Susie Dent Countdown Conundrums and other words

By Lucy Ashford

It’s Saturday 25th of February and I’ve arrived at the Quad Theatre on Marjon Uni Campus. I had been trying to arrange an interview with Countdown’s Susie Dent for a while, as she’s doing her show The Secret Life of Words here. So, I was eventually told to just turn up to see if I could speak to her. I’m just about to go in, fingers crossed....

“Thank you for agreeing to speak to me Susie, it’s lovely to meet you.”

“Likewise.”

“I guess the first question probably to get out of the way is, do you prefer Cats or the main Countdown?”

“You know, I’m asked that so often and the honest answer is, I don’t have a favourite because, obviously Countdown is pretty much my lifelong gig. I’ve been doing it for 30 years now. So, without that, I think I’d feel really lost. It’s my second home. A lot of people who work on the show have been there as long as I have. But Cats do Countdown is special, and it’s obviously so different. I think it’s edited to make me look as if I am rising above it and not having a great time. But honestly, I genuinely laugh throughout, and kind of forget what I’m supposed to be doing; which is essentially being Jimmy’s stooge and trying to come up with some words!”

“In the beginning, I did try too hard to be funny, but I am only ever funny by mistake. I’m not being overly modest here. But if I say something and the audience laughs, I kind of work out later why they’re laughing. I don’t pick up on the innuendo myself, which is pretty much my MO. But yes, the honest answer is I would feel lost without both of them.”

“I think the Cats is definitely my favourite. You play it so perfectly and never lose your cool. I just love it! Do you have a favourite comedian on the show?”

“Again, that’s a tricky one. Joe Wilkinson, he’s a true gent behind the scenes and he’s always sort of, “Oh you’re looking so lovely.” So polite and engaging, and then he will walk in accompanied by naked Fabio on some sort of weird contraption and you just think, Okay, this is the other Joe! I love him because I could chat to him for hours.

Joe Lycett is another favourite. He’s just brilliant in dictionary corner. And David O’Doherty is the sweetest human being and just hilarious. I genuinely think his keyboard is about 25 years old, and that’s the beauty of it. It’s completely bashed about and quite old fashioned now, but he is so naturally funny. Also, he’s a genuinely kind person.”

“Do you get on okay with Rachel? And is there any truth in that you’ve shared bras?”

“That was out of a whole interview that I did. And I can’t even remember what it was. I think it was a charity. I was doing an interview and someone who happened to ask about me and Rachel on Eight out of 10 cats. I think Rachel had mentioned I was wearing her bra because I hadn’t bought the right one. And that’s where the paper picked it up. So yes, there is truth in that.”

“Rachel comes in with enormous suitcases and about 50 pairs of shoes, and her dressing room is immaculate and very, very organised. Whereas I will often come in and realise that I’ve forgotten half my stuff, which is why I then go to Rachel and say please, can I borrow this? She’s worn quite a few of my dresses and jumpers too, so we kind of mingle.”

“Has that changed since she’s become a mum, and she’s less organised?”

“No, not really. She’s always just very on top of things. To be fair, she will always say she’s late to everything, but she is very regimented.”

“I love the dynamic between you all and now you’ve got Colin Murray presenting, which is fantastic. There seems to be good dynamic between Colin and Rachel.”

“Yes, we love Colin. He’s now permanent, which is brilliant; he was the caretaker manager for a while. I’ve known him since his Radio One days, and the very first time I met him, he said “I want to present Countdown, I’ve always wanted to present Countdown, and I would give up everything to present Countdown!”

“He’s watched since he was little, and he knows it inside out. Even now when he’s presenting, he’s working out the maths, or trying to come up with the longest word. Sometimes he forgets he’s presenting because he’s so involved in the game. We’ve just been recording this week, and there was a pregnant pause at one point, when Colin looked at me and said, “I’m so sorry, I just had one of those moments where I realised, I’m presenting Countdown!”

He had this out of body experience where he realised that he was doing what he’d always wanted to do. So yes, his joy is infectious.”

“I know you’re all about the ‘words’ but do you usually get the maths too? It’s quite satisfying, isn’t it?”

“I’m definitely getting better. Yes, it’s really satisfying. And I’ve realised that you have to play with the big numbers quite often before you multiply, because the temptation is to just take 100 and times it by whatever, and then add on the little ones. But actually, if you go 100 plus three times, whatever, very often it will help you get further, but I’ve always said I really need to get on top of the number 75. For some reason, my 75 times multiplication - it needs work!”

“Me too! It is a sticking point, isn’t it? I don’t know why”

“No, I don’t know why either. So, I think if I was a contestant, I’d write out my 75’s, which you’re allowed to do. You’re not allowed to bring them in with you, but you can obviously do it before you’re playing.”

“It is very satisfying! When I spoke to Chris McCausland here, he’d been on the show. I asked him what preparation he’d done, because it was unbelievable how well he did!”

“He was amazing. He was really good. We also had this wonderful contestant Natalie Curran who is completely blind, and she almost won. She got a score that was in the 90s. Colin had me and the dictionary Corner guest close our eyes and try and come up with the longest word from nine letters, without writing it down, without seeing them, and it’s just so hard. But the way that she could place things in her head was incredible.”

“It’s a learned skill, isn’t it? Chris said he drove his wife mad practising beforehand. She was dreading the theme tune because he’d watched it so many times! Now, your word of the day - I love your word of the day. My favourite - I’m not quite sure if this is the right pronunciation - Uhtceare. That’s just absolutely me!”

“Oh yes, I know me too. So many of us, I think particularly now, but yes, it’s predawn anxiety, isn’t it? So, it’s lying awake in the darkness, when problems just seem huge and insurmountable. Then the dawn comes, and things seem a little bit better. But there is another one, a lovely word ‘matutolypea’, which is a mixture of Greek and Latin, and translates as morning grief. We tend to use it in English semi jokingly to mean grumpiness; a real grumpiness when you wake. But actually, it’s that sense of overwhelming worry and anxiety that can beset you sometimes in the morning. So, pre-dawn and after dawn both catered for!”

“These words are kind of forgotten, aren’t they? And if you try to find them anywhere, you just can’t. It’s a shame that they’ve gone.”

“It is a real shame. Uhtceare is not even in the Oxford English Dictionary. I’ve looked it up and I think it’s in various Anglo-Saxon Chronicles and things, so you can extrapolate from there. There’s a wonderful book on Anglo Saxon words called the Word Hoard, which I can recommend as it’s got lovely things in. But ‘‘matutolypea’’ is a is a recent coinage. So very often when people want to create a new word and make it sound classic, they will just take Latin and Greek and Bob’s your uncle. But so many of the words that I tweet are long gone, and I just can’t really understand it. Why did we ever get rid of mumpsimus, which I’m going to mention in the show today. A mumpsimus is someone who insists that they’re right, despite clear evidence that they’re not.”

“And don’t we all know somebody like that?!”

“Yes, and sometimes we are mumsimuses ourselves. Nodcrafty is another of my favourites, which is, again, 400 years old. It means nodding your head as if you understand everything that someone’s saying, when you actually tuned out hours ago. Hopefully my audience won’t do that today! But why did these ever go away? And all the lost positives of language as well. We’re quite pessimistic when it comes to English, we like to dwell on the unruly and the uncouth and the unkempt and the disgruntled and often the positives are forgotten.”

“I wonder why and how that happened?”

“I think it’s because definitely in spoken use, we’re quite a gossipy lot. Humans are, by nature, quite gossipy. When we come together, we tend to criticise don’t we? And tend to take the mickey or something. It’s quite rare that we sit around and compliment people for hours. So, I think through that tendency, if you look at English dialect, it collects around things from a century ago, being bandy legged, bow legged, blisters, armpits, gossip itself, tea - whether it’s a mash or brew or whatever, where we kind of congregate, it’s kind of the waterfront of dialect, it’s quite narrow and deep. So, it’s interesting to see what human themes are most prominent.”

“The English language is so vast, but it feels like it’s shrinking, doesn’t it? Which is sad.”

“Vocabulary wise, I think that’s the area where people say, “Oh, it’s just going to the dogs and the golden age is in the past. And, what’s happening?” But we must remember that every generation has said that; every generation thought the previous lot’s English was better, and they knew their grammar, but in fact, go back to Shakespearean time, Shakespeare was hugely criticised for mucking about with language and Keats was the same. But the one area, you’re right, where there is room for improvement, is vocabulary, it’s shrinking. That’s why if we can remember some of those riches out there and get them back into use, that would be brilliant.”

“Am I right in thinking you went to Princeton?”

“Yes.”

“So, was it recognisable - the difference between American vocabulary and ours? Because they always seem to use a much wider vocabulary than we do?”

“Yes, it’s very interesting. In some in some ways, Americans tend to be more precise than we are. I’m going to talk about American English today because it gets such a hard rap. People hate it in a way that they don’t hate Hindi, English, or Jamaican English.

You know, we readily embrace those, but we don’t like American English. We don’t like the Americanisation; we think it was ours and they somehow misappropriated it, and that seems mad to me. A lot of wonderful dialect words that were taken over by the first settlers, have found their home there, and we’ve lost them here. And a lot of those are rich and textured.”

“I feel it’s very sad that we’ve lost them, but they’ve kept them. Also, many things that we associate with Americanism as well, we used to have them. So, autumn used to be fall for us and we used to call pavements, sidewalks, and we used to have trash and garbage and all these things. But people always assume that it’s because of the American influence. One of the things I did notice is the British English accent, it’s a cliche, but it does have cachet over there. But similarly, I could listen to the American accent for hours.”

“They vary so much, don’t they? Some of them are whiny and nasally and they’re not good. But yes, I know exactly what you mean.”

“I guess we have the same, because if you have popularity polls for dialects here, Brummie always comes last, and Geordie always comes top, which I think is really unfair.”

“I struggle to understand thick Glaswegians and Northern Irish accents as well, so they must too?”

“I know, we have quite lots of brilliant contestants from Scotland and Ireland quite often. And yeah, I’m rubbish. I should be a really good linguist. And I’m like - can you say that again please?”

“I’m not surprised. I’d be exactly the same.”

“I’m not sure if it’s one of your words, but I think my favourite obscure word that I’ve discovered during this course, was nudnik. Do you know that one?”

“I have the OED, but I think that’s also an American origin?

“I used it in one of my blogs for my reflective journals. And I did wonder whether my tutor would know or have to look it up.”

“I love that sort of ‘nik’ suffix, I think did come from Sputnik, and so beatnik and peacenik and all of those came from there. Yes, it’s Yiddish, essentially, but especially in Jewish, right, because it did originate in the US. So would you use it as somebody who nags or who bores you?”

“Well, I was waiting on a zoom call at home and all the rest were in class (I couldn’t come in for some reason). They were supposed to invite me to join, but didn’t, and so I said I was sat there like a nudnik!”

“Yes! I never found out afterwards whether he knew what it was or not, or if he looked it up. But it’s so rare and obscure, I doubt he would have known without looking.”

“But you can definitely infer what it means, which is a sort of a pestering, nagging or irritating person or a bore. Then it also then sends you to nude or nudge, which is a relative of a Russian word nude meaning boring or tedious. So, I don’t think you were a nudnik at all!”

“I’m sure I was at the time, anyway, I still passed!”

“You probably need to get ready for your show soon? Do you get nervous before these?”

“No, I really don’t now, it’s funny I get nervous at strange things. So, I feel here that I’m amongst friends because hopefully people who come are already on side, they already love words. And I tend to always have genuinely lovely audiences, and I have a word surgery bit at the end when people ask me questions, which is fun, too. I get nervous at things which don’t have a large audience but where I feel like, you know, impostor syndrome, I’m about to be exposed for being absolutely rubbish and unintelligent! But here, it’s just a fun show, hopefully, and there’s lots of silly videos from some of my comedian friends from Cats.”

“I’ve been watching the Channel 4 swearing program. So, is it similar kind of clips to that?

“No, these are more videos of people asking me questions, as you will see, but the Channel 4 guide to swearing, I don’t think it’s really a guide to swearing, I always thought that was a bit of a misnomer, about where our swear words came from. You’ll recognise some of that too. And in fact, I was a little bit worried because someone tweeted me to say that they were bringing their 10-year-old daughter. So hopefully, they got the message!

“Well, thank you very much talking to me Susie”

“Thank you for coming to see me!”

After our chat, one thing is for sure, I very much doubt Susie Dent will ever be accused of being absolute rubbish and unintelligent!