Only Connect

This review refers to series 9, episode 12: Europhiles v Software Engineers.

What connects a 1947 Agatha Christie radio play, a variant of solitaire, assassins in Dr. No and a nursery rhyme?

Self-defined as the hardest quiz show on television, Only Connect is a BBC4 hit. The premise is fairly simple – every round challenges contestants to find a connection between clues, with the answers ranging from obscure subjects (the same issue as University Challenge – how do they know this stuff? As a student, I can’t understand when or where these people learn the stuff they do. Why do Maths students know advanced Literature and Latin?) to devious wordplay, especially in the cruel time limit. It’s a smarter version of Channel 4 flop The Common Denominator, but for people who think with their brains rather than their teeth. These are the sort of people who’d be on University Challenge if they hadn’t graduated – the people who you’d have on your pub quiz team for their impressive knowledge if they weren’t such colossal pretentious cocks.

pictued: Coren-Miltchell
source: bbc.co.uk

The show is hosted by Victoria Coren-Mitchell, the world’s strangest woman. Her attempts at humour are cringe worthy, and she speaks in a very off-putting voice – a bastard cross of gruff and nasally. I find her odd to look at – she’s not an ugly woman, but I can’t help but picture Renee Zellweger playing a transvestite when I think of her. She’s like your stern aunt – you’d go round to her house to play, and she’d beat you with a saucepan for not walking with your back straight, then lock you in a cupboard to think about what you’ve done. Imagine a mix of the mum from Carrie and Nurse Ratched.

The episode I watched was a semi-final, pitting the Europhiles against the Software Engineers. The Europhiles were comprized of Douglas (a chubby Sue Perkins), Khuram (Aladdin, after sucking out the musicality and charisma and replacing it with an overwhelming sense of despair at the futility of existence) and team captain Mark (Shaggy after watching the rest of Mystery Inc. being brutally murdered with a claw hammer, and whom I have hated throughout the series due to his condescending air and annoyingly vacant arsehole expression), with their rival team comprized of Stephen (Graem Bauer), Anne (Susannah Reid, undercover as a dowdy librarian) and captain Chris (a man, reminiscent of Tom Hiddleston with a scruffy beard, who looks more like a sex offender than anyone I’ve ever seen).

After a bit of excruciating banter, in which we learn Douglas speaks ‘flirtatious French’, Stephen likes German board games, Khuram’s interesting fact was that he was once in a storm so strong it lifted him off his feet and Chris’ was that he once sung a choral work atop a high peak somewhere – if anything sums up the sheer tedium of these human beings, these facts must come close – we kick off with round one, in which you find the connection between up to four things, earning more points the fewer clues you use. We have the standard difficult fare here – questions vary from different musical pieces that share titles with Stephen King works to pairs of things that are pretty much the same but you need to add a letter to one to get the other. I don’t like the pretention of ‘choose a hieroglyph’, but I suppose it’s the sort of thing that keeps BBC4 going.

Then, round two – similar to before, but the clues are sequential and our contestants must identify what the fourth will be. Answers in this round include layers of the rainforest, hierarchy of angels and BBC radio frequencies, masquerading as different sporting and political years. You need some degree of general knowledge, but also the kind of mind that renders you the sort-of depressed miserable adult who sits in the dark, furiously scribbling letters to the Daily Mail because you saw a youth litter. If you’re lucky, you fluke an answer or two, but more than that and you deserve to be ostracized from a civilized human society that you will never truly be part of, interacting with others only when you carry your bell to inform them you’re coming.

You need some degree of general knowledge, but also the kind of mind that renders you the sort-of depressed miserable adult who sits in the dark, furiously scribbling letters to the Daily Mail because you saw a youth litter

Following that, we have the connecting wall. Contestants have a wall of sixteen clues, which sort into four groups of four. They have to solve the wall, and reveal the connections at the end. This is always deviously hard, but good fun to play along at home – there’s a good number on their website if you fancy a go. After that, we end with the missing vowel round – all vowels are removed from phrases and the spacing of the words rejigged, with the contestants needing to reveal the original. This is the easiest round depending on the categories that come up – in this edition, we had opening words from novels, things served cold and members of the weasel family. Sadly, Mark the dick did exceedingly well and the Europhiles won the place in the final.

A quiz show is only as good as its questions, and so I really enjoy it. Sure, the occasional team member is such a knob you want to fill their food with bleach and watch their slow, agonizing death for your own gratification, but isn’t that true of any quiz show? Watching Only Connect and getting questions right makes you feel genuinely pleased with yourself – any moron can fluke their way to the final on Tipping Point, but a show that encourages you to think is, in my mind, a good one to watch and I recommend it.

Although record it and skip through all the non-question bits, unless you want the added challenge of trying to solve hard puzzles while suffering from what feels like the outcome of a lobotomy.

The answer is that they were all known by Three Blind Mice.