MONDAY

ONLY CONNECT

BBC2, 8pm

What links a professional poker player; the co-director of an erotic movie; a columnist for GQ and The Observer; and Claudia Winkleman’s best friend?

The answer is that they are all past or present roles of Only Connect’s long-standing host Victoria Coren Mitchell, pictured below, who presents the latest series’ grand final this week.

For the few people that haven’t seen Only Connect, in the first ‘Connections’ round two teams are invited to choose questions hidden behind Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs – two reeds, lion, twisted flax, horned viper, water and the eye of Horus.

In round two – ‘Sequences’ – each set of clues is now a sequence and teams must try to figure out the fourth item in the run.

The third round has become the show’s centrepiece. The ‘Connecting Wall’ challenges the teams to sort 16 words, names or phrases into four groups of four, even though several of them could fit into more than one category.

In the final buzzer round, ‘Missing Vowels’, the teams are presented with a series of word puzzles, each with the vowels removed and the spaces shifted to disguise the original words.

The difference between Only Connect and its buddy show University Challenge, is that with the latter you tend to either know the answer or don’t.

Only Connect, on the other hand, tests a very different skill – the ability to twist your brain into the same knots as the question masters’.

Coren Mitchell, 45, who is also the daughter of the late, dearly missed satirist Alan Coren and younger sister of food critic Giles, would be the first to downplay her role in the show’s success, and instead thinks the quiz element and the contestants are what makes it.

She said: “I love quizzes with the same part of my brain that likes puzzles and Sherlock Holmes stories, and Only Connect is infuriating and brilliant and what I love about it is that the people who come on it haven’t got bleached hair and don’t want to be rock stars, and aren’t represented very often on television.

“They are properly clever and interested in knowledge and arcane facts and they look nice and tidy in their favourite jumper. They wouldn’t dream of appearing in fake tan and prosthetic nails, although I obviously insist on them.”