It's a success story which may seem like it's come from nowhere but the truth is that TV quiz show Only Connect has been steadily building millions of viewers since it hit the screens more than a decade ago.
The other cool thing about Only Connect is that the show, which is BBC Two's highest-rated programme and often trounces EastEnders in the Monday night 8pm slot, is that it's filmed in an unassuming studio on an industrial estate in Splott, Cardiff. Enfys Studios to be precise.
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Once a year over two or three months, teams from all over the UK will descend on the studio, as well as host Victoria Coren Mitchell to film what's become the most head-scratching quiz on TV, of which they have made 400 episodes since it started back in 2009.
At the start it aired on BBC Four but its growing popularity saw it transferred to BBC Two where it now sits comfortably alongside University Challenge and the new series of MasterMind.
Co-creator and executive producer is Chris Stuart whose production company, Presentable, pitched and made the show at the start. Now it's made by RDF Television but Chris remains involved and has a unique take on why the show is so beloved these days.
"I think the British audience is unique in enjoying quizzes where they're not able to answer the questions," he said. "It's very hard to sell formats like ours, and I think like University Challenge or Mastermind, to any other territories, but in the UK, people seem to enjoy admiring quiz contestants who can answer things and who know stuff that they can't answer and don't know."
As a nation filled with passionate pub quizzers (other types of quiz venues are available) viewers lap up the format, which sees teams spot the connection between what appear to be unrelated clues.
Chris, who co-created it with Rob Thomas, added that there's no special formula to keeping the show going, other than a great question-writing team and that it's good fun.
"It's a fun quiz," he added. "The questions are often witty in themselves, it's making lateral connections between things so invites you to have fun as a question writer and I think there's an element of fun about Only Connect which often doesn't exist in brainy quizzes. They tend to be far more beetle-browed and serious. There's a sense in which everyone who comes to do Only Connect joins in the light-hearted spirit of it, even though the questions are tough."
And this is something host Victoria definitely backs up, she said: "I’ve always suspected that the thing people like most about Only Connect is that they don’t feel patronised by it.
"A lot of TV seems to assume the audience are idiots. We don’t necessarily assume our viewers can answer all the questions – God knows I can’t – but we assume they’ll get jokes, understand nuance, grasp complicated concepts and be interested in a wide range of things. "
Chris has lived in Cardiff for 50 years since moving here to be a trainee reporter in 1971 with Western Mail publisher, Thomson Regional Newspapers, as it was known.
He worked at and left the Western Mail, taking his band, Baby Grand, into their TV career on BBC where they had two television series about them. He also did the BBC Wales Breakfast Show for 10 years from the station's launch and he was a daily presenter on BBC Radio 2.
You could call him the 'Voice of the '80s' such was his audible presence, which then stretched into the 1990s with him commentating on Diana, Princess of Wales' funeral and he covered the Festival of Remembrance from the Royal Albert Hall for 20 years.
After setting up Presentable production company with with wife Megan, they hit the ground running years before Only Connect came into fruition with Late Night Poker for Channel 4, which is how they came to know Victoria Coren Mitchell, a successful and notable poker player as well as a TV presenter.
Enfys is where they also filmed Late Night Poker and it caught the imagination of TV viewers and global poker players alike with its groundbreaking filming through a clear table, so those watching could see the cards.
"There's a real family feel at Enfys, but at the same time, they're on top of their game. They're a really good team," said Chris. "When we did poker we had Ricky Gervais and Stephen Fry and Martin Amis, we had a lot of footballers, Teddy Sheringham, Matt Le Tissier, they all came to Splott.
"The poker players used to go into local shops to buy a pack of cigarettes and pull out rolls of 50 pound notes, in their cowboy boots on and gold bracelets," he recalled.
So getting Victoria was a no-brainer from the start? Well, they asked her to do the pilot as a favour and then it stuck, with the presence of the mischievously intelligent presenter one of the things which makes Only Connect stand out.
"She's a really special quiz host and she absolutely owns it, she's tremendous," Chris said. "She knows so much anyway, but the stuff she doesn't know she masters very quickly."
The questions definitely contribute to the show's appeal, too, and Question Editor Jack Waley-Cohen has the fun and interesting job of putting them together - with the help of a team of writers.
Is there a formula to the question writing, I ask, or is it a bit of pot luck?
A mixture of both, Jack revealed. "There can be a formula," he said. "But it is more about just getting in the right mindset, noticing things, extrapolating from simple things to slightly more complicated things, and then just digging around to see what might be out there.
"There is definitely luck involved - for example, when one of the long-term question writers spotted that the first letters of the capitals of Ecuador, Mongolia, Pakistan and Croatia were not only unique in that no other world capital begins with the same letters as their capital, but the spelt out an interestingly appropriate word."
Those capitals are Quito, Ulaanbaatar, Islamabad, Zagreb - can you figure out the word? It's quite an easy one.
Jack thinks the secret behind the show's success is the team who love to make it. He added: "It is a great show, made with such care and love and fun - it has found its feet, and is unashamedly confident to be what it is - much of that is down to Victoria, of course, who is an amazing host, who also loves the show, the contestants and the questions."
He joked: "Is it wrong of me to be irritated when we don't get more viewers than EastEnders sometimes these days?"
Back to Chris and the executive producer is very proud of how Only Connect has found its viewership, all three million of them, and how it's a Welsh success story, for sure.
"It's an all-Welsh story," he said. " It was conceived in Wales. It's staffed pretty much entirely by people who live and work here. Victoria constantly references Cardiff, and Wales on air. It emerged from a local production company, and it's become a phenomenon, without sounding vain. To our surprise, it's become this thing, which people are talking about as if it's always been there."
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