History Series / OnlyConnect

* TheLastOfTheseIsNotLikeTheOthers: In the Missing Vowels round, which requires the contestants to decode four phrases related to a given clue, it sometimes happens that the fourth phrase relates to the clue in a different way from the first three. In one case, the clue is ROI, and the first three phrases are expansions of the acronym R.O.I. but the fourth is a definition of the French word ''roi''.

Answer: [[spoiler:ONLY CONNECT]]

* Series 14 (2018-19): The Dicers (George Corfield, Hugh Binnie, Joey Goldman[[note]]who is the only person to have won both ''Only Connect'' and ''Series/UniversityChallenge'', winning in 2017 as the captain of Bailliol College, Oxford[[/note]])

** In Season 19, Victoria continually plugs her new murder mystery novel that was in no way influenced by Creator/RichardOsman's ''Literature/TheThurdsayMurderClub''.

* LongTitle: In one closing gag, Victoria announces a video-game tie-in called ''Only Connect Rise of the Shadow Warriors Battle of the Gilgamesh Ultimate Warfare: Deluxe Edition 4 The Dawn of Justice vs Sonic at the Olympics''.

* SuddenDeath: In the event of a tie, there is one last missing vowels question with no category provided, for team captains only. A correct answer wins; an incorrect answer automatically forfeits.

** One of the teams in Series 10 was the Nørdiphiles. When they faced a team whose name also contained an o, it proved contagious, with their opponents being listed as the Bibliøphiles in all onscreen graphics.

->"''Oh look. It's us, again. Yes, like a bad case of glandular fever ''Only Connect'' is back. Our connections are still so obtuse you could put them in a railway station and call them a help desk. Our wall still as messed up as a sensitive teenage lover dumped in public. And our final round still has as many missing vowels as the text messages they send pleading to be taken back.''"\\
-->--Victoria Coren Mitchell, introducing Series 8

--Victoria Coren Mitchell, introducing Series 8

* BaitAndSwitchComparison: Lampshaded and then subverted in an episode outro where Victoria refers to ''Only Connect'' by the abbreviation "OC", then says that it's important not to get it confused with ''Series/TheOC''.
-->'''Victoria:''' One is a drama of life, love, rivalry, and shimmering sexual tension (I genuinely don't know if I'm going to reverse this comparison or not) set in Orange County, California. (No, I'm not.) The other is ''Only Connect''.

-->£10 in TabletopGame/{{Monopoly}} ↔ 18 points in UsefulNotes/FormulaOne ↔ Blue Crufts rosette ↔ Silver medal\\

-->Humperdinck → Quackmore → Donald → ???\\

** Victoria herself has appeared in a few clues: "People named Victoria", "People whose names are capital cities", the sequence { 6 → Connecticut → Heraldic gold → [[spoiler:(e.g.) Iowa]] } [[spoiler:spells out "VI.CT.OR.IA"]], and when "OC trivia" was used as an anagram as part of a cryptic crossword clue (the connection was that all four clues had "Victoria" as their answers).
** In the Champion of Champions of Champions special, the Sequences round included the sequence { Row 1 = Blue → Row 2 = Green → Row 3 = Purple → ??? } completely flummoxing the two returning teams who have already won their own series tournaments and are in the final round of having won against other former winning teams of other series. The answer? "Row 4 = Turquoise", the fourth color on the ''Only Connect'' Connecting Wall. This leads to a humourous rant from Victoria:

* UnexpectedlyObscureAnswer: For the Sequences Round, it's not uncommon for Victoria to have to accept alternate answers if the team can provide a sound reasoning for the fourth item in the sequence. One recent example is from Series 11 when one team had the sequence: "1.0, 2.0, 3.0" → "95, 98, Me", and answered with "7, 8, 8.1" for successive major releases of UsefulNotes/MicrosoftWindows (the third clue would have been "2000, XP, Vista"), which Victoria said was an acceptable answer, even though their question writers had given the answer as "7, 8, 10".

* {{Troll}}: The Board Gamers in S8 are so named because of their interest in strategy games like ''TabletopGame/{{Carcassonne}}'' and ''TabletopGame/SettlersOfCatan''. Throughout the series, Victoria trolls them by introducing them instead with references to ''Monopoly'', ''Pictionary'', ''Operation'' and ''Kerplunk!''.

* NamesTheSame: Invoked in a sequence question in the 2011 UsefulNotes/ComicRelief special, where the four items in the sequence were Music/PeterGabriel's first four solo albums: [[SelfTitledAlbum 'Peter Gabriel', 'Peter Gabriel', 'Peter Gabriel', and 'Peter Gabriel']].
-->'''Michael Bywater''': 'Peter Gabriel' was the best, though.\\
'''Victoria''': I liked that one... By 'Peter Gabriel', he'd kind of gone off.

* Series 14 (2018-19): The Dicers (George Corfield, Hugh Binnie, Joey Goldman[[note]]who is the only person to have won both Only Connect and ''Series/UniversityChallenge'', winning in 2017 as the captain of Bailliol College, Oxford[[/note]])

* Series 14 (2018-19): The Dicers (George Corfield, Hugh Binnie, Joey Goldman)

** Victoria herself has appeared in a few clues: "People named Victoria", "People whose names are capital cities", the sequence { 6 → Connecticut → Heraldic gold → [[spoiler:(e.g.) Iowa]] } ([[spoiler:spells out "VI.CT.OR.IA"]]), and when "OC trivia" was used as an anagram as part of a cryptic crossword clue (the connection was that all four clues had "Victoria" as their answers).

* WikiWalk: WordOfGod, courtesy of the question editor, is that this is a useful tool for question writing Only Connect questions. Complete with a link to the relevant ''Webcomic/{{xkcd}}'' strip. Wiki/ThatOtherWiki, however, is not accepted as a credible source for OC question writers.

* {{Corpsing}}: The Music/OneDirection [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-v29pf4Dow incident]], where Victoria corpses twice while reviewing a team's answers from the Connecting Wall.