Mitchell Victoria Coren - Only Connect quiz book

CONTENTS

ABOUT THE BOOK

Cryptic, fiendish, esoteric, obscure thats right, theyre all descriptions of Only Connect. Limber up your lateral thinking, its time to pit your wits against the toughest quiz on TV.

With over 200 questions (many of them never broadcast) alongside tips from the questions setters, Only Connect: The Official Quiz Book is your chance to brush up on your tactics and put your skills to the test. Set up a showdown with your family and friends or challenge yourself to an audition paper to see whether youd make the grade. Inventive team names compulsory!

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

JACK WALEY-COHEN featured on the first ever episode of Only Connect, with his team the Lapsed Psychologists reaching the final. He runs various businesses including, of course, a quiz company and started writing questions for the show in 2014. In 2017, he took on the role of Question Editor with his colleague, David McGaughey.

VICTORIA COREN MITCHELL has been the host of Only Connect since its inception in 2008. A writer and broadcaster, she is also an expert poker player and is the first and only person to win two titles on the European Poker Tour.

by Victoria Coren Mitchell

So, how did I come to be standing on a TV set in a spangly frock, helpless and shuddering with giggles, in front of two-and-a-half million viewers, while three highly intelligent, highly respectable civil servants said:

Malik, Tomlinson, Horan, Payne Malik, Tomlinson, Horan, Payne Are they golfers?

Well, it all started with poker. Like everything.

Poker is a beautiful, fiendish, infuriating, irresistible, exasperating and unforgettable game. If poker were a woman, it would be Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton would marry it and divorce it 14 times.

I was beckoned by the poker siren at a young age. I never escaped her clutches, and that is how I came to appear around a smoky baize table in the early, low-budget, ground-breaking TV series Late Night Poker, made by an innovative and brilliant Welsh production company.

That is how I came to play in every series of Late Night Poker until I became a poker commentator and then a presenter.

And that is how I came to be on the other end of the phone when the people from the innovative and brilliant Welsh production company said: Weve got an idea for a quiz

You know the connection, dont you? Malik, Tomlinson, Horan, Payne?

The beauty of Only Connect is that it could always be anything. Highbrow, lowbrow, sidebrow, underbrow. They might be Nobel prize-winning physicists. They might play for Nottingham Forest. They might all rhyme with parts of the body or be French. Perhaps they all mothered illegitimate dukes, or were accused of being Jack the Ripper, or perhaps if you read their names backwards theyre all types of cheese.

The key is lateral thinking. Can you find those hidden connections in the deepest recesses of your mind, the dustiest corners of your memory? I know, I know: its hard enough to remember your uncles name when you bump into him at the supermarket. But on a good day, in a shining lightbulb moment, your brain will deliver to you triumphantly the link youre looking for.

Malik, Tomlinson, Horan, Payne If you dont know the answer, then Im not going to tell you.

But they are not golfers.

So, Presentable Productions of Llandaff, Cardiff (now Parasol Media dont ask me why, but only two more name changes and weve got ourselves a Round 2 question) had an idea for a quiz and they asked if I would host a non-broadcast pilot a run-through of the format to show the BBC in the hope of getting it commissioned as a series.

Fine, I sniffed, but only as a special favour to you. If you get the series, youll have to find someone else to present it. I am an extremely serious and important writer and poker player. I would make a terrible quiz-show host.

They took what they could get. They only knew poker players, and they guessed Id be a better host than Black Jack McGraw, the Polish pawnbroker with eight missing business partners. Or, if not better than Jack, at least less likely to be in prison at time of recording.

So, we recorded the pilot, a series was commissioned and I found myself unable to back out after all. My heart was lost. Id fallen head over heels for Only Connect. I wouldnt have gone so far down the poker road if I didnt have an addictive personality, and this was an utterly addictive quiz.

Simple enough idea: what is the connection between four apparently random clues? But this is a very tough quiz. The link can be very difficult to spot. (The comedian Mark Steel once tweeted, I love Only Connect, with its answers like Theyre all anagrams of Swedish slang words for pomegranate.) Or, as in the case of Malik, Horan, Tomlinson and Payne, it can be theoretically easy to spot. Either way, the connection is there.

Then, on to Round 2, where we up the ante by asking not only what is the connection but what comes next in a sequence.

Round 3: up it again by demanding four connections simultaneously, on a fiendish connecting wall with 16 jumbled-up clues, featuring red herrings that fit into more than one category but only one possible complete solution.

Round 4: nothing to do with the rest of the quiz. The Missing Vowels round. You have to work out what are the well-known names or phrases from which the vowels have been removed and the consonants re-spaced. The round simply isnt about connections. Nobody knows why its there. Then again, the same is true of me.

Well, now you know why Im there. They didnt know who else to ask, and I was too hooked by the format to walk away. But my original instinct was right: I am a terrible quiz-show host.

Good quiz-show hosts are irrepressibly cheery, full of bounce and vigour, with an enormous natural warmth. I am socially awkward, physically lazy and constantly irritable with hunger. I always want to be sitting down; Im too short-sighted to read an autocue, yet too squeamish for contact lenses and too vain for glasses, so I stare into space, blinking like a cartoon scapegoat, trying to remember what Id meant to say next.

Only Connect is back! cheered the Radio Times (always a great supporter of ours) in about 2012. And Victorias in the chair with her trademark withering glare!

That was supposed to be my welcoming smile.

Luckily, somehow, as if by magic, my peculiarities turned out to suit the quiz. Its a peculiar quiz.

If this were an episode of Only Connect, I would now add: And God knows we have peculiar contestants!

I dont really think theyre peculiar. I just enjoy making jokes about the fact that they might seem peculiar, relative to the prejudices of modern television. I actually identify with them very closely.

I think of myself as a geek: short-sighted, prone to hay fever, riddled with tics and compulsions, fundamentally uninterested in fashion, highly likely to be the last one picked for a sports team. Luckily, the day I left school I opted out of a value system that considers these traits to be failings. Im proud of my arcane interests, quirky hobbies and healthy suspicion of consensus.

I imagine the Only Connect family as a community of those who shivered on the edges of the school playground, furiously underestimated by meat-heads with the wrong priorities.