Working Lives: Quiz editor

WORKING LIVES

Question editor

BBC J

ack Waley-Cohen and David McGaughey have been question editors on cult BBC Two show Only Connect since 2017. Over the years, they have also written questions for the fiendishly tricky quiz – and appeared, with some success, as contestants.

What does the job involve? You need to know how to put together good quiz rounds, balancing easier and harder questions. And, literally, you need to edit questions – rewording, reframing or even flipping them. You then have to get questions and answers verified. You also need a deep under standing of the show, so you can bring its character out in the questions.

How did you become question editors? We did a lot of question writing in the quiz world and put on quizzes through our company, QuizQuizQuiz, and made connections. Only Connect

What’s your advice for someone wanting to become a question setter? Learn how to write good, gettable questions – that’s the hardest skill.

What makes a good question? Writing a question that makes people realise they know something they didn’t think they knew – they grab something within themselves and find the answer. Only Connect is almost that by definition – you start with something in the first clue that they have no idea about and, by the end, they’ve cleared the forest and can see the answer. On Only Connect, there is more poten tial ambiguity and creativity in the answers; on other, more straightforward, quiz shows, if we are writing questions with lots of potential answers, we’re not doing our job properly.

Can questions fall flat? Occasionally, questions can totally miss the comfort zones of the contestants. They don’t know something you could have reasonably expected at least one of the six quizzers on Only Connect to know. It is worse when a question is too hard and also boring, so, not only can they not get the answer, they also don’t care. That’s dreadful when that happens, although, thankfully, it is very rare. A question can also fall flat by being too easy.

Which question are you most proud of? In round one, teams are given up to four clues, one by one, and have to find the connection between them. 1 Claudius and Seneca’s Apocolocyntosis; 2 Tomato and an 1893 US Supreme Court declaration; 3 Graham Taylor and a Sun front page on 24 November 1993; 4 Carriage at midnight and Cinderella. [The answer is on the next page.] It’s a nice example of bringing things in from everywhere: it’s got classics, history, football and fairy tales. We were