Only Connect viewers furious over ‘worst question ever’ on BBC quiz show. Can you solve it?
Only Connect is famous for questions that can leave even the sharpest contestants scratching their heads. But one puzzle on the BBC quiz show pushed viewers’ patience to the limit, with some branding it one of the worst questions they had ever seen.
Hosted by Victoria Coren Mitchell, the programme challenges two teams to find the hidden connection between four apparently unrelated clues. The fewer clues a team needs, the better its score, making every second count.
During the latest episode, contestants were presented with a particularly baffling sequence involving the word “little”.
The four clues were:
- Swelling: on bones
- Finger: at the tip of the middle finger
- Mouse: throughout the body
- Pan: in the knees
At first glance, there appeared to be little that connected the four phrases. The contestants struggled to identify what they had in common as the clock continued to run down.
Viewers watching at home were no more impressed.
One frustrated fan described the puzzle as a question that prompted an immediate reaction of “NO. NOPE. ABSOLUTELY NOT,” calling it a terrible question.
Another viewer joked that the “little” puzzle had suddenly become a contender for the show’s worst question ever, while another simply declared: “‘Little’ Body Parts possibly a contender for worst question ever.”
A fourth viewer admitted they had only a “LITTLE understanding” of the question.
So, what was the answer?
The contestants eventually took a guess and offered “Dead” as their answer.
Victoria Coren Mitchell quickly revealed that it was not correct.
With the teams still struggling, she then explained the rather unusual connection behind the clues.
The trick was to place the word “little” before each of the relevant answers. The resulting terms referred to different body parts.
The final clue, “Pan: in the knees,” was the first example Victoria explained.
She pointed to the familiar crossword-style clue involving “two girls, one on each knee”: Pat and Ella.
Put together, they form patella, the anatomical name for a kneecap. In this puzzle, the idea was that a patella could be described as a “little pan”.
The remaining clues relied on similarly obscure terminology.
The other three clues explained
For “Mouse: throughout the body,” the connection came from the Latin word mus.
Victoria explained that musculus means “little mouse”, giving the clue its link to the muscles found throughout the body.
The “Finger” clue referred to the dactylion, described as a little dactyl or little finger.
Then came the most obscure of the four.
The clue “Swelling: on bones” referred to a tubercle, a term derived from the Latin tuberculum, meaning a little swelling.
Once the explanation was given, the seemingly unrelated clues could finally be connected. Before the reveal, however, both the contestants and viewers had been left struggling to see the intended pattern.
That difficulty sparked the unusually strong reaction from viewers, with several taking to social media to complain that the “little” question had crossed the line from fiendishly difficult into simply frustrating.
A typically difficult Only Connect puzzle
The reaction is perhaps fitting for a programme built around lateral thinking and deliberately elusive connections.
Only Connect asks contestants to spot relationships that are often hidden behind wordplay, obscure references or unexpected meanings. That makes its questions notoriously difficult, particularly when teams have only a few clues and limited time to find the answer.
But on this occasion, the challenge proved too much for some viewers, who were left wondering how anyone was supposed to arrive at the solution.
The puzzle may have had a perfectly logical answer once Victoria revealed it. For those watching as the clues appeared one by one, however, the connection between swelling, fingers, mice and pans was far from obvious.
And that is exactly what made the question such a talking point among Only Connect viewers.