For the past few months, I’ve taken to watching the game show Countdown. On the three days per week I’m working from home, I can usually watch it live. On office days, it’s necessary to catch up on the Channel 4 website.
If you’re not familiar with the programme, the general format is two contestants playing head-to-head over fifteen rounds. Four of these rounds involve arithmetic and one is the deciding conundrum at the end. Sticking with the theme of this blog, however, let’s focus on the other ten rounds, all about words and anagrams.
The appeal of the show is linked to its apparantly simple gameplay. Here’s an old episode demonstrating how the letters are chosen. Essentially, one of the contestants asks Rachel Riley to choose either a vowel or a consonant from two corresponding piles of lettered tiles. She then displays them on a board. Once nine letters are chosen, contestants then have 30 seconds to find the longest valid word.
I say the gameplay is apparantly simple because it’s underpinned by complex rules.
To ensure a suitable mixture of letters, the final selection must contain at least three vowels and four consonants. Most words in the Oxford English Dictionary are permitted as solutions, with some exemptions. Notably, American spellings have been disallowed for years unless they end in -ize, meaning flavor wouldn’t be valid, whereas realize would be. There is no specific caveat for other dialects such as Canadian, Australian, &c.
The most ruthless part is the scoring system. Only the contestant with the longer word receives any points unless both find a valid word of the same length. This can make it difficult to recover from a losing streak.
Because I watch the programme while working, however, I set myself a simpler challenge: to find a valid word of at least five letters. I would no doubt perform better by sitting down with a pencil and paper – particularly with the arithmetic – but that’s the level that works for me.
Gavin Cameron 