I Canna Hold Her Cap'n!

It's back and Monday evenings are interesting again. Well I suppose Paxman has been back for weeks hectoring various juveniles on Junvenal and other such esoterica but only Only Connect can supply meta-questions - pure intelligence that tests the intellect as well as the memory and all without any dramatic unresolved chord to ramp up the tension.

But what happens at the start - that nice Victoria Coren suggests that they have been receiving letters on the subject of the symbols used by the contestants to select each bank of things to connect. They are seen as elitist and pretentious and so they are going to change them. Horror! I don't know about anyone else but the show being pretentious and elitist is among the finest reasons for watching it. We are disappointed - the Chavs have breached the walls of BBC4 and are battering at the citadel of our intelligence. We are doomed to be overrun by the hordes of know-nothings who can just about deal with the first six letters of our normal boring alphabet. And so with heavy heart and weary countenance we sink back down in our chairs, resigned to this outrage. Victoria looks at us dryly (as always) then glances to her side - "Contestants" she says "pick your ......" (we pause, our hearts still beating harder at the moral failure of the BBC.) ".... Egyptian Hieroglyph". For a moment the world stops turning as we take this in. ...... Then we punch the air - all is right with the world - the barbarians have been repelled. Pretension level of 100 has been restored - elitism readings normal. Move on please - nothing to see here.

Six Wheels on my Wagon

And now over to the world's nicest poker player and all round clever-clogs - Victoria Coren with her fiendish quiz - Only Connect. At one end of the game show scale we have Deal or No deal - a game with tense music even during the funny bits, and no real need for skill because the whole thing is based on a string of random numbers and an annoying elf called Noel. At the other end we have the 8:30 Monday slot on BBC4 which requires something akin to the intelligence of a Cryptic Crossword setter multiplied by a Rocket Surgeon (or Brain Scientist). You can play the connecting wall game for yourself complete with dry encouragement by Ms Coren herself. Visit and feel smug (or more likely a waste of cortex).

Napoleon Revolving Virtually in his Grave

Dawkins still unfinished but nearly there. Time was taken up watching The Virtual Revolution presented by Dr. Aleks Krotoski up there. This was meaty stuff - no whizzy little sideshows - just well-presented narration and opinion from the great and good of CyberVille, Terra. And straight into it my wife learned something - that www stood for World-Wide Web. She lost interest after that and started on the practical lessons before the end of the theory. A funny bit of prime-time for a Saturday night, much more suited to BBC4 but BBC2 does have occasional throwbacks to its high-brow glory years every so often.

In best novelistic time-shifting mode I now return to the programme we watched before this which has filled the BBC4 Monday brain-box slot (Mind Games etc) - Only Connect - a fiendish quiz of linking four, sometimes apparently random words/phrases/pictures/pieces of music/smells. Well maybe not smells but after 3D I am sure that odour transmission is next on the list of gimmicks. Last night was between a team of neuroscientists and one of rugby fans. The former only needed an extra geeky member to be the main cast of The Big Bang Theory and from the start it was obvious that they did not care whether they won or lost. They did of course win.

An example - what links :

Cream, Quote Marks, Tennis, Yellow Lines

Answers on a postcard - boiled sweet to first drawn - not valid outside Mozambique - offer expires July 1974.