Encomiast

I'm just back from Countdown filming in Leeds. My first episode will be aired on Easter Monday, the bank holiday on 13th April.

What a rollercoaster. I arrived on Monday night, and went straight to the studios. I wanted to watch the last episode being filmed that day, because I was filming first thing in the morning and this was the only way I could see my opponent in action. I was snuck straight into the audience, and started getting excited as I matched both players' scores and was thinking, "Oh my God, I really can do this."

It was nice to get a feel for the set-up too, and interesting to see the warm-up guy (a lovely bloke called Dudley, who clocked me and started chatting with me straight away) do his job when there were breaks in the filming.

Afterwards I was shown back to the green room (effectively a backstage area for the contestants) where I met my opponent formally, and was glad that we were friendly with each other and both happy to wish each other good luck. A woman called Danielle showed me around a bit - it was part of her job to look after contestants, and she was a smiley woman who put me straight at ease. Then Kate Horton, one of the associate producers, came in and chatted to me for ages. Sadly one of the things she told me about was the news that ITV are in trouble. It turns out now that Countdown production is moving to Manchester and a high number of jobs will be lost, but on Monday they just knew their jobs were on the line. Given that all the staff were facing such a grim prospect they were especially professional, helpful and friendly throughout my time in Leeds. Kate even made a point of walking back towards the hotel with me, and we had a nice chat about motherhood and other things.

At this point I was feeling buoyant, but then I got back to the hotel room and looked back at my notes in more detail. It turned out I hadn't fared as well against that episode's winner as I'd thought, and I began to wonder whether I might lose my first game. I was worried about the numbers rounds as well. The challenger preferred a particular type of numbers game which I'd practised, but wasn't 100% confident about. I practised numbers for the next hour or so and kept swinging exaggeratedly from optimism to pessimism according to how I was doing.

I tried to do some more swotting with my word lists, but my brain was going into meltdown. It was a risky strategy, the whole word-list thing. It's only fair to acknowledge I'd been warned off it by better players than me, and with good reason. The basic premise was that I had picked 52 high-frequency 7-letter words. At least one of these words is likely to come up in each Countdown episode (and often a few times more), and the idea was that I would memorise all the 8-letter words that could be formed by adding one letter to the 7-letterers. This gave me hundreds of words, and in theory made it easy for me to spot 8-letter words (I could nearly always spot a 7 if there was one there, but I wasn't so hot at 8s).

But it's more complex than it sounds: First you have to know what those 52 7-letterers are. Then you have to be able to spot them. Then you have to know, out of all 26 letters of the alphabet, which will make an 8 when added to that word, and which won't. And you have to deal with the fact that it's possible to get more than one of the 52 7-letterers popping up in one letters selection. For instance, the selection L,A,S,N,I,E,T,E,R contains no less than nine of my 52 7s (ATELIER, EARNEST, ETERNAL, NAILERS, RELATES, RELIANT, RETAILS, SALIENT and STAINER) which is enough to blow your brain apart. It also contains a 9 (TREENAILS) which I could easily miss while trying to disentangle those nine 7-letterers, and all in 30 seconds. Or you might get something like SALIENTAC. SALIENT is on my 7-letter stems. Niether SALIENT + A nor SALIENT + C yields an 8-letter word. And yet there are some 8s there (ANALECTS, CANALISE, ESTANCIA) which use the extra A and the C. And then there's the problem of wasting 30 seconds running through one of those Derren-Brown-inspired stories I've been posting on the blog lately, only to discover that no 8 is available by that route.

And, what with being a busy mum and all that, I'd only just that day finished learning all 52 words and their accompanying 8-letterers (totalling about 600 words) and had a hell of a lot of revision to do before they would truly sink in.

All of these drawbacks were shouting at me, and I couldn't decide whether to abandon the whole project or keep banging my head against it. I'd contemplated giving it up several times in the previous fortnight, but every time I had I'd played another online game in which several of my 8-letterers popped up, and the potential reward was too tantalising. I kept staring at the flashcards I'd created (9 letters on one side, arranged in a grid, containing one of the 52 7-letterers plus two other random letters) and failing to spot what I was supposed to be able to spot. I tried lying down, I tried deep breathing, but nothing seemed to calm me down. In the end I went down in search of an alcoholic tranquiliser.

The hotel bar was odd. It was an extension of the reception desk, and was effectively part of the lobby. There were some comfy seats, but they were a bit exposed. There was also the dining area leading off to one side, and a giant TV screen with some kind of sporty thing going on (meaningless to me I'm afraid), so I ended up pacing back and forth between the dining tables, drinking my half of bitter (all I dared take, for fear of (a) killing my brain stone dead and (b) being hungover the next day) as fast as I could and feeling a bit silly.

As I was putting my glass back on the bar, a newcomer arrived and started chatting to the barman. I recognised him from somewhere. "I know you," I said, "but I can't think where from."

"I'm an actor," he replied.

"Of course," I said, feeling even sillier. "Emmerdale."

I gushed a bit about how much I like Emmerdale (I do) and then ran away fast.

The beer worked a little, but I gave up on the word lists. It was too late, I had to accept that whatever I did at this time and in this state wasn't going to have much effect on my performance in the morning. I looked at some different lists instead: All the surprising words I've seen allowed and disallowed when playing Countdown online. And I looked at the flashcards I'd created, of common (in Countdown terms) 9-letter words. On one side was the word with the letters jumbled and written in a square (my latest preferred method of displaying letters), and on the other was the word itself.

My favourite was ENCOMIAST. I like it because it feels so satisfying in your mouth - your tongue can do a lot of wrapping around those consonants - and because when you see it all jumbled up you can see several possible prefixes and suffixes (-IEST, -COME, -ATES, -SATE, -NATE, -MOST, MIS-) and none of them except EN- are in the word itself. And when I got home Ally looked it up (in my brand new Countdown dictionary, courtesy of YTV) and discovered it meant "a person who publicly praises someone" (or something along those lines), which I rather like. I am one of Kate Horton (associate producer, see above)'s encomiasts.

I went to sleep muttering "Encomiast" to myself repeatedly. I do at least have some sense and went to bed at a decent hour, although it took me a while to get to sleep; and was easier when I worked out I could turn off the noisy air conditioning.

In the morning I faffed about a bit boiling kettles for tea and fiddling about with other stuff, before going down for breakfast. I looked around, trying to identify fellow contestants. Almost everyone there looked a likely candidate, but none so much as me. I had brought my own muesli - complete with apple chopped in my hotel room with a penknife - in a little bag. I also had a flask of red bush tea, so that I could avoid caffeine (a disaster waiting to happen on several fronts). And finally I had my word lists and flashcards. I may as well have had a giant sign - COUNTDOWN CONTESTANT - above my head.

Back at my room I did more faffing - this time with a hairdryer, another risky enterprise as I never normally bother and don't really have a clue what I'm doing. But the results were not too bad and suddenly, all too suddenly, it was time for me to set off again for the studio.

The sun was shining, and as I got closer I saw some of the staff - recognised from the day before - arriving. This was just another day at work for them, something I couldn't quite get my head around.

This was it. In an hour I'd be on camera.

[continued here, here, here, here, here and here]