For some of us, the biggest TV question of recent weeks hasn’t been how Newsnight is doing without Jeremy Paxman, British drama’s fightback against American competition or even the treatment of Diana Beard by the editors of The Great British Bake Off. Far more important is whether a small BBC4 quiz show can survive a move to BBC2 with its heroic defiance of almost all television fashions intact.
Since 2008, Only Connect has been the obvious place to head after University Challenge on a Monday night. Host Victoria Coren Mitchell achieves a neat balance between mild self-satire and an unashamed pride in the show’s cleverness. (More oddly, she also pretends to be a fearful boozehound.) The contestants, in two teams of three, are mostly middle-aged blokes with specs and a wide range of impeccably eccentric hobbies. In their quest to work out the links between apparently unrelated things, they’re required to know about anything from the works of Homer to the finer details of Sex and the City.
In series one and two, the six questions on offer in the opening rounds were labelled with the first six letters of the Greek alphabet. But then Coren announced that this was a bit pretentious, and that the programme would now use ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs instead. (‘The horned viper, please, Victoria.’) Nonetheless, it’s the third round that has become the show’s centrepiece. In the ‘connecting wall’ the teams have to sort 16 words, names or phrases into four discrete groups of four, even though several of the 16 could fit into more than one category. (You can play these walls for yourself on the show’s website — although this is so addictive that my advice is not to start late at night if you need to be up in the morning.)
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