originally posted @ flashgamesshows.com

Broadcast on BBC Four and fronted by Guardian columnist, thinking man’s crumpet and poker player extraordinaire Victoria Coren, Only Connect is an odd little quiz show that caught my attention earlier this year. It’s a pretty basic premise involving two teams of borderline Aspergers sufferers pitting their wits against each other in a series of increasingly confused and brain melting rounds. To be honest the majority of contestants on Only Connect are not simply nerds, we’re actually talking about a terrifying new race of uber-geeks who make Professor Frink from The Simpsons look like Danny Dyer arm-wrestling a bulldog in a skip on some wasteland round the back of a truckers only pub.

Don’t get me wrong, I like these uber-geeks. They are the kind of people who invent stuff, send people to the moon and solve elaborate codes to save us all from the Nazis. They’re also highly unlikely to stab you in a kebab shop at 3.30 on a Friday night. Yet their most endearing quality is that they genuinely care about things like the heraldic terms for the colours of the spectrum, becoming visibly gutted if their knowledge of arbitrary trivia is not up to their own impossibly high standards. This is probably why observing them trying to figure out the connections between totally archaic and often seemingly made up words is so much fun.

My favourite round has to be the puzzle wall. Sixteen words are placed on a big computerised grid and it’s up to the contestants to put them into connecting groups of four. It’s in this round that the most bizarre connections often appear and you get to hear people saying sentences like “toad, toad, Vincent, chromium, types of hat worn by Calvinists?” whilst Coren stands eyeing them with a mixture of calculated indifference and barely concealed loathing.

Another strangely addictive element to the show is the lack of any atmosphere whatsoever. There’s no studio audience and the whole thing feels like it has been filmed in a Matrix style artificial reality entirely constructed from footage of the Open University lectures they used to show through the night on BBC Two. The unbearably flat tone is further exacerbated by Victoria Coren’s ‘jokes’ and QI-esque puns that often make you feel that time has stopped and the universe is imploding very, very slowly.

So why is the whole thing so damn enjoyable? Well, it’s that Only Connect is so terribly naff that it transcends its inherent naffness and somehow becomes cool, plus the fact that if you manage to get even one of the connections right you feel haughty and intellectually superior to everyone else for about four seconds.

Series Two has just ended on BBC Four so fingers crossed it will be back for a third series soon – I for one can’t wait. And frankly, in a world where 8 Out of 10 Cats is still on the air we could do with more shows like Only Connect and less comedy panel shows latently dripping with hate and populated by hacks cracking jokes about paedophiles, dead celebrities and Gordon Brown only having one eye.