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Jayne Dawson: Countdown catastrophe
IT'S a bit like the Women's Institute being ripped asunder by revelations of shop-bought cakes, or the vicar running amok with a member of the altar flowers committee.
It's just not the kind of behaviour we expect – and, let's be honest – it's all the more delicious for it.
Countdown has always been the very essence of gentle afternoon television. It's where woolly jumpers, mugs of tea and Custard Creams truly belong. It's the spiritual home of quiet banter, the television equivalent of taking a few minutes to do the crossword in a quiet room, save for the ticking of the clock, the crackling of the fire and the pattering of the rain on the window.
If television had been going during World War Two, it would have been required viewing to remind us all of our essential pluck. Its very backbone is British and if any show must go on, it's Countdown.
And yet, suddenly it is as if a semi-naked showgirl had just jumped, high-kicking and hollering, into the room.
Everything is upset. Everyone's feathers are ruffled. Banter has turned into bitchiness and Carol, the consonants, vowels and sums girl for 26 years, will clearly need more than a strong cuppa to bring her round after saying she is being forced out of the show.
Clearly nothing has been quite the same since host Richard Whiteley died three years ago, but no-one expected histrionics like this.
Richard and Carol were a perfect pairing, he a master of the slightly awkward quip, she a hostess thankfully lacking in the fierce glamour required for a more prime time show.
Over the years we saw Richard grow more rotund, his ties grow ever louder, his manner become more bumbling. We watched Carol's bottom grow and shrink with her various diets. We lived the detox phase with her, we quietly applauded her growing sense of style.
We winced a bit when she went through the high glamour phase, swapping insults with Trinny and Susannah, revealing both her cleavage and her knees in the same outfit but were just grateful that, back at the whiteboard, doing her long multiplication and her long division, she was still our Carol.
Once Richard had gone, Carol bravely embraced first Des Lynam and then Des O'Connor – but now it appears to be finally game over.
Carol says programme bosses told her to accept a 90 per cent pay cut or pick up her consonants and leave.
They say it wasn't like that. Either way Carol and Countdown are no more. It was her first job out of university – her mum applied for it on her behalf in the true spirit of Countdown – and now it's all gone pear-shaped.
Walking briskly to Carol's defence – true Countdown people never take the drama to a higher level than that – have come Kathryn Apanowicz, the former partner of Richard Whiteley, and the Belgian record executive who owns the rights to Countdown.
Both have tersely expressed themselves appalled by Carol's treatment. Kathryn says ageism and the downmarket tastes of Channel 4, who broadcast the show, are to blame.
Words like "callous" are being bandied about and not in a Conundrum kind of a way. For some reason, Myleene Klass seems to be getting it in the neck from all sides, being simultaneously mooted as a possible replacement for Carol and rubbished by Kathryn, for just not being Carol.
Meanwhile Carol will assume the Countdown stiff upper lip and bravely continue with business as usual until the end of the year but after that, well anything could kick off.
Countdown has clearly gone off the rails. Carol is talking like a wife abandoned after decades of marriage. She has, she says, put her heart and soul into that show for 26 years.
And now, like an abandoned first wife, she will be seeking revenge. Keep your head covered, is my advice, those consonants and vowels could really start to fly.
So long then, summer
SOMETIMES I find myself wandering around the sales rails of clothes shops in summer as if hypnotised. In my trance-like state I pluck indifferently at various bits of coloured, patterned, pleated, flounced fabric, wanting to march off and do something more worthwhile with my life, but unable to break the spell. We've all been there, haven't we?
This happened at the weekend until I saw a wondrous sight, something that lifted my mood and enervated my being.
It was a black wool dress, plain in aspect, severe in cut, and, if truth be told, quite high in price. I gravitated towards it as if to a cool lagoon in a scorching, arid desert. Will it be autumn soon?
Christmas is coming...
ON the PR calendar, Christmas has begun. Within the last week, I have received several brochures on Christmas decorations, Christmas beauty and Christmas at Castle Howard. It's customary when this happens to shudder and become outraged at the seasonal perverseness and the encroachment of Christmas into a time of the year where it has no business to be.
But actually I quite like it. Christmas can be enjoyed the most when it is a safe, unthreatening event separated from us by months and months. It's when it gets up close and personal that it is time to dislike it.
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Weather for Leeds
Sunday 12 February 2012
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