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Cryptic, fiendish, esoteric, obscure … that’s right, they’re all descriptions of Only Connect. Limber up your lateral thinking, it’s time to pit your wits against the toughest quiz on TV.

With over 200 questions (many of them never broadcast) alongside tips from the questions setters, Only Connect: The Official Quiz Book is your chance to brush up on your tactics and put your skills to the test. Set up a showdown with your family and friends or challenge yourself to an audition paper to see whether you’d make the grade. Inventive team names compulsory!

JACK WALEY-COHEN featured on the first ever episode of Only Connect, with his team – the Lapsed Psychologists – reaching the final. He runs various businesses – including, of course, a quiz company – and started writing questions for the show in 2014. In 2017, he took on the role of Question Editor with his colleague, David McGaughey.

VICTORIA COREN MITCHELL has been the host of Only Connect since its inception in 2008. A writer and broadcaster, she is also an expert poker player and is the first and only person to win two titles on the European Poker Tour.

So, how did I come to be standing on a TV set in a spangly frock, helpless and shuddering with giggles, in front of two-and-a-half million viewers, while three highly intelligent, highly respectable civil servants said:

‘Malik, Tomlinson, Horan, Payne … Malik, Tomlinson, Horan, Payne … Are they golfers?’

Poker is a beautiful, fiendish, infuriating, irresistible, exasperating and unforgettable game. If poker were a woman, it would be Elizabeth Taylor – and Richard Burton would marry it and divorce it 14 times.

I was beckoned by the poker siren at a young age. I never escaped her clutches, and that is how I came to appear around a smoky baize table in the early, low-budget, ground-breaking TV series Late Night Poker, made by an innovative and brilliant Welsh production company.

That is how I came to play in every series of Late Night Poker until I became a poker commentator and then a presenter.

And that is how I came to be on the other end of the phone when the people from the innovative and brilliant Welsh production company said: ‘We’ve got an idea for a quiz …’

The beauty of Only Connect is that it could always be anything. Highbrow, lowbrow, sidebrow, underbrow. They might be Nobel prize-winning physicists. They might play for Nottingham Forest. They might all rhyme with parts of the body or be French. Perhaps they all mothered illegitimate dukes, or were accused of being Jack the Ripper, or perhaps – if you read their names backwards – they’re all types of cheese.

The key is lateral thinking. Can you find those hidden connections in the deepest recesses of your mind, the dustiest corners of your memory? I know, I know: it’s hard enough to remember your uncle’s name when you bump into him at the supermarket. But on a good day, in a shining lightbulb moment, your brain will deliver to you – triumphantly – the link you’re looking for.

Malik, Tomlinson, Horan, Payne … If you don’t know the answer, then I’m not going to tell you.

So, Presentable Productions of Llandaff, Cardiff (now Parasol Media – don’t ask me why, but only two more name changes and we’ve got ourselves a Round 2 question) had an idea for a quiz and they asked if I would host a ‘non-broadcast pilot’ – a run-through of the format – to show the BBC in the hope of getting it commissioned as a series.

‘Fine,’ I sniffed, ‘but only as a special favour to you. If you get the series, you’ll have to find someone else to present it. I am an extremely serious and important writer and poker player. I would make a terrible quiz-show host.’

They took what they could get. They only knew poker players, and they guessed I’d be a better host than Black Jack McGraw, the Polish pawnbroker with eight ‘missing’ business partners. Or, if not better than Jack, at least less likely to be in prison at time of recording.

So, we recorded the pilot, a series was commissioned and I found myself unable to back out after all. My heart was lost. I’d fallen head over heels for Only Connect. I wouldn’t have gone so far down the poker road if I didn’t have an addictive personality, and this was an utterly addictive quiz.

Simple enough idea: what is the connection between four apparently random clues? But this is a very tough quiz. The link can be very difficult to spot. (The comedian Mark Steel once tweeted, ‘I love Only Connect, with its answers like “They’re all anagrams of Swedish slang words for pomegranate.”’) Or, as in the case of Malik, Horan, Tomlinson and Payne, it can be – theoretically – easy to spot. Either way, the connection is there.

Then, on to Round 2, where we up the ante by asking not only what is the connection but what comes next in a sequence.

Round 3: up it again by demanding four connections simultaneously, on a fiendish ‘connecting wall’ with 16 jumbled-up clues, featuring red herrings that fit into more than one category but only one possible complete solution.

Round 4: nothing to do with the rest of the quiz. The ‘Missing Vowels’ round. You have to work out what are the well-known names or phrases from which the vowels have been removed and the consonants re-spaced. The round simply isn’t about connections. Nobody knows why it’s there. Then again, the same is true of me.

Well, now you know why I’m there. They didn’t know who else to ask, and I was too hooked by the format to walk away. But my original instinct was right: I am a terrible quiz-show host.

Good quiz-show hosts are irrepressibly cheery, full of bounce and vigour, with an enormous natural warmth. I am socially awkward, physically lazy and constantly irritable with hunger. I always want to be sitting down; I’m too short-sighted to read an autocue, yet too squeamish for contact lenses and too vain for glasses, so I stare into space, blinking like a cartoon scapegoat, trying to remember what I’d meant to say next.

‘Only Connect is back!’ cheered the Radio Times (always a great supporter of ours) in about 2012. ‘And Victoria’s in the chair with her trademark withering glare!’

Luckily, somehow, as if by magic, my peculiarities turned out to suit the quiz. It’s a peculiar quiz.

If this were an episode of Only Connect, I would now add: ‘And God knows we have peculiar contestants!’

I don’t really think they’re peculiar. I just enjoy making jokes about the fact that they might seem peculiar, relative to the prejudices of modern television. I actually identify with them very closely.

I think of myself as a ‘geek’: short-sighted, prone to hay fever, riddled with tics and compulsions, fundamentally uninterested in fashion, highly likely to be the last one picked for a sports team. Luckily, the day I left school I opted out of a value system that considers these traits to be ‘failings’. I’m proud of my arcane interests, quirky hobbies and healthy suspicion of consensus.

I imagine the Only Connect family as a community of those who shivered on the edges of the school playground, furiously underestimated by meat-heads with the wrong priorities.

Of course, some of our contestants are perfectly cool in a straightforward way: good-looking, articulate and confident. Nevertheless, I like to celebrate the geek soul in all of us. We are the sitters and readers, the studiers and stamp-collectors, the museum visitors and chamber music players, the coders and counters, the speakers of ancient languages and historic battle re-enactors. (Another tweet of Mark Steel’s: ‘The first contestant on Only Connect tonight built a lifesize model of Von Ribbentrop out of earwigs.’)

Increasingly, as time has gone on, I’ve characterised us as weedy and awkward, unconventional and stubborn, pale, myopic and wheezy. The programme itself, I once explained to viewers, has a nervous disorder and wears orthopaedic shoes. Another time, I revealed that Only Connect has been questioned over the disappearance of several missing hitch-hikers.

Naturally, in the classic British tradition, this is all highly celebratory. There is no better way to express love, pride and comradeship than by mickey-taking. My real satirical target, I hope it has always been clear, is the mainstream.

This was easy because Only Connect never was mainstream. We were made for BBC Four, a cultish, non-terrestrial channel for an eager, curious audience. We were there to entertain the sort of viewer who might run screaming from The X Factor into the comforting arms of a documentary about biplanes or molecular biology. Not a viewer who necessarily knew about these things, but who was interested to know about anything. I hope we kept that cultish flavour as we stumbled, blinking and nervous, into the bright lights of BBC Two.

The way we identify our questions, for example, is highly rarefied. They’re separated into

LION

WATER

TWO REEDS

TWISTED FLAX

HORNED VIPER

and

EYE OF HORUS.

Why? Well, for the first three series they were identified by Greek letters – alpha, beta, gamma and so on. Although the BBC Four viewers fell quickly in love with the essential connecting principles of the quiz, we had a lot of complaints about the Greek letters. People considered it a pretentious gimmick. The complaints built and built. The letters had to go. On the other hand, I hate to give in to peer pressure.