He's punching well above his weight there, she'd be far better off with me!

I only watch this show for Victoria, the quiz is way too difficult for me to comprehend.

Victoria ruins the programme for me. I have to sky+ it so I can fast forward over her drivel. If she presented it straight it might be bareable but it those not very funny jokes she puts in are awful. I know people like her and I would suspect her assets are something to do with it but agggghhhhh Victoria you are not a comedienne you are a poker player!

Wow! "bareable" and "assets" in the same post!

Victoria is a good columnist though and her witty remarks are just her being her. I think she makes the prog and gives it some personality...with all due respect to the team players, though clever people, theyre not there to raise a giggle. If she presented it straight, she wouldn't have got the gig as her intelligent and quirky nature is the reason shes there .

And I wish a lot of them would stop trying to be comedians, it really spoils it sometimes.

I know one of the competitors who is on next week's show. Should be interesting.

Anybody I know?

It's just a standard double elimination format with a fancy diagram to make it seem more complicated

I was thinking about things that could be made with parts or parts changed. I didn't remember about Wurzel changing heads and that threw me.

Thanks for the answer

Just as a follow up though did the beeb cut down the series length in order to give you two series?

Are you being serious? In what way is Paxman's manner 'excellent?'

Contestants are on a quiz show, so they quite rightly take wild guesses at any answers they don't know, often on subjects they know little about. Paxman is often rude, mocking and condescending in response, which is totally uncalled for.

Yeah, probably.

It's good that there's someone who works on the show - sorry I don't know your exact role - who posts here regularly, so we can quickly get the exact facts, inside information and answers to any queries. Thanks for that.

If I may ask your opinion/Only Connect's policies with regards to what I believe are 2 major flaws within the show.

The first flaw has bothered me for a while and it's the offering 5 points and asking teams to make a connection/sequence from ONE CLUE!?! This is impossible as the possibilities are infinite. For a show which is clearly centred around a reasonable level of intelligence, this is a fairly major and somewhat un-intelligent sort of flaw. Even when teams have some knowledge of the subject of the first clue, the fact the possibilities are infinite nearly always stop them from making a guess as the odds of infinite chance vs 5 points reward make taking a guess just not worth it. Surely you have to change this and start with two clues and not one. I can't believe you are in the 7th series and this problem still exists!

The second flaw is along similar lines and one which only occurred to me the other night after the 'darts question.' Now, I play darts once a week and could list the order of the 20 numbers on the board in about 5 seconds. However, I never even got near to getting this connection. Again, if the connection is based on words, there are maybe 10 or 20 possible meanings to a particular word or phrase, but when a connection is to do with numbers, the possibilities become pretty infinite again and just not possible to realistically solve in the time given.

Basically, you have to give the teams enough information to be able to solve what you are asking them within the time. At the moment you are not doing that.

Teams have got it on the first clue before and achieved five points. Even I've managed to get a connection on the first clue before. It's meant to be difficult.

You can't have a 'connection' between one thing though. That's the point I'm making.

Hello, I'm David Bodycombe and I was the question editor up to series 8 (which airs later in the year).

With regards to the first point, the art of writing the questions is to get the teams to start on one train of thought and then realise that it's something else. e.g. Commander, Colonel, Caretaker, Dashing. It starts of looking like military ranks, then a list of jobs, and then just a list of words. The answer is actually that they start with punctuation-type marks (comma, colon, caret, dash).

So the point of the first clue is not really about scoring points, but about setting up a false expectation that the contestants might have trouble extracting themselves from when further clues are revealed. Guessing the 5 points might not always be possible because the clue might be something with several meanings like "The Sun", particularly in the sequences round, but we try to compensate for that in two ways:

(1) in the connections round, we sometimes put the SECOND-most obscure clue, or a less ambiguous clue, in the 5 point slot, as a tempter to invite people to make a guess. In the early series people very rarely did, but very early buzzes are becoming more common.

(2) in the sequences round, questions that begin very vague and are impossible to guess for 5 are often the questions that are actually quite easy for 2 points. For info, 5-point answers in the sequences round are answered correctly about twice a series so it's non-trivial to at least offer people the opportunity to answer.

As for your second point, if you look around Twitter you'll see that there's quite a lot of people who had a lot of success on this question. But even if you didn't, I'd like to explain that there is a logic to how one might answer it:

a) The sequence is leading up to 20. Often, the sequences end up on the "obvious" answer or the natural end of the sequence. In what context might a sequence end on 20?
b) You'd have to be a real darts expert to know what's either side of 17, but 18 is close to the top of the board and you might know that it's next to the 1. Failing that, 19 being next to 3 is quite well-known. So there is what we call a 'ramping' to the question in that it gradually becomes more obvious.

Believe me, many hours are spent ensuring that the contestants are given all the clues possible to answer the questions correctly.

What appears to have happened, which is again quite disappointing for such an intelligent show, is that you have got mixed up between your scoring system and one where teams are offered a 'free' guess at every step of the connection/sequence.

If teams had a 'free' guess at the 5-point option (without the consequence of handing the whole question to the other team) then there would be justification for including the revealing of one clue - with infinite possible answers - and offering 5 points for the correct answer at that stage. I think that would be much more interesting and a much fairer risk/reward ratio.

Saying 'Here, take a guess at one of an infinite number of possibilities, if you're correct you get 5 points, if incorrect the whole question passes to the other team' is clearly not a reasonable risk/reward scenario and infact an entirely pointless part of the game. I know you may be loathed to admit your mistake and stubborn to change things after 7/8 series, but you have to either offer teams a free guess at the 5 point option or else start with two clues rather than one.

I wondered that too I mean surely it could be ANYTHING on the first clue

This has been known to happen, but we're still waiting for the wall to stay still for the whole time so we can concentrate on it properly

What you suggest makes sense, and also if a team is brave enough to go for a guess on the first clue knowing that the whole idea is to unexpectedly change perceptions with each succeeding clue, it does seem unfair to give the other team all the other clues to go on.

I'm still impressed with myself getting the 4th after two clues of "high level" and "swing" last series. They could have been anything!

The pilot show allowed multiple guesses, in fact, so it is something we've already tried out and rejected.

There's at least four reasons why it doesn't work:
1) It takes more time and means fewer questions per show, and there's few enough as it is.
2) The 40 seconds thinking time is for the contestants to think on their own, not for Victoria to get into a conversation with them over whether answers are right or not.
3) You'll lose the "shall we go for it or shall we take the next clue"-type drama.
4) It's harder for the audience to assimilate two clues at once.


Since our scoring system is quite low, a 5-pointer is almost a match-winning answer. Teams already buzz for first clue guesses on a semi-regular basis, so I don't see any problem with the risk-reward ratio.

As I said above, we didn't have the "buzz and guess once" system originally but it's been proven to work well over 8 series. I think it's because there's four different outcomes, which are all nice TV moments:
i) You don't take the next clue, buzz and get it right - you look like a hero.
ii) You don't take the next clue, buzz and get it wrong - you look a bit silly.
iii) You take the next clue and it doesn't fit in with what you were thinking - you look surprised.
iv) You take the next clue and it matches your theory - you feel gutted for not gambling earlier.

If you think the first clue is useless on its own, you're more than entitled to ask for "Next" straight away. A few teams did this as a tactic in the early series but no-one does this now. Most teams find that taking the clues every 10 seconds tends to give the best points-to-information combination.

Are you leaving the show after the next series? Will there be a 9th series?

(By the way I completely agree with you on keeping the 5 point/ one guess structure, it works well)

I completely agree with this, and think it a really odd aspect of the programme to complain about.

5 points is a comparatively large score & contestants are always aware that it's a large risk. I am sure I've seen people buzzing in successfully at this point once or twice, so it can be done. It only works on questions where there are a couple of apparent possibilities for the logical connection, and the contestant takes a punt on the one that is not the most obvious. If there is only one glaringly obvious possibility for the connection at that point, it is probably wrong, so they should wait.

Of course, it's much easier to do sitting at home, when you are not risking ruining your team's chances early on. It is also a lot harder in the sequence round - I can only vaguely remember someone managing it once there.

As I say, it's an odd thing to complain about, IMO. Particularly when the viewers have to put up with the annoying screen distortion thing which make the connections wall impossible to read unless you have a very big telly. Now, that is annoying.

I don't understand that. On the few occasions it's happened it's generally been the only possible connection even if you have to know the particular terminology, and if there are two obvious answers the teams would usually go for the next clue.


I reckon on the very last show of the very last series they will change this.

It's easier to get the full 5 points in the sequence round. For example this week we had "Delta: secondary elections" (or something like that)

If you have delta then the sequence is either going to be "delta, gamma, beta, alpha" or "delta, epsilon, zeta, eta". From the first clue it looks like something to do with radiation so this suggests the sequence going towards alpha is more likely as those are better known.

Then all you have to be aware of is what alpha radiation is formed from - and the answer is "helium nuclei"

Easy. If you know some physics

Then again, the sequence could be Shakespeare plays and then I wouldn't have a clue.