Only Connect

[andy-hughes]

I watch this to be polite, because Mrs Hughes really likes it, but I really can't do with it.

To me, it's far too pleased with itself, contestants, impossible format, even the music!

I do like Victoria Coren-Mitchelll - but I have to click off before her final breathtakingly bad 'amusing' link at the end.

Anyone else feel like that, or are you fans?

[Atheist]

I do fancy Vic, but I find the whole atmosphere rather smug and cosy.

[bednobs]

VCM turns me right off. she's not funny, although seems to think she's enormously funny. i watch it but only really ever get any answers right in the last round, or sometimes on the 2nd wall if theres something samey to the first (ie words that end in weather patterns)

[sunny-dave]

The best show on TV by some distance - but I too wish VCM would can the daft links.

[Atheist]

Trouble is - the questions are far too easy.

[andy-hughes]

Oh, and while I'm having a moan - can someone tell whoever makes the questions for University Challenge - we're not all scientists, and whereas I always love to learn things, I learn nothing from questions and answers that I don't understand - and wonder why there is such a high proportion of them every week!

[gingejbee]

Love it and always have. Perhaps Catchphrase or The Wheel are more your thing? You do need a brain for Only Connect.

[Sunk]

No.
It is purposely a hard quiz which is why it shares a three in a bed threesome with Mastermind and University Challenge on BBC2 on Monday nights.
Victoria is a very good host and perfectly cast.

Her Michael Portillo innuendo reminds me of Humf on Clue referencing Lionel Blair, but sadly, is usually unfunny. She should take Barry Cryer to the pub and he can write her some better material.

(I expect you always get the music round wrong, which is why you are anti).

:-)

[gingejbee]

...and I am/was a scientist and don't like all the arty questions....

[Ken4155]

Big fan. Mon nights are not the same without Only Connect.

[gness]

Don't like when she waffles on or sings but must be my favourite programme.
Dave and I compete and then pretend to help each other with the wall...but we're still competing.
Fantastic questions.

[Hopkirk]

Oh, I love it.

[jim360]

Everyone is entitled to their wrong opinion.

[sunny-dave]

The Arts/Science thing is interesting.

There was an edition of the 'Alumni' version of UC over Christmas when all 8 of the contestants were from 'The Arts' - so they all too obviously dropped all the Science content - not a single question.

I'm convinced that if the situation was reversed they'd have left a solid quota of Arts questions in, on the basis that people should know things outside their own disciplines.

Why is it acceptable to not know about quarks - but a subject for derision if you don't know King Lear?

[zebo]

If it's acceptable to call intelligent people 'smug' how do we refer to some of the seriously thick ones on other lower level quiz shows? Ones like the woman years ago when asked Who got shot in Dallas in November 1963 replied JR or the one the when asked The Suez canal connects the Red Sea and what other body of water answered The Thames? I can't stand inverted snobbery.
To be honest I think many of the people on Only Connect have every right to look smug, I'm beside myself when I get something right in there, I'm good on the last round!

[jim360]

Same on the Uni Challenge thing -- the whole point is to ask hard questions anyway, why should hard questions be confined to the Arts and Literature, etc?

[andy-hughes]

ginge - // Love it and always have. Perhaps Catchphrase or The Wheel are more your thing? You do need a brain for Only Connect.

No need to be patronising.

You don't 'need a brain' to play OC, you need a mind that has the capacity for lateral thinking, which is not the same thing at all - I have one, but not the other.

[nescio]

Andy Hughes - are you serious? There are only a handful of science questions on University Challenge and the majority of them are more school than university level.

[ichkeria]

I have never been wholly taken with it, but I have to be careful what I say as I know a few people who've been on it.
I can't make up my mind if it sets out to be avowedly nerdy or if it's just a symptom of the people on it.
So I do watch, but I won't be trying to blag my way onto the Facebook page :-)

[andy-hughes]

Sunk - // (I expect you always get the music round wrong, which is why you are anti). //

You're quite right, I do, but that doesn't bother me in the slightest - I get all the 'popular music' ones right on UC, so that makes up for it!

[Sunk]

Humf: Lionel Blair & Christopher Biggins recently appeared on Stars in Their Eyes, where Lionel singing Maggie May came second to his old teammate. Biggins said that Lionel's Rod was outstanding but he easily had it licked..."