I hate Only Connect – but I can’t stop watching it

Almost every Monday night I find myself in the same sorry situation. It’s eight o’clock. My dinner is ready. There is still half an hour until University Challenge starts.

I endure a period of inner conflict in which I consider sitting at the table and then remember that’s a ridiculous idea – I am, after all, a millennial with a nine-to-five. The sofa calls; I enter the bargaining phase. Is there something else I could put on? My dinner is rapidly getting cold, so at this point I tend to skip to acceptance. Twenty-five minutes later I am shouting things like “BOB MARLEY AND CHICKENPOX” or “DOLLY PARTON AND CHLAMYDIA” at my screen, which is blazoned with bizarre “missing vowel” clues like “BBM RLY NDC H CKNP X”, and my cat is staring at me as though I have gone mad.

The show, of course, is Only Connect, which has a prime slot in BBC2’s weekly “quiz night” (Mastermind, Only Connect and University Challenge run consecutively from 7.30 to 9pm). This is a quiz show – with a twist! Rather than answering questions on boring old general knowledge, it instead asks contestants to think outside the box and spot patterns and connections between clues.

Only Connect, which first aired on BBC4 in 2008, is extremely popular. In 2021 it reached almost three million viewers. I don’t doubt that plenty of people sit down specially to watch it – but I can’t be the only person among that large number who is there in limbo, patiently waiting to get intellectually annihilated by a load of precocious 18-year-olds and finding the whole thing supremely frustrating.

The show’s overt nerdery is of course what makes it charming. In contrast to easy-watch offerings like its BBC1 daytime contemporary Pointless, this is, and always has been, a quiz for quizzers. From its subject matter to its question selection format – team captains were originally asked to choose from a selection of ancient Greek letters to select their question; now, a range of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs – it is unashamedly niche.

Yet unlike University Challenge it’s also theoretically work-out-able. This, presumably, is what has enabled it to transition from BBC4 to primetime BBC2 (its host, Victoria Coren-Mitchell may have the hair of Cat Deeley but you can tell her primary calling is international poker, where she has won around as many dollars as Only Connect has viewers, rather than all-smiles game show presenting).

Only Connect’s widespread appeal, in other words, is in the fact that it makes its viewers feel almost as clever as its contestants because, if you squint and stroke your chin and think really, really, really hard, you can begin to grasp at the answers. 

This is all well and good – if the questions actually make sense. But they are becoming increasingly inconsistent and imprecise. The first two rounds, in which players try to identify the connection between a group of four clues and then to name the next clue in a cryptic sequence, are often so obscure, the connections so convoluted or tangential, that nobody lands on an answer. Last week, the show made headlines as viewers railed against the “worst question ever”: a tangled mess of Latin names for body parts linked, allegedly, by the word “little”, which I still cannot understand well enough to explain here. Judging by the faces of the contestants, nor could they.

Of course, as a University Challenge fan, I can see that complaining about too-hard answers might seem unfair. But Only Connect‘s problems run deeper. Its appeal is also its downfall: the fact that it is supposed to be figure-out-able means it has no suspense. We watch contestants puzzle, slowly, as we ourselves struggle. Then there are two possible outcomes. Either the contestants work it out, in which case they already know that they know the answer. Or they know that they don’t know the answer. Either way, everyone knows the outcome: a lengthy explanation from Coren-Mitchell.

By contrast, on University Challenge there are many more instances in which contestants don’t know that they do know the answer, or, even better, don’t know that they don’t. There is more surprise, more joy and more satisfaction.

Only Connect picks up in the second half – the connections wall, where teams match four groups of four and name what connects each one, with the challenge of multiple red herrings, is satisfying. Many new viewers will spot the connection – ha ha – between it and the popular New York Times game called, you guessed it, “Connections” – a glaring similarity that Coren-Mitchell pointed out on Twitter when the NYT launched the new game in 2023.

Then we reach the aforementioned missing vowels round, whose quickfire nature ups the stakes – but which becomes increasingly ridiculous as the setters run out of meaningful categories. They can have “Musical legends of the 20th century and infectious diseases” for free, but I can’t promise it wouldn’t irritate even me.

So why can’t I stop watching it, really? Well, obviously, because I, along with the rest of its viewers, secretly believe I’ll be able to do it better than the contestants. Then, when I get proved wrong every time, my fragile ego has no choice but to come back for more.