Only Connect’s ‘Impossible’ Question That Left Contestants Completely Stumped

A deceptively simple question about English counties left an Only Connect team struggling to find the connection — and even after they committed to an answer, the real pattern was still far from obvious.

Known for its fiendishly difficult questions, BBC Two’s Only Connect regularly challenges contestants to spot links between clues that appear to have little or nothing in common.

One particular question from a 2023 episode proved especially frustrating for the Stitchers team.

Three clues — but what was the connection?

The team was shown three clues, with a fourth hidden behind a question mark:

3 in Cambridgeshire
2 in Staffordshire
1 in Hertfordshire
?

The challenge was not simply to identify what the numbers represented. The contestants also had to work out the underlying connection and predict what the missing clue should be.

The Stitchers team struggled to see where the clues were leading.

They considered several possible explanations, including whether the numbers referred to universities or military bases located in the respective counties.

Eventually, they settled on an answer of “0 in Buckinghamshire.”

Unfortunately for the team, that was not correct.

The opposing team finds the answer

With the Stitchers unable to solve the connection, the question passed across to their opponents, the Gunners.

The Gunners offered “0 in Rutland” — and this time, they had it right.

Host Victoria Coren Mitchell also explained that “0 in Dorset” would have been accepted as a valid answer.

But the Gunners initially had their own theory about what the numbers represented. They believed the clues referred to the number of cathedrals in each county.

That wasn’t the connection either.

The surprisingly simple link

The actual answer was based on the number of cities in each English county.

Cambridgeshire has three cities: Cambridge, Ely and Peterborough.

Staffordshire has two: Stoke-on-Trent and Lichfield.

Hertfordshire has one: St Albans.

That left counties such as Rutland and Dorset, which have no cities, making either “0 in Rutland” or “0 in Dorset” a correct answer.

Once the connection was revealed, the pattern became much easier to understand. But getting there required contestants to look beyond the obvious interpretations of the numbers and identify what linked the counties themselves.

Why Only Connect can be so difficult

This is exactly the kind of puzzle that has made Only Connect one of television’s most challenging quiz shows.

Rather than simply testing knowledge, the programme asks contestants to identify relationships between apparently unrelated pieces of information — often with only a small number of clues to work from.

In this case, the numbers 3, 2 and 1 were not the answer themselves. They were pointing toward the number of cities within each county, while the missing clue required contestants to predict a county with no cities at all.

For the Stitchers, that connection remained elusive until the question was passed to their opponents.

And once the answer was explained, the seemingly impossible puzzle suddenly made perfect sense.