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When good TV goes bad: why the number's up for Countdown

Nick Hewer with Rachel Riley (right) and Susie Dent (left).
Nine-letter, charmless.. Nick Hewer with Rachel Riley (right) and Susie Dent. Photograph: Mark Johnston/Channel 4/PA

To paraphrase Shakespeare, some achieve the jumping of the shark, others have the jumping of the shark thrust upon them. To explain: it would be a tad unfair to blame the demise of Countdown on the death of Richard Whiteley; it’s not as if the show’s producers made an executive decision to have him rubbed out to cut costs. But it would also be disingenuous not to acknowledge the show’s painful decline since his passing, a decline during which the shark has been vaulted time and again.

SHARK No 1: the show’s inability to settle on a decent replacement for Whiteley. Warm, suave, ladies-of-a-certain-age’s man Des Lynam seemed the perfect successor, but when it became apparent that neither he (based in Worthing) nor the show (Leeds) were willing to relocate for the purposes of convenience, he was rejected like a bad organ. Des O’Connor came and went in a pastel-coloured blur of oily smarm and presentational incompetence. Then came Jeff Stelling, a fine broadcaster when it comes to communicating the giddy excitement of a late Hartlepool equaliser on Soccer Saturday, a fish entirely out of water on a pensioner-friendly TV quizshow.

Finally, in 2012, Countdown settled upon Nick Hewer. A man entirely lacking in stage craft, personal warmth or charisma, Hewer was previously best known for his “Yes, absolutely, Sir Alan” role in The Apprentice. Since moving to his front-of-house position, Hewer has been as ill-at-ease as a journeyman bass guitarist suddenly called upon to provide Slash-style shredding. He is, frankly, hopeless; his grey functionality the polar opposite of Whiteley’s freewheeling, gormless charm. When he attempts to weave an anecdote, time seems to stretch and warp like the liquid metal flesh of the T-1000. Except much less interesting than that sounds.

SHARK No 2: the failure to replace Carol Vorderman. The one thing anchoring Countdown to its glorious past was cut loose in 2008 in an unforgivably public display of cost-cutting. She was replaced by Rachel Riley, a ruthlessly efficient maths automaton seemingly assembled by a committee of single male World of Warcraft enthusiasts with but a tiny iota of Vorderman’s chutzpah and sense of the absurd. Since leaving Countdown, Vorderman has been living la vida loca in a way that somehow seems at odds with Riley’s froideur: learning how to fly planes, hanging out backstage with Rag’n’Bone Man and basically hammering home that she is not just too expensive for Countdown, she’s bigger than it as well. Truly, you don’t know what you’ve got till it, or in this case she, is gone.

SHARK No 3: a much smaller shark – perhaps a hammerhead, but a shark nevertheless – has been the show’s recent random selections of micro-celebrities to sit in Dictionary Corner alongside Susie Dent. The policy seems to be “flick to any page in the Red Pages and stick a pin in it” – recent “GODs” (Guardians of Dictionary) include June Sarpong, TV money-saving bore Martin Lewis, Jack Whitehall’s dad and the bloke who played Boycie.

Put it all together, and you have a Countdown that is a hunched, wan shadow of its glorious former self. Sclerotic, emaciated and atrophied: all of which, by coincidence, would be corking nine-letter winners.