Only Connect Post MortemWas it dumbed down for BBC Two?

With the grand final of Only Connect this evening it's a good time for a quick look back at its first series on BBC Two. Having cut its teeth in the wilds of BBC Four, many were worried the move to more populist waters would herald an inevitable dumbing down of 'Britain's Toughest Quiz'. As the Internet's premier (by which I mean, only) source of Only Connect data analysis, I had a look at the numbers.

While 'dumbing down' can take various forms, the obvious interpretation is that our beloved quiz was going to make things easier to suit the ruffians who watch BBC Two. My main interest, then, was the average total score: how many points were the teams putting on the board compared to their BBC Four predecessors? The plot below provides some immediate insight.

Series 10 came in at 42.7 points per game, which is a little above the BBC Four average of 39.5, but it's clear from the above that it's not really any sort of outlier. Series 4 has comfortably held onto the top spot (helped in part by some unusually long missing vowels rounds), while Series 10 sits just between Series 7 and 8 on this particular high score table. What's more, the BBC Four average includes the infamous Series 9, whose scoring was so low statistical testing identified it as an anomaly. (Excluding Series 9 the BBC Four average creeps up to 40.3, and you can see what the resulting plot looks like here.) No analysis is going to identify Series 10 as being particularly high scoring, then, and so on this measure at least we can be fairly confident Only Connect didn't decide to go easy on its new viewers.

I should acknowledge a couple of alternative possibilities, however. First, these numbers can't distinguish question difficulty from team quality: perhaps the questions were easier and the teams were just more rubbish. However, this series was the first to invite former contestants back for another go, so if anything we might expect an even stronger showing. Alternatively, it could be that the show was dumbed down, with its One Directioning here and Boom Boom Boom Booming there, and the scoring wasn't higher because its contestants don't get out much. As someone who has deliberately learned Harry, Liam, Niall, Louis and (now less importantly) Zayn for the purposes of pub quizzes I think it's safe to say us Only Connect alumni are cooler than that.

For the more data-hungry out there, I've included the round-by-round breakdowns below, but there's little of any particular note about Series 10 here either (although there are some mildly interesting trends in the earlier series).

As a final note, missing vowels continues to make less difference to the outcome than many of its detractors attest: Series 10 added three more 'missing vowels turnarounds' (where a team came from behind to win), taking the all-time total to 22 in 152 regular series episodes, or about 1 in 7.

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