will, I will, I WILL!”

In its absence, Nick Robinson’s production team settled for ITV’s The Chase. I’d guess they offered May the BBC rival as an alternative, but for obvious messaging reasons she wasn’t about to be filmed watching Pointless.

So it was that last Friday at 5pm, when ordinarily she is probably glued to R4’s PM for the latest on the Brexit calamity, May and her Arthur Askey husband settled down in a chintzy Chequers sitting room with a cup of tea and Bradley Walsh. You know, like ordinary folk.

No one could blame them for being hooked on The Chase, which may be the best quiz ever. But it was soon apparent that a vignette intended to make May more relatable had been forged. “It seems rather menacing somehow,” said a mystified Philip (Askey) when the chaser du jour, Mark Labbett aka The Beast, stomped to his seat high above the player. “I think that’s the idea,” his missus uncertainly replied, glancing up from official papers and plainly never having seen it before. “To put pressure on the contestant.”

Now pressure is something with which she is familiar. Six months before the alleged exit date, days before the official deadline to strike the deal, she is under more of that than any game show contestant since a wounded gladiator found himself sharing the Coliseum stage with a tiger.

To her credit, she showed very little sign of it. She appeared so calm that you wondered whether her tea was laced with lashings of Xanax. This would have been a more compelling film if a camera had stayed on her through the night, to discover whether she wakes at 3am, screaming and pummeling Askey in livid frustration. But on the surface, she was unnervingly tranquil. She did tell Robinson she gets “a bit irritated” by questions about her own future, but didn’t really give that impression.

Perhaps when you have no future – once you’re basically Winston Smith after the Ministry of Love, and the question isn’t whether a bullet from behind will take you out but when – not fretting becomes easier.

The only future she cares about, she told Robinson, is that of all her people. This was hugely reassuring. If I were a 60-year-old Windrusher removed from my homeland under a covert policy she operated at the Home Office, I might have been unsure.

Anyway, in the interests of every one of us, she trumpeted the negotiation position of neo-Thatcherite rigidity she obviously hasn’t a prayer of maintaining. The only newsworthy revelation here, apart from the fact that Askey knows “saturnine” means “gloomy” (ah, that Oxford education) but can’t tell a dahlia from a chrysanthemum (disappointing; I’d had him pegged for a devoted flower arranger), is her insistence that it’s her Chequers deal or none.

It didn’t need footage of Mark Carney arriving at Number 10 to inform the cabinet of the housing market and general economic crash no deal would bring to confirm this as the bluff of someone holding an unsuited deuce, seven against the EU’s pocket kings. She can sweet talk Jean Claude Junker all she likes, hoping he had a good summer break when he rings with the icy detachment of The Banker making a worse offer than the last one. She can roll her eyes about Boris’ inflammatory metaphors. She can even be mildly peeved when Jacob Rees-Mogg, casting himself faintly against type as Harry Callahan, promises to make her day if she presents any version of Chequers to a Commons vote.

But another of the aphorisms Dirty Harry directed at a punk, long before #metoo came to Hollywood, was “a man’s gotta know his limitations”. As Panorama underlined, her limitations, personal and professional, are so overwhelming that if she does feel lucky, she’s begging for one of those psych ward consultations which begin “Now, can you tell me who the prime minister is?”

For as long as she somehow remains the correct answer to that, she has two options. One, if it needs restating, is to invite the people whose future is her only concern to break this desperate deadlock via the second referendum she says she will not countenance.

The other is to parlay her new affection for The Chase into a meeting with Bradley Walsh, who’s about to moonlight as one of Jodie Whittaker’s companions in Doctor Who; bribe him with an earldom to smuggle her into the Tardis; take it back to early last year; and not call the election that left her and Britain paralysed.

If that seems a long shot, perhaps it is. But it’s a shorter shot than trusting her version of Nolly’s cosmic ordering to magic Chequers into existence.