Is Britain dumbing down? Not if the toughest TV quiz is moving to BBC1
What is the link between these numbers: 285,000, 684,000, 1.1 million, 2.9 million? The answer is they are soaring viewers figures for Only Connect, the toughest quiz on television, which began as a BBC4 obscurity and has now overtaken BBC1 in the ratings.
Presented byVictoria Coren Mitchell, the show in which teams compete to find connections between seemingly unrelated clues, has quietly become a mainstream hit.
Launched on BBC4 in 2008, Only Connect, which invites two teams to choose questions hidden behind Egyptian hieroglyphs and solve a wall containing groups of connected items, now delights and baffles an audience of nearly three million. Celebrity contestants, including David Baddiel, are queuing up to test their wits on special editions.
Transferred to BBC2 last year, reflecting its cult popularity, the Monday night edition this week enjoyed a peak audience 200,000 viewers ahead of BBC1.
What is the secret behind the success of the programme, which might typically ask “what connects (1) He’s my brother (2) Well, nobody’s perfect (3) Mein Führer, I can walk (4) It was Beauty killed the Beast”? (Answer: they are all last lines in films.)
“The BBC has consistently said to us ‘Don’t make it any easier’. Our USP is to be the toughest, brainiest quiz on TV and we like to think it works because of that,” said Chris Stuart, executive producer.
Stuart took the concept to the BBC after tweaking an original idea for a quiz called “Four Share” about numerical sequences. “That was a bit dull, I thought it would work better about connections.”
Although the questions may seem impenetrable to some – the missing vowels round once asked teams to find the fictional suicide contained with the formulation C CS N – viewers enjoy seeing the egghead contestants struggling to come up with an answer