Everything's Made Up and The Points Don't Matter

For those who don't know, I have quite a penchant for quiz shows. I adore them. I could watch Jeopardy all day long and have no shame at all about it. For some time I thought that I loved quiz shows because they made me feel smarter. I loved being able to answer a question along with the contestants. Or sometimes even before them. I figured it was ego that kept me loving Jeopardy or Wheel of Fortune (they ran back to back when I was a kid, don't know if they still do). Well, Raven has introduced a new quiz show to me that proves my previous theory entirely wrong. The show is called Only Connect. It is a British quiz show where 2 teams of 3 compete for no prizes and no rewards. Just a very average trophy declaring them the winners of Only Connect. There are 4 rounds on the show - connections, sequences, connecting wall, and missing vowels.

The connections sequences consists of a series of 4 clues revealed one at a time. The team gets a brief amount of time to work out the connection between the clues. The next phase is the sequences round. The idea is basically the same except that you get only 3 clues and have to provide the 4th that would come next in that sequences. The connecting wall is the 3rd (and my favorite) section. There are 16 clues and teams have to sort the clues into 4 groups of 4. There is only one correct solution to every wall. The missing vowels round (which may be Raven's favorite - it's certainly her best as she often trumps the contestants) is fairly obvious. The host gives a category and then the name of something from that category with no vowels and the consonants re-spaced so for example the phrase Only Connect might look like this during the missing vowels round: nlycn nct. 

The questions are hard. Really, really hard. I can't say that I get more than 10% right in a single episode. Though I have been improving as I watch. I'll give an example. Here is what you might see in the sequences round. Soviet Union, United States, Czechoslovakia, ? Your job is to fill in the question mark. No googling. And don't give yourself an abundance of time (say 2 minutes tops). I'll include the answer in my next post.

Good luck!

Also: the host of Only Connect is Victoria Coren Mitchell. She is a goddess and at least 50% of the reason I am completely hooked on the show.