Oh today was a landmark in afternoon tv viewing. We had our young grandson with us and he was keeping us pretty busy but I caught about 15 minutes of Countdown. I don’t watch a lot of it these days because the latest host Nick Hewer’s a bit too earnestly dull for my taste. Though Rachel Riley’s figure work is still impressive.
Anyway the two contestants today were a seemingly nice lady and this pretty old chap who seemed avuncular and just a bit dipsy, like he might have had a reassuring sherry or two beforehand. Just to settle the nerves. Or he might have lost a couple of marbles over the years, poor old sod. Well he was all over the place. On the first word game he offered the 7 letter word ‘Enquire’ (or something similar) although there wasn’t an E to be seen as Dictionary Corner’s Susie Dent pointed out. Bless him. In the next game he admitted to having miscounted his E’s again. Ahh. On the third game the letters came up something like WLOIGRANT and he told Nick he thought he might have a 5 letter word. And, yep, when prompted he came up with ‘Grant.’ Bloody inspired. There was one word game where 4 out of the first 5 letters in Countdown happened to appear and you couldn’t help wondering if he’d noticed this sequence too. He hadn’t. He wasn’t too bad on the numbers; actually winning one game but he wasn’t within 20 on the other games I saw. And the answers were pretty obvious. Never mind, perhaps he didn’t use arithmetic much in his career…as an accountant!
I got up and left at this point to pop to the shops with my grandson. Just as he was heading to the lowest score ever seen on Countdown and I had to go, I couldn’t watch any more. Surely they should have screened the old lad to test his acumen beforehand or at least kept an eye in him in the green room.The nice thing was he didn’t seem to give a monkey’s, just uttering the odd ‘oh bother’ after each slip up. He made me smile.
I couldn’t help thinking this might be me in a few years smiling at Nick’s replacement, Chris Moyles, as the random letters come up YUTOSSPOT.
Ahh.
pp
Pasta Paulie 