What if I told you that I got an answer right after two clues? If I added that both teams got that answer wrong? And that this incredible moment happened during the grand finale?
True fans of Only Connect will be joining me as I whoop, force my husband into an awkward high-five, and then sit beaming for the rest of the round — or, lets be honest, the rest of the quiz.
Everyone else will be wondering whether I am suffering the effects of lockdown. Because if there is ever a show to divide viewers, it is the sublimely geeky Only Connect. (When Goggleboxers watched the quiz, I couldn’t work out if Channel 4 was trolling its own stars or BBC2 — but the WHAT?! faces were worth all the annoying car adverts in the world).
You are either totally committed to this knotty, arrrgh-inducing half-hour with the world’s cheapest credits — brow furrowed in anticipation as The Wall and its many impossible connections hoves into view — or you cannot imagine how it has survived 15 seasons and a jump from BBC4 to primetime BBC2. And why on earth is Victoria Coren Mitchell harping on about question-setters Jack Waley-Cohen and David McGaughey being the same person?
Victoria’s “jokes” are one of the true joys of Only Connect. They are like nothing else on television: a kind of performance art with rules all of its own that is often completely unfunny but strangely irresistible.
You can’t imagine what anyone reading her monologue scripts — or arriving at the show with no context — thinks is going on. And yet those weird intros are just as essential to Only Connect as sequences you still don’t understand five days later and furious arguments about which of you got the missing vowels questions right first.
This year, the teams in the final are among my favourites of the series. (Yes, I have favourites. Yes, I am completely overinvested. No, I am not ashamed). Tonight it’s the 007s vs The Suits, who look so fresh-faced they probably get ID-ed when they try to do pub quizzes (presumably before sweeping away all before them).
The Suits all share a love of bridge. I’m not sure I even knew that bridge was a game at their age. And I still have no idea of the rules. But I do know the rules here and, given that it’s the final, it is pleasing that the questions haven’t got so hard it’s impossible to understand what’s happening on screen — a state of affairs I have encountered before with this quiz. The Walls, however, are H.A.R.D. even by Only Connect standards.
Luckily, even for the losers of tonight’s show and this year’s contest, there is a silver lining: Victoria doesn’t make anyone sing tonight, saving both the contestants and the viewers from an excruciating ordeal.
And yet if it meant we could have a never-ending season of Only Connect, I’d accept singing in every episode. In fact, I’d probably accept viewers having to join in. Or talk without vowels fr th whl f nxt wk. Only Connect will be missed from the schedules — although Michael Portillo’s new series of important documentaries is of course filling the gap. Victoria will be pleased.
Only Connect is on BBC Two, 8pm tonight
