c4countdown

I felt bad for James when he misdeclared 'ropiest' as an eight instead of a seven in R10 on today's episode. This was shared by Nick in particular, who half-suggested making an exception and allowing him to still have seven points, along with Maureen Lipman's backing. It got me thinking that there should be perhaps a way of reducing the amount of misdeclarations. I say this especially as it seems to happen quite a bit and more so in recent years.

Anyway, following today's episode, it came to me that all contestants could be told to always right the number of letters next to the word on their pad, so that if they misdeclare, they can show on the pad that (as Maureen pointed out with James) they meant to say something else. Writing down the number of letters next to the word would also be a way of double checking that you know the length of your word and therefore reducing the possibility that you may have to prove it by showing your pad (which could be done off screen anyway). This could be applied to the numbers game too, by showing that your solution does show that you were for example - 3 away from the target and not 4 away as you accidently declared.

Just a thought. What are yours?

I often did write down the length of my word next to the word itself if I had time, but it wasn't intended to be any kind of supporting evidence, it was just an extra check for myself to make it a bit less likely that I would somehow say the wrong number. Sure, if you fleetingly think ROPIEST has 8 letters that might not stop you writing down "ROPIEST 8", but I expect if you looked at your pad and saw "ROPIEST 8" staring back at you then that might make you notice the mistake. Requiring all contestants to write down their word length seems a bit far, though, especially as misdeclarations are quite rare anyway.

In the numbers game, where a contestant has gone back to correct something they've done one or two steps ago, Rachel has sometimes asked the contestant if their correction is what they've got written down.

This got me thinking though, why are the contestants asked to declare the length of their word at all? Why not just ask each contestant what their word is without asking for the lengths first? The obvious reason is that the length declaration stage gives the contestant the opportunity to state that they haven't written their word down, but that didn't apply in the early days of the programme - it used to be that if one player offered the same word as their opponent it was taken on faith. So there must have been another reason to have it when Countdown first started.

It was probably that if the contestants declared the length of their words, it made it harder to simply copy your opponent's word all the time, but that would only really be true if the second player to announce their word's length was always the first player asked for their word if the lengths were the same. I don't know if they did things in a definite order in the early years of Countdown though.

If you can't count to 7 under the pressure of being on national television, Countdown probably isn't for you.

Watching the show i thought the contestant must have misspelt it with an extra e in the middle (ROPEIEST) rather than misdeclaring.

Zubair Patel wrote:Watching the show i thought the contestant must have misspelt it with an extra e in the middle (ROPEIEST) rather than misdeclaring.

That's exactly what the subtitler thought, as when I scrolled back I saw that ropeiest with the extra 'e' appeared on the screen. However, watching that part 2 or 3 times I am convinced he declared Gropiest, which I think was only the other day declared by a contestant and subsequently disallowed. If that was true, he declared 8 correctly, so I'm not sure why the contestant on Friday didn't correct Maureen, Susie and Nick who all thought he miscounted, so all in all it was a bit of a mysterious few minutes!

I think it's obvious why you can't score any points for this.

Player one has ROPIEST for 7 but misdeclares it as an 8. Player 2 then thinks, crap better try and 8 then. Their 8 is disallowed but played 1 gets his 7 points for the length of his word.

My sister was a recent example where she declared FLOUNCE as a 6 not a 7. She explained she had UNCLE first and then saw FLOUNCE so thought it was just 1 letter more. Again, you declare a 6 when you have a 7 and your opponent then sticks with 6. You say your 7 and get the points and they didn't get the chance to risk their 7.

Opens up a can of words, have to leave it as it is.

Andy Platt wrote:If you can't count to 7 under the pressure of being on national television, Countdown probably isn't for you.

It is supposed to be a letters and numbers game.

If you can calculate sums in the numbers round correctly then counting the number of letters in your word should be quite simple.

Philip Wilson wrote:

Zubair Patel wrote:Watching the show i thought the contestant must have misspelt it with an extra e in the middle (ROPEIEST) rather than misdeclaring.

That's exactly what the subtitler thought, as when I scrolled back I saw that ropeiest with the extra 'e' appeared on the screen. However, watching that part 2 or 3 times I am convinced he declared Gropiest, which I think was only the other day declared by a contestant and subsequently disallowed. If that was true, he declared 8 correctly, so I'm not sure why the contestant on Friday didn't correct Maureen, Susie and Nick who all thought he miscounted, so all in all it was a bit of a mysterious few minutes!

I thought he said gropiest too.