As it’s a bit quiet, there will be a Question Too Esoteric For Only Connect later.
Er, I can’t bring it to you just yet, I know what the question is going to be but I need to research the elements. Still though, watch this space!
Edit: Sorry, that’s all gone a bit wrong, a question will be done for another time. In the meantime for those people who arrive at the bar through rather interesting search terms, a clip from the gunge tank game from The Noel Edmonds Saturday Roadshow from the late eighties. Unfortunately a minute of the game part gets edited out.
A later version of this game involved the contestant solving five word clues and picking five prizes, trying to keep the value of the prizes under 100 points, never being told what each prize is worth.
Make this clip 1 of an odd video-based QTE.
Never mind that, it’s Gottschalk’s Haus Party!
From this and the few vids I’ve seen, it appears that the only colour of gunge they could afford was yellow.
Can I set a question?
I hope I don’t trip up David B this time, as I did with the ITV station symbols. In fact, it may not be impossible to get five points from this one, if you think hard enough:
Clue 1 is Croydon.
Places with tram systems?
Places with closed airports?
Ooh, yes, could be. It’s now a Costco! (Incidentally, what is the deal with Costco? More expensive than Tesco, worse stock selection than Booker Cash and Carry – why would anyone go there?)
We shop at Costco from time to time! The nearest one to us is up by the Metro Centre in Gateshead.
More expensive than Tesco? Hmm. Certainly it’s often not quite as cheap as perhaps you would think, but it has big bulk packs like 35 500ml bottles of water at about 10p each, compared to about 25p each at supermarkets. (Or, y’know, drinking tap water, but this is not my decision to make.) The cans of Coke are generally cheaper than other supermarkets except when supermarkets are doing their best special offers.
There’s a relatively good selection of American products, the meat counter is extensive, the bakery looks really good if you’re buying industrial quantities of products and the cafe is, well, cheap and cheerful fun for a supermarket cafe. We go to Makro from time to time because it’s much closer and that has little to recommend it compared to Costco, except locality. However, what you say makes me want to see if we can get to Booker.
Let me explain further: Costco has the potential to be awesome. It has the space, but equally it has some really bonehead stock decisions.
For instance: they stock tubs of Chicken OXO cubes, but not the Beef or Vegetable ones. They stock salted butter in many different forms, but not unsalted butter (which, actually, is by far the one you’d use most of in large quantities – ask any caterer).
I don’t really understand what Costco is for. What kind of shop feels the need to sell frozen chicken nuggets AND 10 megapixel cameras?
Have you ever visited Target in the US? Meg bemoans the hypermarkets in the UK’s lack of ability to stock “everything” in the way Target does (Asda tries but falls short) and Costco comes as close as she has yet experienced in the UK. We once went through the door to the big display of fifty huge TVs, and they were all tuned to VH-1, which was playing Top ’80s Hit Videos or somesuch. We came in at a point where we were Rickrolled times fifty.
Fully agreed about unsalted butter, and the stock decisions you identify do sound baffling.
American stuff? Would this include American soda?
Can’t imagine Roy Walker in Victoria’s role, but anyway:
“Places with tram systems?” It’s good but it’s not right.
“Places with closed airports?” Riiiiiiiiiiiiiight! Well done CMD.
The other clues I would have given were Heston, Hendon and Fairlop. (RAF airfields can be considered military airports, so those at the latter two count.)
FWIW, I’ve been doing horribly terribly with the actual questions on the show (enjoying them at least as much as ever, though) and have been meaning to whingingly ask whether the first round questions this year really aren’t harder than the first round questions last year. Nice to be able to get two in a row where it “counts”, though…
The concensus is that show 2 was the easiest one for a while, and people of a certain 30-mumble something found a lot of references to their liking in show 3. But they’re not conciously easier or harder than the usual standard. If you have two good teams, like on ep 1, it doesn’t give the viewer much of a chance to play along.
If everybody whinges about it, it’s probably about right. As ‘they’ say.
Wot, no North Weald?
North Weald may be unlicensed, but it still hosts several fly-ins and air shows, like this one:
http://www.airshows.co.uk/reports/uk/2010/north-weald-gathering-of-warbirds/
So one can’t really say it’s closed completely.
Apropos of nothing, here’s a fun thing:
http://tinyurl.com/mysterylocale
Awesome, I knew it was on Google Maps but I had never bothered actually looking it up before.
Doesn’t the Wipeout Zone look rubbish without lights and water?
Now, that’s the US one found – now let’s hope the rest of the world version course gets snapped by the Google satellite…
What specifically connects
Mark Watson
Eleanor Oldroyd
Sid Waddell and
Clare Balding
but excludes all of
Greg Brady
Stephen Fry
Hugh Laurie and
Steve Bunce?
(Or, I suppose, what do I think is the most interesting connection between the four above, etc.)
Help us out here – has it anything to do with Fighting Talk or not?
I don’t claim this would come close to making the grade as an Only Connect question. That certainly would be a good link between the four without the exclusion, but the exclusion makes things more specific and the connection slightly more interesting. (Your definiton of “interesting” may vary, of course!)
Yes, I will provide help, but perhaps not after one guess and one hour. 🙂
I can’t remember if Sid Waddell has been a contestant, but have they all hosted?
Nope, it’s not that, nor is it people who got the Golden Envelope round right.
You could check!
(In truth, he was disappointingly only quite good, rather than as great as you might hope.)
A clue.
What connects
Mark Watson
Eleanor Oldroyd
Sid Waddell
Clare Balding
Stephen Fry and
Hugh Laurie?
The answer isn’t on WP for Oldroyd, so if you’ve been looking there then play the Windows XP startup tune at yourself and deduct a point.
It is nothing to do with Cambridge University, is it?
“I’ll give you one more try…”
They got Firsts from Cambridge. Wadell famously so.
Mmm, good stuff. I was well aware Sid Wadell got his History degree here (St Catherines, I think it was?) and guessed Mark Watson and Claire Balding probably came here, was well aware about Fry and Laurie (you could have added Richard Whiteley and Carol Vorderman) to the exclusion list as well, of course.
Of course the other connection is that they are all less good than Bob Mills, obviously.
If they did all take Firsts then I have got very lucky indeed; I had intended that the connection between the original four was “people who studied at Cambridge University then went on to appear on Fighting Talk”, with the exclusions referring to people with only one half of this distinction.