c4countdown

It's not at all unlikely, put it that way. Osman, in a Twitter Q&A the other day that I accidentally stumbled upon, mentions how neither he nor Alexander know the scores/correctness of answers before it is revealed, so there is that. But believe what you will. One thing to be aware of is that I...

Thomas Carey wrote:apterites like to go for those 4 large and 6 small picks pretty often.

Not surprised they keep winning if they're allowed to choose 10 numbers

Malcolm James wrote:R14

((7x6) - 5 -5) x 3 x 7 = 672

Or ((7+5) x (5+3)) x 7 = 672.

One episode that sticks in my mind is the one where a contestant, given DISCULOUR as the conundrum, incorrectly buzzed in with "discolour". To my surprise, the Wiki tells me that this happened not once, but twice: http://wiki.apterous.org/Episode_269 http://wiki.apterous.org/Episode_1075 H...

Giles wrote:Amazingly, PINNER isn't in the ODE.

No, it's in Middlesex

I have a question about the rules, and also one about an individual episode. (1) What happens if both contestants make the same declaration, but neither has written their answer down? (2) When did the following incident take place and what were the details? (I may not have remembered them completely...

Must admit I start every episode at 5 mins on Sky+ to miss out some of the bullshit, but did catch the end of this. So can't help, but didn't he also say something about "if you watch Pointless, you can't take part"? Surely this can't be policed very well. What Richard actually said was &...

What made me go for 4L, and again, this is presumably the same for other players, was seeing all the clever tricks you can do involving 4 large numbers, e.g. James Martin's classic 4L solve Yes, I'd seen that a few times - of course it looks rather more impressive than it actually is once you menta...

Well done to the contestants who won £11,500 yesterday by guessing "enzymology" in the category "words beginning with a vowel and ending in -ology", particularly as I didn't think it was a word (and they weren't sure either). But did anyone notice that Alexander Armstrong asked t...

I was hoping for ^ENGLISHED in R12, but it needs a capital E :evil: I thought of that as well - "to english" is an old verb meaning "to translate into English", and as far as I'm concerned verbs derived from proper nouns can be spelt with small initial letters (e.g. "hoover...

As I mentioned in my introductory post, I hadn't seen much of the programme since the days of Richard Whiteley until recently. One thing I've noticed is that it's now far commoner for contestants to pick four large numbers - something that used to be regarded as pretty exceptional. Over the years I ...

Definitely an improvement in my opinion. It restores the equal treatment of the two contestants that was lost when the 9-round format was abolished, and I think the programme has a better rhythm to it now. At first I thought they were going to introduce another ad break, but now the guest talk provi...

Pete Whitelock was one of my lecturers when I studied computational linguistics at the University of Edinburgh around 25 years ago - in fact I gave a couple of lectures in his place when he was absent! I think this is the first time I've seen the name of someone I've met in the credits of a TV progr...

Well, I matched his nine-letter word today and got the numbers game that neither contestant got, so I'm not feeling too bad about my performance. I think I'd still have been soundly thrashed though! Annoyingly, 4oD (on which I usually watch the show) was playing up today and hung several times, as w...

Hi - I've been following Countdown on and off since the early days but sort of lost interest when Richard Whiteley died. As I've had some time on my hands recently I decided to catch up with the show again. Unbeknownst to me I started watching in the middle of the 30th birthday championship and thou...