Never, never, never, never, never.

She's been around the Quiz circuit for donkey's years (Mastermind/15-to-1 etc) and must admit I've never seen her crack a smile.

Must admit for me tonight it was the lesser of the 2 evlis - Wayfarers smug-ness vs Yorkers captain seemingly never having heard of the word 'Please....'.

Exactly. The first time, then repeated four times equals five altogether.

Good point.

Oh no surely? This is the OC thread, can we not have a two page argument about whether the first utterance of a word is counted as a repeat?


However on the subject of nit-picking over correct answers, in the music question I was a bit unsure that saying "Seasons" and then being allowed to pick an actual season shouldn't have been allowed in a semi-final.

Seasons was the wrong answer, Summer was the right answer. I know VCM often asks for a little more work to get the right answer but even I thought of "seasons" by the second clue, and then realised that simply playing a bit of Vivaldi's The Four Seasons was way too easy a clue that early on, in the semi.

Unfortunately, I don't see how you can stretch "It's not" over two pages

Was she not laughing quite heartily when the guy sang the Benny Hill song? I was taken aback by how animated she got. I am sure she smiled at least one other time too. I think this episode was the happiest she has seemed in fact.





OK then. It was a sequence round so it didn't matter if they made a mistake with the details of the connection as long as they got a valid fourth connection (which they did).

Incidentally I suspect someone will say that what they mean is VCM saying "repeated 5 times... etc." but at this stage I have given up expecting much from her so don't care about that detail. At least the answer was fine and not some dodgy situation (for once).

If you don't explicitly refer to the first instance then it is implied to be one of the repeats.

"Say IT and then repeat IT three times" - gives you four ITs
"Repeat IT three times" - gives you three ITs

And so the "The word is repeated five times" is okay, as to get to four repeats you would need to say something like "The first word is followed by four repeats".

It's happening, it's happening. It's beginning to happen.

But is it known as the "first" instance from the start, or does it only get given the ordinal adjective once there are two? (And does the same apply in Scotland? )

It doesn't get to be either until you specify it. Once there are two you can not assume that there is a first and a repeat, it could be a group of two and as such there is no first and second.

You are repeating yourself.

So, the final.

Get it right up yer Gerard

Yay for them! Delighted they won.

How very annoying that the String team has won AGAIN on the missing vowels round!

You can almost become champion by being good only on spotting missing vowels and be quick on the buzzer

Couldn't have put it better myself, what an odious man

As far as winning is concerned they might as well just play the missing vowels round. The semis and final were decided entirely by the last round.

Unless you can get over 13 points on the missing vowels round, then not really.

Give it a rest FFS.

Excuse me, who are you again?

Who's asking?

How fitting that they had a live string quartet on to play the theme music when the String Section emerged triumphant. I did think it would have been a bit of a sickener for them in particular if they'd lost and had to sit in the dark as the credits rolled listening to that of all things

And so ends the longest pregnancy in television history.

I love Tessa North.