The Rainbow Connection

Most people have, I think, no idea what a labour of love it is to put together the Only Connect music questions.

They’ll associate the music questions with the exaggerated “Oh No!”s that greet the sound of the warning bell (perhaps as much of a quiz show tradition as Jeremy Paxman’s exaggerated amazement at anyone knowing anything pop cultural), or they’ll associate them with the team captains’ puzzled “Anyone know it? Don’t know it. Next, please” that usually greets the first snippet, and, of course, they’ll associate them with the gilded voices of angels that are occasionally encouraged, coaxed, threatened into a sequence-ending singalong.

People may see the music questions as the maligned, poor relations of Only Connect questions. But they’d be wrong.

The music questions are, in their way, more debated, more fought for, more cherished than anything else in the show. I was made aware of this when Jack and I took over as Question Editors in 2016. The music questions have their own separate meetings and their own special timeline, with several participants and several stages. They have also been, above all, the preserve of Chris Stuart, the show’s creator and long-time executive producer, who died this summer.

Chris cared about the details of every single question on the show, but I think he cared most about the music questions. He wrote his own excellent music questions throughout the show’s 18 series, more than 50 in total. He was a music man – a songwriter, musician, producer, DJ, a fan, a font of knowledge across all genres. He also understood the music questions’ part in the show better than anyone else, something he helped me to understand, something I’ll get to.

I also love the music questions. I bring no practical musical expertise beyond Grade 5 clarinet (failed), but I do bring pretty extensive pop and rock fandom, the kind which means I might well know what was Number 1 on your birthday.

Every series, Chris, Jack, me, and a varying cast of very significant others would meet, in person or on zoom, to bash through the music questions. More than the other questions, which we discuss a couple of months later (though still in enormous detail), the music questions need bashing through. It is a process. Sometimes, for reasons beyond our control, a very frustrating process.

A question writer might submit a lovely idea for a music question, perfect in every regard, except when it is checked to see whether we are licensed to use the key tracks, it’s a big fat no.

Music clearance is a perplexing, baffling process and, no, I cannot explain it to you, just suffice to say, it affects the music questions a great deal, and there are many cool music questions that have fallen by the wayside because we couldn’t play a key track. Or two key tracks.

Most questions are salvageable, thankfully – you think of another song that fits the answer, you shuffle a bit, you use a bit of imagination, but some sit in the “unusable great ideas” folder for ever.

So, we worked hard at the music questions. We brainstormed and we bashed. We went through a big spreadsheet of question ideas, and coloured them green, orange and red. So many are almost good, but just can’t quite be got to work. Will that song be famous enough? Does that title fit the link well enough? Is there a long enough clip of that song where they’re not singing the title or swearing?

For me personally, a lot of the music questions on Only Connect start with a song on in the background while I work, spotting a noteworthy word in the title, and thinking “hmm, maybe I can make something of that”. It is surprisingly common, however, for the initial song that inspires the question not to make it into the final question.

A typical music question meeting interaction (especially in my early days) might have gone a bit like this:

David McGaughey: “We’ve got …

The Only Limping Dog in Pitshanger, by early 90s indie sensations Neville’s Flexible Chimney … then

Lammas Blues, by early 90s indie-folk sensation Josh Josherson

Boating in Gunnersbury, by late 90s twee-pop geniuses Olga and Roberto, then

Castlebar Man, by mid-90s Britpop also-rans Sludge….

… and all the titles … obviously … as everyone will know … refer to parks in the London Borough of Ealing”.

And Chris would diplomatically wonder if the connection was a little tricky and London-centric perhaps, could be broadened to parks in general perhaps, if perhaps we could have a little more musical variety, then plucks out of the air a classic Ella Fitzgerald song called ‘Central Park Melody ’, a Bizet aria called  ‘Bois de Boulogne’,  and hey presto, we’d be near a music question.

NB … there will never be a music question that is “Parks of Ealing”, and don’t go looking for any of these songs on Spotify.

We’d talk about the tracks, play little sections, look up chart positions, all try to make cases for songs, and the position of songs in the question. Even after the question meetings, there’s a long way to go. We’ll decide which shows the questions go in, source the clips, push for clearance in those cases where a track isn’t automatically licensed for use, but with a bit of pushing might be clearable , play with the order, then listen to the songs to try to find the best possible clips from the songs, which do not give the answer away, but represent the song well. And we continue to go back and forth, making little changes here and there.

Sometimes, I would be a bit frustrated if what I felt was a decent set of songs was deemed, in question meetings, a bit too pop-samey, but when Chris once reminded me “the music questions have to be, as much as is possible, true to the spirit of the show, a collection of four apparently random things, a real collection of eras and styles all in one question”, it fell into place for me.

Music (and picture) questions require a different kind of thinking from other questions in the show: we can’t expect teams to be both recognising songs and performing massive leaps of logic, but we do aim for them to be, in some sense, in the spirit of the show.

Sometimes a music question falls flat. Sometimes a team, entirely out of their comfort zone, recognises nothing and has no idea. Once in a while, they recognise, or think they recognise, nothing but somehow, still, get the right answer, through a mixture of luck and hidden knowledge, or subconscious processing of some lyrics that played out. Sometimes, amusingly (though perhaps not for the them), a team recognises all the tracks but still can’t figure out the connection.

But, you know what, the hit rate on music questions is much better than you might think it is. Teams rarely score more than 1 or 2 points on a music connection question, but they do usually score. It’s always quietly satisfactory when they do. Chris loved it when they recognised the classical pieces, as they often do. I love it when teams have a real music expert, and they recognise the obscure Americana track no one thinks they’ll recognise.

Chris was part of all the discussions on music questions for the current series, Series 18, as enthusiastic and precise as ever. He was suggesting to me in March, in the run-up to Block 1 of filming, that we should change the timings of a couple of the jazz excerpts by a few seconds to give the teams a better chance of recognising the theme, and he was absolutely spot-on in both cases.

Next series, we’ll have to do the music questions without him, and we’ll do our best but we’ll feel a bit lost, I expect.

When we were listening to the tracks for Series 18, Nick, our series producer, remarked on how much he was enjoying listening to them, and that maybe, at the end of the series, we put together a little OC playlist, which will be a nice idea if we get round to it.

Inevitably, we’d all be led in our discussions by pieces of music that we loved, that we wanted to be heard. And, often, over the course of the process, I’d come to love songs and pieces I hardly knew or didn’t know at all.

For example, one of our question writers, Charlie Methven, came up with a brilliant question for Series 16, which we put in a semi-final (you may remember it) which was “All sung by someone green”.

I think the original suggestion for Clue 4 was “It’s not Easy Being Green” as sung by Kermit, but, whether because it was not clearable or because it was maybe a tiny bit much of a giveaway for a semi-final, we thought to replace it.

Chris’s eyes lit up; “let’s have ‘Rainbow Connection’ – it’s such a great song”. He may even have sung a bit of it, if I remember rightly. Lo and behold, ‘Rainbow Connection’ was clearable, and went in at Clue 4 on the question, which was answered correctly in the semi-final match.

Perhaps because I was a little muppet-phobic as a child, I’d, surprisingly, never heard ‘Rainbow Connection’ until that point, a situation I have now amended countless times. It’s a song I listen to regularly now, a song that reminds me of the great TV show I’m lucky enough to work on and the great man I was lucky enough to work with.