Only Connect: Warmth and humour make whip-smart Victoria Coren-Mitchell queen of the quizzes

BBC

Here’s your starter for 10: what does a quiz need to win over an audience? Is it fiendishly challenging questions, likeable contestants or does it all hinge on the host?

Monday is quiz night on TV, with five general knowledge competitions across terrestrial channels for viewers who want to to sharpen their wits at the start of the week. The best is Only Connect — and this is down to the host.

Two teams of friends, drawn from the public, battle to find obscure connections between things as seemingly unrelated as Krishnan Guru-Murthy and a tagine.

With such a niche set up, (you’re doing well if you get more than six questions right) the pressure’s on the host to give the show popular appeal.

Victoria Coren-Mitchell is perfect for the job. She commands respect while also being entertaining and likeable. The best quiz show hosts are people you would both trust to look after your children and want to spend an evening at the pub with. They need to know the answers but they can’t be a smart a*** — take note, Jeremy Paxman.

His sneering University Challenge persona is funny up to a point but at a time when self-important older white men are on an uncertain footing, it’s unlikely he would be cast in that role if he were starting now. Instead, there has been a a rise in the number of female quiz hosts — Sharon Carpenter on the app HQ, Jo Brand on Have I Got News for You and Coren-Mitchell.

Today she is with the LARPers — that’s Live Action Role Play, as Coren-Mitchell tells us, rightly not assuming we have any knowledge, versus the Durhamites — three University of Durham graduates, including a cartographer who can draw a map of the world freehand (swoon) and looks like Jesse Eisenberg playing Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network. They’ve auditioned for Only Connect before and are glad this time they haven’t wasted money on transport (it eats into their gaming budget. Coren-Mitchell says she understands).

Coren-Mitchell has a kind sense of humour. Because she’s nice to the contestants, understanding their hobbies and giving them points when they’ve only almost got the answer right, she earns the right to lightly mock them.

Host: Sandi Toksvig is in the QI hotseat
BBC/Talkback/FremantleMedia/Brian Ritchie

After the genuine warmth of Only Connect, Monday’s other quiz show, QI, feels like a shock to the system. There’s canned laughter, an onslaught of props and too many competing egos. It’s not host Sandi Toskvig’s fault — the show was equally trying under Stephen Fry — but she does have the air of a supply teacher allowing naughty children to carry on as she sits back. Sometimes she doesn’t even have the energy to talk or make a joke, she just does a funny hand gesture. Maybe she’s on a sugar comedown from Bake Off. At one point, panellist Alan Davies even says “sorry, Sandi” like a repentant child.

There’s just one woman on the panel, comedian Sara Pascoe, who at times can’t hide her exasperated face. This show is the TV equivalent of a drunken conversation with an obnoxious stranger in a pub. She perks up, though, at discussion of uses for chilli in condoms.

It’s alright if not all women want to play quizzes — Only Connect is pretty geeky. But they shouldn’t feel like they can’t try, and having hosts like Coren-Mitchell is surely the way to encourage them.

Pick of the day

Condor - Universal TV, 9pm

Although this spy thriller is adapted from the novel Six Days Of The Condor by James Grady, and the associated screenplay, it’s probably best to put the 1975 film starring Robert Redford to one side.

This update, by Jason Smilovic (Lucky Number Slevin) and Todd Katzberg, starts with a bloody shock, and some ecological insights from Brendan Fraser as he buries prairie dogs in the dust of the New Mexico desert.

But it quickly develops into a pacy espionage story perfectly suited to these paranoid times. It follows Joe Turner (played by Max Irons) as a CIA analyst who is called in to help hunt down a suspected terrorist.

He has qualms: his CIA superiors have used Turner’s algorithm to identify a suspect on American soil and are planning to eliminate him, despite his objections.

“A Saudi-born American citizen who is also a Muslim just visited a secret safety deposit box and is on his way to a football stadium,” he is told. “How many variables do we need?”

William Hurt lends support as Turner’s shadowy uncle Bob.

Screen time

Selling Children: Storyville - BBC Four, 10pm

Showing as part of the BBC’s Why Slavery season, this documentary by Pankaj Johar follows the Indian director as he tries to understand how it is possible for children to be bought and sold in the world’s largest democracy.

It was an issue he hadn’t considered until Cecilia, a maid employed by his family, suffered a terrible loss: the suicide of her 14-year-old daughter after she was trafficked into sexual slavery. Johar travels the country trying to understand how the child trafficking system continues to prosper. He meets children and the traffickers, and witnesses rescue operations. There are no easy answers but it’s clear that India’s booming economy is fuelling the demand for cheap labour.

Death to Smoochy - London Live, midnight

A rhino that had better watch out that it’s not bagged by those planks who killed a goat on Islay is Smoochy, a hit children’s entertainer, although they have competition from Randolph Smiley, the act usurped by this horned sensation. Robin Williams can barely be contained in this black comedy as he plans extinction for Smoochy (Edward Norton).

Trust Me, I’m a Doctor - London Live, 9pm

When we read a theory that’s in tonight’s episode, we thought we had misheard it because we’d missed our usual pre-lunch sixth cup of coffee. So we had that sixth coffee and yet there was no change: is coffee bad for you?

That’s one of the questions raised this evening — that standard way of jump-starting the synapses in the morning might get the mental motor running but at a cost.

Elsewhere in this MOT for the body Michael Mosley addresses an issue which troubles all Londoners — air pollution. Research from last year indicates that it’s killing 50,000 people every year in the UK — one of the highest rates in Europe — and Mosley explores if a simple and natural remedy might be the answer we’re looking for.

Scarred: Michaela Coel stars as Kate Ashby in Black Earth Rising
BBC

Serial box

Black Earth Rising - BBC iPlayer

Hugo Blick’s drama didn’t always make things easy for the viewer, and possibly that’s not the job of a tale of conspiracy set against the background of the Rwandan genocide.

Now that the final episode has been broadcast, perhaps it’s time to catch up properly, and to appreciate the performance of Michaela Coel as Kate Ashby, the woman who is chasing shadows from her past.

Deep dish

Best of Enemies - Netflix

With House of Cards returning sans Kevin Spacey, it’s worth recalling that the actor was due to star in a biopic of Gore Vidal, until the alleged events were reported.

This documentary is a very funny reminder of the intellectual spat between Vidal and the conservative William F Buckley Jr, and of a time when political debate could be carried out on television by avowed intellectuals.

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