Fixing Only Connect

Only Connect, BBC 4 (er, 2's) rather cerebral quiz show is a favourite in our household. As of Series 10, it's clearly shown its worth, as it's moved to BBC 2. At the same time, the "play at home" feature has gone away. This allowed you to play the "wall" round at home, using a Flash website. This was a lot of fun, adding a lot more interactivity than would otherwise be possible. The other rounds, you can shout out your answers with everyone else, but the mechanics are such that without the play-along website you wouldn't really be able to get the same experience on the wall.

So, we lost the website. That made us sad. Looking up Only Connect on Facebook revealed a whole host of other people who were similarly disappointed. What is one to do in such situations?

Clearly the correct solution is to reverse engineer the website and add the walls for the new series. This is what I've done, and the result is up here. After ripping the Flash apart, it turns out it's configured from some very simple XML files. It really does make me wonder what the difficulty was in updating the website for the new series. Politics of some kind, no doubt.

In any case, the site's now up. I'm trying to keep it up to date with the new episodes. The sad thing is that I have to watch the program in order to enter the walls into the site, which means I can't play them fresh, but at least Caroline gets a go at them, and hopefully they're of use to anyone else who wants a go out there on the wider internet.

Posted 2014-09-16.