Just this second noticed a link to this and thought you’d find it interesting, it’s the pilot for Calendar Countdown. I’m putting this up whilst also watching it, so doubtless you’ll have some things to say when it’s finished:
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So far this is genuinely fascinating – I’d love to see some proper Laffont era Des Chiffres… to compare it to.
They’re trying out a lot of things with the rounds with regards to the lengths and things. Intriguing that if both have the same length word, only the person who picked the letters scores for it. And you can see why “pre-selected round” didn’t stick.
And I also like how taken aback Richard is by the “just buzz when you find a word” part, and also I like how bored everyone looks waiting for the Conundrum re-run to finish and I also like Ted Moult.
I like Cathy!
I have something to say. What the hell does parvenu mean? Also who let Cathy on telly wearing that?
What a find! It’s remarkable just how slick non-pilot Countdown looks in comparison and what a good job they did tightening the show up between the pilot and the real thing.
I also quite enjoyed the lazy end-of-the-row number selection, which I thought implied that they had rigged the pilot to give solvable games. SPOILER: (let’s see if font color=”white” works, and hope this comes up on a white background rather than a blue one) ((75+50)*4)+(5*7)+8 = 543
Dammit, just which HTML tags do work in this gerdinked thing?
According to some commented-out code in the comments form:
XHTML: You can use these tags:
<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>Read ’em, commit ’em to memory, use ’em.
I might stick that in the Contact bit for reference, thanks Iain.
If I’m right in thinking, Richard said in his book Himoff! that it was supposedly only on the morning of this pilot when Alan Hawkshaw came up with the music – he was in the toilet when he grabbed the back page of the Daily Telegraph and wrote the notes on it.
Whether or not this is actually true, it rather shows here.
Obviously, he made considerable improvements to his composition before the first C4 episode was filmed, as well as using it to come up with the familiar think music.
And of course, Joyce Cansfield was the champion of the first C4 series, beating the late Michael Wylie in the final, while Cathy Hytner continued as a hostess until 1987.
Fantasic. I love stuff like this. Love the first words on the show were “Stop..and reset”. Good job someone at Yorkshire decided that it wasn’t a good idea for the host to reset the clock whilst presenting the programme – get a studio sparky to do it.
I take it that this is actually the pilot for Caledar Countdown, rather than Channel 4 Countdown?
Twice nightly appeared on a show called TV’s greatest failures somewhere around 2000-ish and they showed clips of the original series of 6 which was broadcast to the ‘op north region only.
I wonder whose idea it was to drop the French original format round time of 45 secs, down to 30 before it was allowed out to wander round the mid afternoon schedule on Channel 4 since day 001?