The early morning hours can be lonely, especially in the postpartum haze. You’re covered in milk and drool, trying to stay awake while feeding your child and feeling desperate for human connection. You don’t have enough attention span to read, and even if you did, you don’t have two hands to open a book or change the page on your Kindle.
So you do whatever you can to entertain your anxious mind. You watch television shows, catching up on Veep and other HBO series you didn’t have a chance to watch while you were in graduate school. After the cringe of watching Selina Meyer make yet another political gaffe, you search for something, anything, to comfort your anxious soul.
And then you find it. Somewhere on bootleg channels of YouTube. The best ever British quiz show to ever exist: Only Connect.1
Originally airing on BBC Four in 2008 and moving to BBC Two in 2014, Only Connect, hosted by Victoria Coren Mitchell, describes itself as “deliciously devious and maddeningly abstract.”2 Two teams of three compete to show off their lateral thinking in a season-long push to win…the glory of knowing you won. Seriously, there is no prize other than a trophy provided by the BBC. The game is divided into four rounds. The goal in the first round is to find the connection between four seemingly unconnected things, whether those are people, years, words, or other items. The second round is more difficult: you have to answer what the fourth in a series of clues would be. The third round, my favorite, is the connecting wall. (More on that in a bit). The final round is missing vowels — you must figure out what the word or phrase is stating by just seeing the consonants.
As I mentioned, the connecting wall is the best part of the show. The teams of three have two and a half minutes to find the connections between sixteen clues shown on a board. There are four different groups of four clues each. The teams must try to figure out the four connected group as well as what connects each quartet. For each correct set, teams receive one point. For each correct connection, they also receive a point. If the team solves all of the groupings and knows all of the connections, they receive two extra points for a maximum of ten.
Now, after explaining this to you, does it sound vaguely familiar? Coren Mitchell seems to think there is a striking resemblance between the connecting wall and the New York Times’ newest game, Connections. When the NYT Games team announced Connections on Twitter, Coren Mitchell responded with “Do you know this has been a TV show in the UK since 2008 ?! It’s so similar I guess you must do?”3
Shockingly, or maybe not, per Deadline, NYT Games “denied the game was a clone. ‘Grouped words is a common theme of games. The content of “Connections” is unique, handcrafted and has a distinctive style synonymous with New York Times Games,’ a spokesperson said.”4
In spite of their similarities, I cannot get enough of either of the games. I’m often waiting until midnight for a new game to refresh on the NYT Games app and am sad that I cannot stream any new episodes of Only Connect via a YouTube channel run by an Only Connect question writer that streams the UK-based show for those of us not in their distribution area.
So if you area also obsessed with Connections and need more to satisfy your intellectual mind, please watch Only Connect. And if you get to a point where you’ve exhausted all of the videos on YouTube, then please listen to Tom Scott’s Lateral podcast. It is truly the highlight of my Friday mornings.
Things I’m Enjoying:
A very specific notebook to jot down all of my thoughts.
And a new favorite pen.
I dug up an old pair of Warby Parker frames to switch up my eyewear a bit and I have to say, I’m so happy to have a new look.
Elin Hilderbrand’s Swan Song is truly a wonderful way for her to sail off to her retirement.
Upcoming Events:
(next book club events in bold)
March 19 at 6:00: March Meetup at Leopold’s
April 19 at 6:00: April Meetup at Forward Craft & Coffee5
April 23 at 12:00: Lunch for Libraries fundraising event presenting Tommy Orange at the Monona Terrace, tickets range from $125 to $175
May 10 at 7:00: Erik Larson at Community Christian Church Plainfield in Plainfield, IL presented by Anderson’s Bookshops
May 23 at 6:00: May Meetup at Northstreet
Hyperbole is my own.
“Only Connect.” BBC Two. Accessed March 11, 2024. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00lskhg.
Kanter, Jake. “BBC Presenter Victoria Coren Mitchell Accuses New York Times of Cloning Her Cult Quiz ‘Only Connect.’” Deadline, June 15, 2023. https://deadline.com/2023/06/bbc-victoria-coren-mitchell-accuses-new-york-times-clone-only-connect-1235417841/.
Ibed.
Please note the new date; moved to have a reserved space at Forward.