New Countdown Studio

Hmm, a letter tile nearly falling through the board middle is hardly compared to "wankers", itself an outtake bought no doubt to fame by Denis Norden's programme. And from Richard Whiteley's Gotcha, "I've got diarrhoea" ranks highly too.

Anyway airing the odd unusual thing that you don't expect to see isn't that unusual, there are many episodes of Deal or No Deal airing incidents and stuff that normally doesn't make the final edit - such as this:

DOND had a strange habit of leaving footage in an episode that really shouldn't be there, like when a contestant started having a fit or something and they had to stop the game. There really wasn't any benefit from showing that.

I wonder if DOND during recording didn't have enough material to fill the timeslot, which would be a very unusual situation to end up in for any recorded production so using unrelated "fodder" for want of a better term comes across as filler as there's little else to fill with on DOND if there is no gameplay going on. Normally I'd have thought you'd be recording the best part of an hour at least and chop it down to whatever Channel 4's required length for a 45 min slot was, probably 36 minutes, something like that?

I'm sure 15-to-One had an under-run once and IIRC William G Stewart filled the remaining airtime with a ad-hoc presentation about... I dunno, a ming vase or something.

It was the Elgin Marbles. It had been a longstanding joke that if not enough players got through the first round he would fill the time with a talk about them. Then it happened. And the ITC upheld a complaint about it being biased.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/1165688.stm

Yes, although I don't think that was on a regular episode but a fascinating programme called Fifteen to One Scrapbook they did one afternoon where William G was joined by Laura and Philip to talk about some bits and pieces that had arisen from various episodes - I remember it talked about how the questions were compiled, and William went off to speak to the programme's oldest viewer, who had come top of the Senior Citizens Board they used to do (a great concept). There were also answers to viewers' letters, I remember people asked about binary numbers, which they often asked questions about, so they did a bit of an explanation of how they worked. And in that was a sequence about his pet subject, the Elgin Marbles.

On the programme itself, the concept did indeed mean that some games were much longer than others, and so there would often be a bit of time at the end for a bit of business, so that would involve something like the Senior Citizens Board, or a closer look at the prizes for the series, or answering viewers' letters.

I remember one where William G explained why he'd had a laugh with one of the contestants during the show, explaining that they'd been on before and been eliminated having had both questions about sport, and he invited them back because he thought that was a bit unfair. And then "As luck would have it, their first question today was also about sport, which explains our little joke". Used to love all the minutiae like that.

I went to see Countdown yesterday - It surprised me how the set looks quite expensive on TV but when you actually see it looks like something you could buy all the components for in Ikea!

Although apparently they were using the larger studio space for filming due to Davina stealing the normal studio for 100K Drop - Quite surreal thinking you're watching Countdown being filmed in the same studio where they film shows such as The Voice UK!

The audience is quite far back from the action, but Dudley makes sure they get heard well enough! Quite a clockwork operation really, basically a straight take apart from a few small pauses to rotate Rachel's board between letters and numbers then the odd slight pickup at the end but nothing major.

Really cool seeing Rachel and Susie working things out in real time, it really is 30 seconds! (The audience get pens and paper, I was absolutely useless!). Rachel seems to pass the 'used' letter tiles to a crew member after each round, I always thought they would pause the filming between rounds to give them a quick shuffle and refill the slots!

After 35 years you'd hope so!

I've seen both Countdown and Catsdown being filmed. Countdown I saw at Quay Street in Studio 8, probably one of the smaller studios, safe to say nothing has changed in this time.

I saw Catsdown at MediaCity and that studio is very crammed as the audience goes all the way to the front. Worth noting a Catsdown recording goes on for hours. We watched the 2014 Christmas special being filmed and it went on for two and a half hours, amazingly crammed into 46 minutes on TV.

They use a different warm up man for Catsdown but to be fair to Jimmy Carr he often told a few jokes in the warm up and the recording break when all of the other personalities went out for a break.

I can vouch that Countdown is slick operation, I've been twice to recordings during the Des O'Connor/Carol Vorderman and Jeff Stelling/Rachel Riley era at The Leeds Studios.

Still got old grainy photos taken on a 'camera phone' in 2008, some of the set, Carol, Des, the warm up man and around the studios.
This one might be interesting:

Super picture...
.. But, comic sans used for the shot script.

You do have to give in that it is a dyslexia-friendly font.

I hate to get off topic but what's the controller on the right? Never see it in US productions.