So there goes another series of ‘Only Connect’. Series 15. I hope people have enjoyed it. Hearty congratulations to the 007s, who, I think you’ll agree, were extremely worthy of their crown. They went unbeaten throughout the series and showed an incredible breadth of knowledge and calm under pressure. One of the enjoyable things about […]
I wrote a few months ago about the issue of gender bias in quizzes from a writer’s point of view. The question has reared its head again recently in a somewhat blunt and unhelpful way. I have little to add to what I wrote then, beyond saying there would be a few more things I […]
Although it’s now a few months since he died, I thought I’d write about William G. Stewart, the host of Fifteen-to-One. I loved Fifteen-to-One as I was growing up – it is easy to forget what an oasis of quizzing it was in the early-to-mid 90s. University Challenge didn’t come back till 1994, Millionaire and […]
I’ve had the question of gender bias in quizzing on my mind a fair bit recently, but have been directly prompted to write this by this spectacularly grim exposé of a men-only charity event in London. Some will be shocked, some less so. I think I’d be more shocked if I hadn’t been involved in what is […]
Having written Only Connect questions for a few years, my colleague Jack Waley-Cohen and I (I being David McGaughey) took over from Alan Connor as Question Editors in 2016. Halfway through the broadcast of our first series in the role (and as the show moves back to its natural home on Mondays), I thought it […]
Just a quick thought. Can you put too much effort into making sure a question satisfies everyone in its lack of ambiguity? People want quiz questions to be perfectly clear with perfectly unambiguous answers, and rightly so, but it can sometimes be a little muddier than that. Just as an example, if you watch Only […]
This is a follow-up to the last post – I want to expand on how the different aspects of our work fit together. (These two strands are hosted quiz nights and quiz question writing for TV shows, games, iPhone apps etc.) Those have always been the two main areas of our business – over the years […]
When a blog falls silent, it’s usually either a good or bad sign. Thankfully, in this case, it’s the former. We’ve been BusyBusyBusy rather than QuietQuietQuiet (sorry, that’s terrible …). I’ve been writing, rather than hosting, a lot – almost exclusively. in fact. This blog has had three main purposes since it began – 1. […]
Creativity – perhaps as overused and meaningless a term these days as “interactive”, “passionate” or “110%”. I remember, for one of the first big question-writing projects I worked on for QuizQuizQuiz, shuffling with my colleague into the imposing offices of a large multinational firm who was our client, and being introduced to the various serious […]
When people come up to me at the end of a quiz I’ve run in order to pay it a kind compliment, it doesn’t usually extend that much further than “Great quiz”, “That was really fun”, “Clever quiz questions”, “That was tough but we really enjoyed it”, “I’m not normally one for quiz nights but […]