Q: What links JFK and Elon Musk’s cake? A: The trickiest quiz on TV
You must have noticed the intellectual rush that sweeps the cerebral cortex on a Monday, boosting the IQ and invigorating the conversation like a dash of champagne.
No? Me neither. But it’s a genuine scientific phenomenon, proven by the telly schedules. All the best brainbox shows air on a Monday.
Watching university Challenge or QI on any other evening might seem too gruelling, but at the beginning of the week no mental test is too extreme . . . not even Only Connect (BBC2).
Victoria Coren Mitchell’s mindbending quiz is so complex that even the introductions require a PhD in irony. Each player is introduced with an utterly improbable snippet of personal information, offered without comment or further explanation.
As the gameshow returned for a new series, one chap was described as ‘a civil servant who was charged by a rhino in the Ngorongoro crater’ and another ‘accidentally ate a cake intended for Elon Musk’.
The questions were similarly abstruse. For instance, what links Kennedy and Lincoln, with Reagan and Clinton? Yes, of course they were all u.S. presidents, but the answer is far more convoluted than that. Here’s another clue: the same rule applies to Washington and
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Monroe. Still not seeing it? These presidential pairs were succeeded by men who shared a surname.
Abe Lincoln was followed by Andrew Johnson, while Lyndon B. Johnson replaced Jack Kennedy. Reagan and Clinton both vacated the White House for a President George Bush, while men called Adams took over from George Washington and James Monroe.
None of the contestants saw that ludicrous link. That’s one of the joys of this quiz: whereas, on Mastermind and the like, we love to see players pluck phenomenal scraps of knowledge from the recesses of their craniums, on only Connect we want to see them foxed by puzzles so impenetrable an Enigma machine couldn’t decode them.
Since advanced quizzers can be expected to know the Sumerian alphabet backwards and recite the period table in their sleep, only Connect has pop culture questions so fiendish that just thinking about them can induce a headache.
Can you name Dan Brown’s novels in reverse order, or list the years visited by Marty McFly in the Back To The Future franchise? unbelievably, one team could. And since this is a show that inevitably attracts pedants, viewers eager to spot flaws and inaccuracies in the factchecking, Victoria gets her corrections in early.
Billy Paul’s soul hit Me And Mrs Jones, she pointed out, should be more grammatically expressed as Mrs Jones And I. But the one question that cannot be answered is, what in the name of Albert Einstein is For Facts Sake (BBC1) doing on our screens on a Monday night?
Even the title is mocking us. Shouldn’t there be an apostrophe after the second word?
Brendan o’Carroll’s witless panel game might be the most stupid programme ever aired. Members of the audience are invited to reveal two facts about a hobby, one true and one a lie. Then Brendan’s relatives have to guess which one is made up.
The Beeb has always been a self-serving closed shop, where presenters can command jobs for their children. But to see Brendan rope in his wife and daughter (co-stars in his sitcom Mrs Brown’s Boys) as the quiz team captains is shameless.
It doesn’t even bear wondering what the world’s worst Elvis impersonator was doing there. Any karaoke party will boast better versions of Suspicious Minds. Here’s the hardest question of the night: how did this bilge ever get commissioned?