Victoria Coren Mitchell

Victoria Elizabeth Coren Mitchell (born Victoria Elizabeth Coren, 18 August 1972) is an English writer, presenter and professional poker player. Coren Mitchell writes weekly columns for The Observer and The Guardian and has hosted the BBC television quiz show Only Connect since 2008.

Early life

Coren was born in Hammersmith, west London, and grew up in Cricklewood, north London, the daughter of the humorist and journalist Alan Coren and his wife Dr Anne Kasriel. Her brother is the journalist Giles Coren. She attended girls' independent schools between the ages of five and eighteen and read English at St John's College, Oxford, graduating with a first-class degree.

Writing

When aged 14 she had a short story published under a pseudonym in Just Seventeen magazine and then won a competition in The Daily Telegraph to write a column about teenage life for their "Weekend" section, which she continued writing for several years.

Her books include Love 16 and Once More, with Feeling, about her attempt (with co-author Charlie Skelton) to make "the greatest porn film ever". Their jobs reviewing porn films for the Erotic Review led them to believe that most of what they were watching was terrible and that they could make better films themselves.

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Only Connect

Only Connect is a British quiz show presented by Victoria Coren Mitchell. It aired on BBC Four from 15 September 2008 to 7 July 2014 and then moved to BBC Two from 1 September 2014. In the series, teams compete in a tournament of finding connections between seemingly unrelated clues.

Etymology

The phrase "Only connect" was originally used in E. M. Forster's 1910 novel Howards End. It was spoken by the character Margaret Schlegel, and occurs in chapter 22:

The quote was the basis of an unanswered question in the grand final of series nine - the beast, the monk, the prose, the passion, to which the answer was Only Connect.

Format

Each programme has two teams of three people competing in four rounds of gameplay. In the first three series, clues in Rounds 1 and 2 and the connecting walls in Round 3 were identified by Greek letters. In series 4 Coren Mitchell announced that this idea had been dropped, ostensibly due to viewer complaints that it was too pretentious, and that henceforth Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs (two reeds, lion, twisted flax, horned viper, water and the eye of Horus) would be used instead. The show's opening sequence continued to display Greek letters until series 5, when they were replaced with the hieroglyphs. In series 7 the "knockout" format was modified to a double-elimination tournament with the exception of the single-elimination final round, in a rule change that Coren Mitchell said that even she did not fully understand. This reduced the number of competing teams from 16 to 8, and the episodes from 16 to 13, compared with the previous series except Series 2. The number of competing teams was restored to 16 with Series 10, expanding the series to a total of 27 episodes.