c4countdown

...Susie Dent be as a contestant?

Would be interesting to see. There's no reason to believe she'd be exceptionally good at the letters just because of her linguistic knowledge, anagramming is an almost completely unrelated skill, but I still expect she'd be better than most contestants, since she'll know a lot of the classic 'Countdown words' from having had to repeat them so many times.

Considering she has Damian in her ear, I'd say it's impossible for us to know. I genuinely have no idea what % of DC offerings she comes up with herself, therefore it wouldn't be a particularly massive shock to learn she was fairly poor at the game. Equally she could be really good, although for some reason I find myself more drawn towards the other extreme. Not entirely sure why that is but it's probably built up in my subconscious from watching hundreds of shows - dunno, little things like when somebody declares a word DC hadn't got, she spends a while making sure all the letters are there. That may of course just be part of being the official adjudicator, but it doesn't immediately suggest that she's juggling those letters like an aptopro. There's probably other stuff too that doesn't come readily to mind.

How good would Rachel be? At least as good as any apterite at numbers, and she has a pretty solid track record of finding longer words than DC and getting conundrums no-one else in the studio has got.

A Rachel v Susie special has been oft mentioned. It'd be excellent, but I don't think it would ever happen unfortunately.

I reckon Rachel would octo.
Not sure about Susie, it's always hard to say. You'd expect her to be pretty good at the letters but no evidence about the numbers games.