Everything about Countdown Game Show totally explained
Countdown is a
British game show currently (March 2008) presented by Susie Dent,
Des O'Connor and
Carol Vorderman. It was the first programme aired on
Channel 4, and over fifty series have been broadcast since its debut on
2 November 1982. With over 4,000 episodes, it's one of the longest-running game shows in the world. The programme was presented by
Richard Whiteley for over twenty years, until his death in 2005. His position was taken over by
Des Lynam, who retired from the show in December
2006 and was replaced by Des O'Connor on
January 2 2007. A celebrity guest features in every programme, and provides a brief interlude before the first advertisement break.
The two contestants in each episode compete in three disciplines: eleven
letters rounds, in which the contestants attempt to make the longest word from nine randomly chosen letters; three
numbers rounds, in which the contestants must use
arithmetic to make a random target number from six other numbers; and the conundrum, a
buzzer round in which the contestants try to be first to solve a nine-letter
anagram. During the series heats, the winning contestant returns the next day until he or she loses or has accumulated eight wins. The best contestants are invited back for the series finals, which are decided in
knockout format. Contestants of exceptional skill have received national media coverage, and the programme as a whole is widely recognised and parodied within British culture.
History
Origins
Countdown is based on the
French game show
Des chiffres et des lettres (
Numbers and Letters), created by
Armand Jammot. The format was brought to Britain by Marcel Stellman, a Belgian record executive, who had watched the French show and believed it could be popular overseas.
Yorkshire Television purchased the format and commissioned a series of eight shows under the title
Calendar Countdown, which were to be part of their regional news programme
Calendar. As the presenter of
Calendar,
Richard Whiteley was the natural choice to present
Calendar Countdown - his daily appearances on both shows earned him the nickname "Twice Nightly". These shows were only broadcast in the Yorkshire area.
An additional
pilot episode was made, with a refined format, although it was never broadcast. A new British television channel,
Channel 4, was due to launch in November 1982, and bought the newly-renamed
Countdown on the strength of this additional episode.
Presenters
Calendar Countdown was presented by
Richard Whiteley, with
Cathy Hytner and Denise McFarland-Cruickshanks managing the numbers and letters rounds respectively. When
Countdown was commissioned for
Channel 4 the number of hostesses expanded further: Cathy Hytner and
Beverley Isherwood selected the letters and numbers tiles respectively, and calculations in the numbers rounds were checked by
Linda Barrett or Carol Vorderman. Vorderman, a
Cambridge graduate and member of
Mensa, was appointed as one of the numbers experts after responding to an advertisement in a national newspaper which asked for a young woman who would like to become a game show hostess; unlike almost any other game show hostess of the time, however, the advertisement also made it clear that the applicants' appearance would be less important than their being a talented mathematician.
Gradually the tasks performed by the extra presenters were taken over by Carol Vorderman, whose role within the show is now essentially that of co-presenter. The show was briefly taken off air following Whiteley's death in June 2005, but reappeared in October 2005 with
Des Lynam as presenter. On
September 30,
2006, Lynam said that he'd decided to leave the programme after
Christmas 2006. Lynam's departure was due to travel requirements for the demanding filming schedule, with the show recorded in
Leeds and Lynam living 250 miles away in
Worthing,
West Sussex. Channel 4 had tried an extra programme on Saturday in early 2006 which Lynam had agreed to, subject to part of the filming schedule being moved nearer to his home. However, viewers reacted angrily to the idea of the show leaving Leeds On 7 November 2006, it was announced that
Des O'Connor would succeed Lynam as host. Lynam's final show as
Countdown presenter was broadcast on
December 22 2006.
The other studio mainstay is Dictionary Corner, which houses a
lexicographer and that week's celebrity guest. Initially farmer & broadcaster
Ted Moult was on hand for verification. The role of the lexicographer is to verify the words offered by the contestants (see
Letters round rules) and point out any longer or otherwise interesting words available. The lexicographer is aided in finding these words by the show's producers, currently Michael Wylie and Damian Eadie. Many lexicographers have appeared over the years, but since her debut in 1992,
Susie Dent has become synonymous with the role, and has now made over a thousand appearances. The celebrity guest, sometimes known as the "Dictionary Dweller", also contributes words, and provides a short interlude at the end of the first section of the show. Dwellers have included
Jo Brand,
Martin Jarvis,
Richard Digance,
Geoffrey Durham,
Gyles Brandreth and
John Sergeant providing poems, anecdotes, puzzles and magic tricks.
Alison Heard replaced Susie Dent over the Winter of 2007-2008, whilst Dent was on maternity leave; however, Susie Dent returned to Countdown on 6th February 2008.
Character
Countdown quickly established
cult status within British television -- an image which it maintains today, despite numerous changes of rules and personnel. The programme's audience comprises mainly students, housewives and pensioners, In its mid-afternoon broadcast slot, the show draws about 1.7 million viewers every day — around half a million fewer than with Richard Whiteley presenting — and the Series 54 final, on
26 May,
2006, attracted 2.5 million viewers. Up to 2 million viewers had watched the show daily in its previous 4.15pm slot. The drop in viewers following the scheduling change, coupled with the show's perceived educational benefits, even caused
Labour MP Jonathan Shaw to table a motion in the
UK Parliament, requesting that the show be returned to its later time. Minor scheduling changes have subsequently seen the show move from 3.15 to 3.30 to 3.25.
In keeping with the show's friendly nature, contestants compete not for money but the
Countdown winner's teapot, which is custom-made and can only be obtained by winning a game on the programme. The prize for the series winner is a leather-bound copy of the twenty-volume
Oxford English Dictionary, worth
GB£4,000. However Series 31 winner David Acton refused this prize on account of his strict
veganism, instead opting for a
CD-ROM version of the dictionaries and donating the monetary difference to charity.
Since 2006, the series champion also receives the Richard Whiteley Memorial Trophy, in memory of the show's original presenter.
Though the style and colour scheme of the set has changed many times, the clock has always provided the centrepiece and, like the clock music composed by
Alan Hawkshaw, is an enduring and well-recognised feature of
Countdown.
Executive producer John Meade once commissioned Hawkshaw to revise the music for extra intensity; after hundreds of complaints from viewers, the old tune was reinstated.
Format
Countdown has occupied a tea-time broadcast slot since its inception. Currently an episode lasts around 45 minutes including advertising breaks. During the normal series, the winner of each game returns for the next day's show. If a player wins eight games, he's declared an "octochamp" and retires until the series finals. At the end of the series, the eight players with most wins (or the highest total score in the event of a tie) are invited back to compete in the series finals. They are seeded in a
knockout tournament, with the first seed playing the eighth seed, the second playing the seventh, and so on. The winner of this knockout, which culminates in the Grand Final, becomes the series champion. Each series lasts around six months, with about 125 episodes.
Approximately every four series, a Champion of Champions tournament takes place. For this, sixteen of the best players to have appeared since the previous Championship are invited back for another knockout tournament. The
producer, former contestant Damian Eadie, decides which players to include, but typically the tournament includes the series winners and other note-worthy contestants. Series 33 was designated a "Supreme Championship", in which 56 of the best contestants from all the previous series returned for another knockout tournament. Series 10 champion Harvey Freeman was declared Supreme Champion after beating Allan Saldanha in the final. There are also occasional special episodes, in which past contestants return for themed matches. For example, David Acton and Kenneth Michie returned for a rematch of their Series 31 final, while brothers and former contestants Sanjay and Sandeep Mazumder played off against each other on
20 December, 2004.
The game is split into three sections, separated by
advertising breaks. The first two sections each contain four letters rounds and a numbers round, while the last section has three letters rounds, a numbers round and a final "Conundrum". At the end of the first two sections, O'Connor poses an anagram with a
cryptic clue for the viewers at home, called the
Teatime Teaser - the solution is revealed at the start of the next section. When the Teatime Teaser was first introduced, the anagrams were seven letters long, but have since been extended to eight.
Letters round
Letter tiles are arranged face-down into two piles; one all
consonants, the other
vowels. The contestant chooses a pile, and Vorderman reveals the top tile from that pile and places it on the board. A selection of nine tiles is generated in this way, and must contain at least three vowels and four consonants. Then, the clock is started and both contestants have thirty seconds to come up with the longest word they can make from the available letters. Each letter may be used only as often as it appears in the selection.
Contestants write down the words they've found during the round, in case they've the same one. After the thirty seconds are up, the players declare the length of their chosen word, with the player who selected the letters declaring first. If either player hasn't written their word down in time, he or she must declare this also. The words are then revealed. If either player hasn't written their word down, that's revealed first; otherwise, the shorter word is shown first. Only the contestant with the longer word scores points; both score in the event of a tie. One point is scored per letter, except for nine-lettered words, which score eighteen points. If a contestant offers an invalid word then they score no points, if the second player reveals the same word as the first, this must be proved by showing the word to either the host or celebrity guest - whoever is closest. Finally, Dictionary Corner reveals the best word they could find from the selection, aided by the production team.
Any word which appears in the
Oxford Dictionary of English is allowable, as well as some inflections. Standard
inflections of
nouns and
verbs - for example,
escapes,
escaped and
escaping - are accepted even though not explicitly stated in the dictionary.
Comparative and
superlative forms of monosyllabic
adjectives - for example,
greater and
greatest - are valid although these too are not explicitly stated. For longer adjectives, the inflections must be stated explicitly. However, some words given in the dictionary are not permitted:
proper nouns (
Kurdistan),
hyphenated words (
re-embark), some
plurals of
mass noun (
mankinds), and words that occur only in combination - for example,
mistle is invalid as it's used only in
mistle thrush. Also, only British spelling is permitted -
American spellings and inflections, such as
flavor and
signaled, are invalid. The contestants then have thirty seconds to get as near to the target as possible by combining the six numbers selected with
addition,
subtraction,
multiplication and
division. despite two large numbers giving the best chance of the game being solvable exactly. Selections with zero or four large numbers are generally considered the hardest.
A "crucial Countdown conundrum" occurs if, before the conundrum, the leading contestant is ahead by ten points or fewer. The studio lights are dimmed and the first contestant to answer correctly wins the game. If the scores are level after the conundrum, additional conundrums are used until the match is decided.
» Example:
:Conundrum is revealed:
» ::
C H I N A L U N G.
:Contestant One buzzes, and says
launching, which scores 10 points.
Evolution
The rules of
Countdown are derived from those of
Des chiffres et des lettres. Perhaps the biggest difference is the length of the round;
DCedL's rounds are each 45 seconds long to
Countdown's 30. Also,
DCedL has a standard letters round as its final round, so there's no analogue to
Countdown's Conundrum finale. However,
DCedL has an alternative two rounds, called "duels", in which players compete to solve a mental arithmetic problem, extract two themed words, or spell a rare word. Other minor discrepancies include a different numbers scoring system (9 points for an exact solution, or 6 points for the closest inexact solution in
DCedL) and the proportion of letters to numbers rounds (11 to 3 in
Countdown, 8 to 4 in
DCedL).
The
pilot episode followed significantly different rules to the current ones. Most noticeably, only eight letters were selected for each letters round. If two contestants offered a word of the same length, or an equally close solution to a numbers game, then only the contestant who made the selection for that round was awarded points. Also, only five points were given for an exact numbers solution, three for a solution within 5, and one point for the closer solution, no matter how far away.
Until the end of Series 21, if the two contestants had equal scores after the first conundrum, the match was considered a draw and they both returned for the next show. A significant change in the format occurred in September 2001, when the show was expanded from nine rounds and 30 minutes to the current fifteen rounds and 45 minutes. The older format was split into two halves, each having three letters and one numbers game, with the conundrum at the end of the second half. When the format was expanded to fifteen rounds, Richard Whiteley jokingly continued to refer to the three segments of the show as "halves". Under the old format, Grand Finals were specially extended shows of fourteen rounds, but now all shows follow the same format.
The rules regarding which words are permitted have changed with time.
American spelling was allowed until 2002, and more unspecified inflections were assumed to be valid.
In September 2007 a new feature was added to the show, in which during a brief pause in the game Susie Dent explains the origin of a word or phrase which she's been researching. For the short time Susie was on maternity leave this addition wasn't continued; however, when Susie returned, on Wednesday 6 February 2008, she continued the feature once again.
25th Anniversary Celebrations
The first episode of
Countdown was repeated on
1 October 2007 on
More4 and on
2 November 2007 on Channel 4, as part of
Channel 4 at 25, a season of celebratory Channel 4 programmes as it celebrated its 25th birthday.
On
2 November 2007, Countdown celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary and aired a special 'birthday episode'. The two players were 2006 winner Conor Travers and 2002 winner
Chris Wills. However, for the rounds,
VIP guests selected the letters and numbers. Guests included
Gordon Brown,
Amir Khan and
Lord Attenborough. A statement from the French TV network
France Télévisions was read out on air by
Carol Vorderman to commend
Channel 4 on its success of Countdown. The network show the original, French version of the show,
Des chiffres et des lettres on the station
France 3.
Notable contestants
Since
Countdown's debut in 1982, there have been over 4,000 televised games and 57 complete series. There have also been twelve
Champion of Champions tournaments, with the most recent in June 2006.
Several of
Countdown's most successful contestants have received national media coverage. Teenager
Julian Fell set a record score of 146 in December 2002. More recently, fourteen-year-old Conor Travers became the youngest series champion in the show's history, gaining wide newspaper interest. At eight years old, Tanmay Dixit was one of the youngest players ever to appear on the show when he achieved two wins in March 2005. He also received press attention for his offerings in the letters round, which included
fannies and
farted. A couple of former contestants have returned to Countdown as part of the production team:
Mark Nyman (as producer, and occasional lexicographer in Dictionary Corner) and
Damian Eadie (the current series producer).
In 1998, sixteen celebrities were invited to play
Celebrity Countdown, a series of eight games broadcast every Thursday evening over the course of eight weeks. The celebrities included Whiteley's successor Des Lynam, who defeated
Siân Lloyd. The highest and lowest scores were posted in the same game when
Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall defeated
Jilly Goolden 47-9.
In popular culture
Countdown is often referenced and parodied in British culture. In the 2002 film
About a Boy, protagonist Will Freeman is a regular viewer of
Countdown.
Fairport Convention guitarist
Simon Nicol named one of his solo records
Consonant Please, Carol, echoing one of the show's most famous catchphrases. The programme is mentioned in an episode of British
sitcom Father Ted entitled "
The Old Grey Whistle Theft,"
Still Game (in the episode "Kill Wullie") and is also referenced in the very first episode of
Little Britain from 2003.
BBC impression sketch show,
Dead Ringers, parodies
Countdown numerous times, and another television programme,
The Big Breakfast, parodied
Countdown in a feature called "Countdown Under". Comedy show
A Bit of Fry and Laurie further lampooned
Countdown in a sketch entitled
Countdown to Hell.
Fry played
Richard Whiteley, while
Gyles Brandreth got the word
sloblock — an anagram of
bollocks. The show also has a fleeting reference in British sitcom
The Office when Chris 'Finchy' Finch attempts to insult temporary worker Ricky when he explains he'd a job to pay for his studies. Finchy states that it probably was 'professor in charge of watching Countdown every day'. Commenting on its student audience, and referring to the fact anyone watching Countdown during its 'hometime' time slot can't be out at work.
Countdown has also generated a number of popular
outtakes, with the letters producing the occasional word that was deemed unsuitable for the original broadcast. A round in which Dictionary Corner offered the word
gobshite featured in
TV's Finest Failures in 2001, and in one episode, contestants Gino Corr and Lawrence Pearse both declared the word
wankers. This was edited out of the programme but has since appeared on many outtakes shows. Other incidents with only marginally rude words (including
wanker, singular) have made it into the programme as they appeared, such as those with Tanmay Dixit referenced above, and a clip from a 2001 episode in which the word
fart appeared on the letters board, which also featured on
100 Greatest TV Moments from Hell.
The format of the show has been parodied on
Have I Got News for You. In
1999, when Richard was a guest, the numbers game was copied along with the famous clock music and at the end of the show was a conundrum, the conundrum was "PHANIOILS", to which the answer was
IAN HISLOP. In 2004, when Carol was a guest one of the usual rounds was replaced with a conundrum round based on the week's news. When Carol hosted the show in
2006, one of the rounds was the "Spinning Conundrum Numbers Round", altering the "Spinning Headlines" round, by adding a number to a picture relating to the week's news, then at the end of the round the 6 numbers from the picture were used for a numbers game.
The
Doctor Who episode "
Bad Wolf" (2005) mentions a futuristic version of
Countdown, in which the goal is to stop a bomb from exploding in 30 seconds. It was referenced again in a later series in "
Last of the Time Lords" (2007), where Professor Docherty expresses a keen fondness for the show.
Richard Whiteley was the victim of a practical joke while presenting the show. The contestants and rounds had been planted as part of a "Gotcha!", a regular prank feature on the light entertainment show
Noel's House Party. Whiteley didn't uncover the joke until
House Party presenter
Noel Edmonds appeared on the set at the end of the programme.
Further Information
Get more info on 'Countdown Game Show'.
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