#POP UP FROM WORD CONNECT GAME SERIES#

Still more converge in the Connections Online Quiz League (COQL), a fan-run tournament styled after Only Connect in which players compete in three-month seasons with weekly games written by fellow Only Connect devotees. While the membership includes many Britons, many others appear with profile pictures posed against a telltale blue backdrop, that ubiquitous social media tell of a Jeopardy! alum.

#POP UP FROM WORD CONNECT GAME SERIES#

While the series remains mostly obscure stateside, it has gained a dedicated following among a brainy sort of American trivia obsessive-particularly those who, like Jennings, have made names for themselves on shows like Jeopardy! A popular group on Facebook in which members take turns devising their own Only Connect–style puzzles boasts more than 30,000 members. “Now that I’m acclimated to Jeopardy!, Only Connect gives me the same feeling-I guess the answer is, I don’t know, Oxford and Cambridge?” “When I was a kid watching Jeopardy!, the thing that fascinated me was Where do they find these people who can do this?-you know, because I was 10 years old,” Jennings says. It’s a lateral thinking challenge that makes Jeopardy! look like a pop-up word search in the back of a taxi. Pitting two teams of three against each other, the series asks players to identify patterns in intentionally obscure trivia incorporating classical education, pop culture, current events, and everything in between.

In the years since, Only Connect has sealed its reputation as TV’s hardest quiz show on either side of the Atlantic. Forster reference?’ And I knew I had to see it.” Not long after Only Connect’s 2008 premiere, he says, “I started to hear rumblings from other game show fans and quiz bowl people: ‘Have you seen the new hardest show ever? You will not believe how hard this show is.’ I heard the name and I said, ‘Wait, it’s named for an E.M. Jennings, it turns out, had indeed seen the BBC Two quiz show. “All they wanted to do was talk about Only Connect.” “‘Have you seen this British show?’” Jennings remembers one of them asking. One of the odd things, it turns out, about being the winningest Jeopardy! contestant of all time is that you sometimes find yourself in unusual company.Īnd so it was that several years ago, Ken Jennings found himself at an event where he was seated, he says, “next to a pretty respected literary novelist and a former poet laureate of the United States.” But his esteemed seatmates didn’t break the ice with the now-host of Jeopardy! by asking questions about books, or poetry, or even Alex Trebek. From Masterpiece Theatre to Love Island, join us as we look back on some of the iconic shows that have crossed the pond in the past century.

To mark the anniversary, The Ringer is celebrating one of the BBC’s chief exports to the United States: British TV. Transmitting news and entertainment across radio and television, the BBC would go on to have a far-reaching impact on not only the United Kingdom, but also audiences worldwide. One hundred years ago this week, the company that would become known as the British Broadcasting Corporation was founded in London.

Pop up from word connect game