Nick Hewer quits Countdown

It's even more strange, as they have people working on that show who know exactly how to create a video that goes viral. Darren Dutton - he, of the wonderful re-edits of the 10 Downing Street covid press conferences, works on the packed lunch show, I believe.

I think a lot of decision making around Packed Lunch has been questionable. Even the announcement of the new Countdown presenter - which they knew would generate viewers - was basically given away as an anagram hours in advance. The more linguistically gifted amongst us had unscrambled Anne Robinson's name and it was all over the internet well before it was revealed as an exclusive on the show, making their "big announcement" rather lacklustre completely from their own doing. Surely they would have gained more viewers and/or hits to their own post had their original social tease explained they had a "Countdown exclusive on today's show" and the associated anagram formed "NEW PRESENTER" or something? Keep it as a pure tease, and make people watch to find out who it is. Giving away the name just felt like a bit of an own goal really.

Daily Fail making a big deal out of this Weakest Link clip that has apparently "resurfaced" and apparently "Social media users were left shocked by the clip":


(although a farting squirrel would apparently "shock" half the globe according to the Fail)

Bless those precious social media users who were "left shocked".
No, that clip hasn't aged well 20 years on and that programme probably wouldn't be made with those horrible comments these days. However, there are many more "shocking" and important things than that happening now in the real world that they could be worrying about, instead of a clip of an episode of a once very popular 20 year old TV programme.
People with too much time on their hands. It's pathetic - digging up clips like that to try to make Anne look bad because they heard she has a new job hosting a programme that they probably won't even watch.

Eamonn and Ruth got it right on This Morning this morning, when they were mocking the stupid clickbait newspaper articles about them (specifically mentioning the Mail). They always write stupid "shocked", "shamed", "slammed" headlines about the couple's harmless banter.

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Not if your poor at anagrams I got Brian Neonson I agree 100% with your point they gave it away hours before and was trending on twitter prior to the announcement on Steph's Packed Lunch

Yes, inevitable in this 'cancel culture' world we now live in but people trawling through the archives to find old clips of The Weakest Link and acting like Anne Robinson is Hitler is all a bit pathetic in my view.

Nobody seems to be able to make the news for any reason nowadays without someone going out of their way to find an old tweet or negative article about that person in order to 'prove' their unworthiness to receive any positive press.

Anne's antagonistic Weakest Link style was all an act for the show, you knew what you were going to get when you signed up to appear on the programme, and this sort of tongue-in-cheek, harmless back and forth joshing between Anne & the contestants (some of whom gave very much as good at they got!) is what made The Weakest Link so successful.

Deciding she's unsuitable for a presenting role on an anagram-based Channel 4 series several years later off the back of clips like those circulating on Twitter is just laughable.

I'm sure Anne will be great in the role. Let's wait and see how she does and make an informed decision once we've actually seen her in action.

I was never particularly comfortable with the 'joshing' on The Weakest Link but everyone knew it was play-acting. It did tend to rely on lazy stereotyping in many cases. However what's ironic is that 'people on social media' are now able to say far worse things about contestants on TV, either in quizzes or reality programmes.

Yes, that's kind of what I was trying to say in my post.

Anne's conversations with the contestants were what made it more interesting and enhanced the format. The programme would have been quite stale and less memorable without it, just as people now enjoy the bantering Bradley does on The Chase.

Roll on 2035 when Bradley Walsh gets offered the presenting role on Countdown for argument's sake and somebody comes out with "Walsh is totally unsuited for this role because he laughed at Fanny Chmelar's name in <whatever year it was>, here's a clip of him BEING TOTALLY UNPROFESSIONAL ABOUT IT!" or some other garbage on Twitter in 2035, or whatever the equivalent will be of Twitter in 2035, assuming social media hasn't totally eaten itself by then and been replaced by something even more toxic.

All this has prompted me to rewatch this brilliant spoof:



The interaction with John towards the end is particularly good.

Totally agree. Having attended 3 Celb Weakest Link recording in the audience, the 'Anne' that you saw on screen, was different to the Anne between the rounds, and in small places, the contestant chatter before the voting - most of which was edited out to make her look like she never cracked a smile until the 'wink' at the end of the show.

She loved the banter back and forth, and some times was laughing and giggling, before bringing the wall back up and firing the next scripted ad-lib with a stern and clippy manner to the next celeb with didn't bank with £2,500 on the money scale.

I hope they start her first Countdown, with her standing at a fake podium, stage central, and do the mean look thing, for a few seconds and getting that of it out of the way before we see her in Countdown mode. She has huge respect for the show and the audience, and she is not going to play on the last quiz show persona knowing full well, if she does it'll harm the cozy nature of Countdown.

The benefits clip going around is particularly uncomfortable and mean rather than banter, but ultimately she hosted nearly 1700 episodes of The Weakest Link with 8 or 9 contestants I think on each show, so up to 15,000. It's inevitable they'll be at least one clip which doesn't show Anne in the best of light. And it's unlikely any 76 year old gets to that point in life without making some faux pas's along the way.