At the risk of sounding like Prince Harry, the press can sometimes be misleading. There were widespread headlines a couple of weeks ago saying “Victoria Coren Mitchell blasts New York Times for blatant TV rip-off!” In two cases, I think the “blasts” became “slams”. In another, it was “tears into”.
But I did nothing so violent! If only you could have seen how carefully I crafted my words to imply a sort of… insouciance. A raised eyebrow. A gentle tickle. I don’t really understand defamation law, never mind copyright (nobody does, which is why the legal profession is such a smart trade to go into), so I avoided any blasting, slamming or even asserting. Everything was as polite as Miss Marple asking delicate little questions over tea.
I don’t know if you saw the hoo-ha? That august institution The New York Times has launched a new online game to sit alongside its popular puzzle apps – like the big hitter Wordle, which has 85 per cent of the Western world trying to guess a daily five-letter word and usually succeeding, only sometimes shouting “Caulk?! Agora?! I’ve got a four-letter word for whoever came up with that!”
The new game is called Connections. It involves a grid of 16 jumbled-up words which need sorting into four connected groups of four. Is that description familiar to you? It is to me – screamingly so – because I have said it in pretty much every episode of a quiz I’ve been hosting on the BBC for 15 years. I have said that sentence a lot of times. I suspect the only phrases I’ve used more often in my lifetime are “Hello and welcome to Only Connect” and “Ooh, do you not want the rest of those chips?”
So, when hundreds of strangers and several colleagues were in touch to say, “Have you seen The New York Times is ripping off Only Connect?”, I could see where they were coming from. Whether it’s a rip-off or a coincidence I have no idea, but it seemed disingenuous to make no comment at all. Underneath the NYT associate puzzle editor’s launch tweet (“Very exciting to share the game I’ve been working on, Connections! I’ve loved making it and hope you enjoy playing”), I posted a reply: “Do you know this has been a TV show in the UK since 2008?! It’s so similar, I guess you must do?”
I didn’t mean this as a blast, a slam or even an accusation. It was purely an interested question. In fact, the main thing that’s aroused my suspicion as a poker player is the fact that two weeks have gone by and she hasn’t replied. I’m not one to set too much store by Twitter numbers, but my question has so far had 433,000 interactions, 11,800 likes and 244 replies, most if not all of which copied in the NYT associate puzzle editor. So, if this were a poker game, I’d make a decent bet she’s seen it. Why not reply, “I didn’t know that, but I’ll look out for the show!” or similar? Isn’t that what you’d do, if it really were a coincidence and we are all like-minded puzzlers/broadsheet readers/intellectually curious consumers of the world?
Well, nothing’s a certainty in betting. Perhaps she hasn’t seen it.
Do you know this has been a TV show in the UK since 2008 ?! It’s so similar I guess you must do?
— Victoria Coren Mitchell (@VictoriaCoren) June 13, 2023The next question is, what’s to be done about this? Well, that’s not up to me. I don’t own the rights. I have a small theoretical percentage, because of amendments I’ve made over the years, but I’m literally and figuratively a long way from the owner. We make the show with a little, brilliant, cottagey team of mostly Welsh creatives who have all been cottaging together since the early days (*note to self, rephrase this later) and the rights are held far above our heads by a giant multinational company, one or two of whose representatives I sometimes chat to and the rest are unknown. Maybe someone from there will write to someone on the equivalent level at the NYT and maybe they won’t. Not my call. But if it were…?
Ach, I dunno. Copyright, or “IP” as they like to say in TV circles, is so complicated and slippery, and I’ve been irritated in the past by others’ attempts to grip onto theirs in too miserly a fashion. Comedians can get too angry about other comics doing one of their jokes, for example. Whole relentless routines: maybe a problem. But the odd joke? If you love something, set it free.
And I hated that recent court case where Ed Sheeran was sued by the descendants of Marvin Gaye’s co-writer Ed Townsend on the grounds that his song Thinking Out Loud was too similar to Let’s Get It On. It wasn’t even Ed Townsend himself suing! It was some descendants who should count themselves lucky to have inherited the royalties from such a magnificent song they had no part in creating, never mind wanting a slice of Ed Sheeran’s work as well.
Shouldn’t music be out there at least partly to inspire other musicians, even if they borrow whole snatches like TS Eliot did in his poetry? In this case, Sheeran didn’t even do that! Am I Ed Townsend’s descendants in this analogy? Is The New York Times Ed Sheeran?
I suppose if it were up to me, I’d want the NYT to mention Only Connect on the same page as its Connections game. Even if it’s an honest accident, that would seem the elegant and collegiate thing to do.
But it’s not up to me. Which, as with most things, is probably for the best.
The new series of Only Connect begins on BBC Two later this month
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