Is there a household in England that doesn’t call Mondays ‘Quiz Night’?

The combination of Clive Myrie’s Mastermind at 7:30PM, Victoria Coren Mitchell’s Only Connect at 8:00PM, and Amol Rajan’s University Challenge at 8:30PM, all on BBC2, have firmly established Monday evenings as a time for giving your brains a thorough workout.

The format of each programme is sufficiently different to sustain interest throughout the entire 90-minute mental marathon, and each presents its own brand of entertainment and challenges, even for non–quizzers.

Mastermind is divided into two sections: the specialist subject round where, as a viewer, it is impossible to answer any questions––I mean, who in their right mind needs to know that much about Mariah Carey?––and a general knowledge round, where it is usually possible to answer a good 50% of the questions.  The real quiz here, though, happens right at the beginning of the show when the four contestants are first revealed.  The quiz is to guess purely from appearances alone, who is going to be the smartest and go on to win the programme.  Here, my initial instincts/aesthetic prejudices are rarely accurate; I’m probably only scoring around a 33% success rate; barely better than random guesswork.

Only Connect consists of four rounds, but only the first two really matter.  The third round is rather non-participatory for a viewer, and the fourth is only thrown in to make you feel that you are not quite so stupid as the first two rounds would have you believe.  These first two rounds comprise fiendishly difficult puzzles which, following a brief straw poll with fellow viewers, I find myself a ‘good average’, in that I am able to half answer one question roughly every three episodes.

The rules of University Challenge, as Amol Rajan frequently reminds us, need no introduction.  Often, here, I find the challenge is not so much knowing the answer to a question, but trying to remember the start of the question before the end of it has even been reached, particularly if it has anything to do with chemical equations, mathematical formulae, or dates from obscure periods of European history.  I only ever come into my own if there are bonus questions on art, birds, or shipping forecast areas, and only then if one of the answers is ‘Dogger’.  Once again, though, the real quiz is not about answering Amol’s questions, but about trying to spot the most neurodiverse brainiac amongst the students competing, who will proceed to go on and answer 90% of the questions posed to them, whether it be about Zoroastrian history, political sociology, or quantum cosmology.

Tip: they are often found to be sitting on the right-hand side of the team captain.

© Stephanie Snifter

Stephanie Snifter likes to shout out ‘Dogger’ whatever her starter for ten.