You really can PUZZLE your way to happiness
...says CAROL VORDERMAN, who says they helped her swap grinding poverty for a dazzling TV career. That’s why she’s proud to introduce the Mail’s new brilliant Puzzles & Prizes daily pullout
WHEN I was a little girl growing up in North Wales during the late Sixties, there wasn’t a lot to do. But on rainy days in the seaside town of Prestatyn, we always had the amusement arcade.
I couldn’t play on the machines, of course. My father walked out on us shortly after I was born, leaving my wonderful Mum, Jean, to bring up three children on practically no money.
There was no question of squandering coppers on the Penny Falls or the one-armed bandits.
But the manager of this seaside arcade used to let me and my friends come in and play bingo. We made the place look busy, he said.
We weren’t allowed to win prizes, but that wasn’t important to me: I just wanted to concentrate on the numbers as they were called out, flicking the plastic covers across as I hoped feverishly to complete a row and shout: ‘House!’
Who could have guessed then that I would make a whole career out of numbers? For 26 years, I co-hosted Countdown on Channel 4, solving sums at high speed from random selections picked out by the contestants. And when the Sudoku craze struck in the Noughties, I spotted the trend in time to publish a ‘How To’ book that went on to sell nearly three million copies worldwide.
It’s not surprising I always say that ‘numbers are my friends’. They have looked after me well. And that’s why I was so excited to be involved when the Mail announced this week that it is launching a bigger, brighter Puzzles & Prizes section, with five new games: Suguru, Suko, Futoshiki, Train Tracks and Killer Sudoku.
That’s my idea of bliss. Give me a train journey, a pencil and a book of mind-twisting number puzzles and I’m happy. If the puzzles require new logical techniques and arithmetic tricks to be mastered, so much the better.
Friends and colleagues are often horrified when I tell them I don’t read fiction. Novels don’t interest me. Scrawls of numerical data on a screen, on the other hand, make my little heart flutter. What secrets are they holding? What patterns lie within?
Looking back, I realise that my fascination with numbers is rooted in the financial poverty of my childhood. It influenced life in every way — not that I had any idea at the time that we were poor. My clothes were all hand-me-downs from a girl in the next street or bought from a jumble sale, and my brother’s school uniform was paid for with money Mum scraped together by selling trinkets, but I was never aware of it.
To feed and clothe us, she worked every hour without respite, holding down three jobs as a school secretary, an accountant’s secretary and a typist. In the evenings, she would sit at the living room table with a pile of papers, writing them up.
My father Tony had left us for another woman, and refused to give Mum a shilling for upkeep. STILL, I didn’t see anything unusual in the fact that my mother, my older sister Trixie, my cousin Pam and I all slept in the one room of our ground-floor flat — at No 3 Palmeira Gardens. My older brother Anton was in a tiny box room next door.
Mum and I shared a bed every night until I was nine years old, which was practical during the winter: we had no central heating or double glazing. Our house special was eggs, chips and beans: the eggs and potatoes came from the farm my grandparents rented up the road, and the tins of beans cost a couple of old pennies from the supermarket.
I started helping with my mother’s work when I was just three. Anton was 11 and somehow he and Mum had acquired an old Gestetner duplicating machine. With it, he could print pamphlets for the church and knitting patterns to sell to neighbours.
With the copier on the table and me on a stool beside it, my job was to feed papers into the machine while Anton turned the handle.
What has this got to do with my obsession for numbers? Everything. The love affair began when I started primary school at Ysgol Mair, which is Welsh for St Mary’s, in nearby Rhyl. It was a bus ride away, but this was the nearest Catholic primary, and my mother took her faith seriously.
She hadn’t been raised Catholic, mind you — she converted when she married my father. Her belief stayed longer than him.
My teacher in Class One was a tiny nun named Sister Zita. She chalked some numbers on the board and told us we were going to learn to add them together. To my great excitement, we were each issued with a pristine exercise book. The thrill of opening the first page is a memory I’ve never lost.
Here was something marvellous, and it was all mine. I’d been given it because of the numbers on the board. Numbers were going to be my friends.
As I worked through my first exercise, I was trembling but, despite my nervousness, I understood how addition worked straight away. I just got it.
The numbers danced into position. While my classmates were frowning and working methodically, I was writing as fast as I could, intent on completing them in lightning speed.
Very soon I was moved up a year to join the older children. The challenge for me was not just getting the sums right, but doing them faster than anyone else. I wanted to be the quickest in the school at mental arithmetic.
To practise at home, I began to collect puzzle books. Buying them new was out of the question, so Anton and I began to haunt jumble sales. It was amazing what you could pick up for a penny or two, and — thanks to his small income from his duplicating — Anton bought them for me.
As I fell further into the depths of my puzzle books, it became clear I had found my calling. When I was eight, and top in maths, my teacher wrote in my end- of-year report: ‘Carol has a masterly hold over mathematical computation, which should prove profitable later on.’
She wasn’t wrong. From a comprehensive school and on free school meals, I was the first from my town ever to go to Oxford or Cambridge. After I graduated from Cambridge with a Masters degree in Engineering, I got a job working in frozen food warehouses.
While I loved driving the fork-lift trucks, my Mum spotted a newspaper ad: Yorkshire TV was looking for someone good at mental arithmetic for a new quiz show.
It was based on a French format called Des Chiffres Et Des Lettres, which translates as Numbers And Letters — but the British title was going to be Countdown.
I told Mum she was being daft. I had no TV experience, I was 21 and I wasn’t posh or a model. The producers wouldn’t look twice at me. Mum refused to be deterred.
She believed in me — so much that she wrote a CV and an application, signed them with my name, and posted them off.
She then told me what she’d done. The first shock was when the phone rang and producer John Meade asked me to come in for an audition, which — to my relief — turned out to be not so much of a screen-test as a maths test. The producers, it must be said, were getting desperate.
Countdown was due to start filming and, though they had thousands of applications, they’d found no one who could do the number game fast enough. The sums, made up of numbers picked out blind by contestants, were foxing everyone.
At my test, I solved the first sum instantly. As soon as the numbers came up, I could literally ‘see’ the solution. The second example was
the same. The third was trickier, but I had an answer within five seconds — and the job. All those years of maths against the clock and puzzling had paid off. And I believe that puzzles can pay off for everybody.
There’s extensive research that shows the mental effort of solving Sudoku and similar games can help slow the impact of debilitating brain conditions.
Many viewers wrote to me and former Countdown host Richard Whiteley to explain how they had recovered from brain tumour operations with the help of the show.
Apparently, their consultants had used Countdown to gauge the speed of their patients’ thoughts. If a patient could solve the number game in 20 seconds before the op, and now needed a couple of minutes, it indicated a slowdown. And when they were back up to speed, it meant their recovery was going well.
The brain loves rhythms: it gets stronger through constant use. And there’s no more efficient work- out than the challenge of number puzzles. But more importantly, they are the antidote to the rush and whirl of the modern world.
Our phones, tablets, the constant clamour of social media and 24-hour news all conspire to rob us of our concentration. Many people don’t even sit down to watch a TV drama without one eye on their phone.
Little wonder that we complain of being exhausted, while our brains flit from one distraction to the next.
Number puzzles switch off all that noise. They force us to concentrate. You can’t do Killer Sudoku or Futoshiki if you’re fiddling with your phone at the same time. These mental challenges are intense and demanding, and for that reason they are vital to the health of our brains.
The sheer intensity of the exercise is also deeply relaxing. If you can’t sleep, do a Suko or a Suguru puzzle, or focus on Train Tracks. All the rattling thoughts left over from the day will be silenced while you focus, and you’ll sleep much better. It certainly works for me. Numbers are still the friends that help me relax when I’m alone.
A few years ago, I treated myself to a holiday on a hired yacht, off the coast of Mallorca. One afternoon, I was so absorbed that I failed to spot a distant paparazzi photographer.
The pictures appeared around the world. And what was I spied doing? Playing bingo on a wooden board!