Rhys Benjamin wrote:1. Get a good presenter.
I quite like Nick, actually. Rachel certainly likes him, anyway.
If he did go, though, then Damian and his team might as well bite the bullet and go down the same route as HIGNFY and Never Mind the Buzzcocks...
2. Put Countdown back to an erstwhile time. The prime-time specials show that there is a market for Countdown (8/10 cats #1 was third that week). Countdown is watched by students and elderly (mainly). The elderly aren't surviving, and the students are still at school/tucked up in bed at 2:40pm. After I advertised Countdown on Twitter, a friend of mine went: "What's it doing at 2:40?!". It also makes the phrase "TEATIME teaser" redundant.
I haven't seen anyone, anywhere, disagree with this point yet.
But will Channel 4 listen? They certainly didn't when they moved the show from 4:15 to 3:15 in the autumn of 2003...
3. Switch it back to half an hour. This would rejuvenate Channel 4's afternoon schedule as: 1:30pm FILM, 3:00pm Face the Clock, 3:30 Deal or No Deal, 4:30 Countdown, 5:00 Come Dine With Me. I often turn on about halfway through and I'm not quite sure which round we're on, especially if it's round 7 or 8.
Not gonna happen any time soon, unfortunately.
4. Do away with those HIDEOUS new displays. For anyone who read the spoilers thread yesterday, I have fully recovered by looking at Comic Sans MS in Green on Pink.
As has already been said, this change was necessary.
However, I don't see the point of these displays using the
exact same colour scheme as the letter and number tiles.
Couldn't they be yellow-on-black, or at least a different shade of blue?
5. Have more prolific DC guests.
Well, bring in some more old game show hosts, anyway. And make Gyles a regular again.
6. Definitely need better continuity.
7. Definitely need trailers and the like to be shown at prime time.
I wouldn't say "definitely", TBH.
And one thing the show definitely
doesn't need is overexposure like Deal or No Deal.
8. Have more Countdown documentaries like they did in the late 90's and early 00's.
Those documentaries were only made for special occasions, AFAIK.
9. Repeat classic Countdown episodes from the late 90's and early 00's. Time can be whenever you like.
The only channel that could realistically do that is Challenge - and even then they'd probably only acquire one or two series' worth of episodes, just as (at the time of this post) they've only acquired the first year of DOND and the first series of Bob's Full House.
10. Go back to the old 14-round final. It always gave more of a sense of occasion.
Maybe so - but then that would require getting rid of the 15-round format, and probably going back to half-an-hour for all other episodes (see #3).
"The atmosphere is so tense, if Elvis walked in with a portion of chips, you could hear the vinegar sizzle on them." - Sid Waddell 1940-2012