So Anne Robinson hates small talk? Me too
Anne-Marie Imafidon was a maths prodigy who got into Oxford at 15. But can she work out the ‘Countdown’ host? By Chris Harvey
Anyone who has turned on the TV to watch Countdown on Channel 4 recently will not have failed to notice that alongside its defanged quizmaster Anne Robinson, in the role of glamorous arithmetician and co-host, stands the vivacious, trainerwearing maths whiz Anne-Marie Imafidon. The 32-year-old east Londoner, co-founder of STEMettes – an organisation to encourage young women into Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths – has, since December, been standing in as maternity cover for Rachel Riley.
With her distinctive grey hair extensions (which have the essential seal of approval of her grandmother), she makes numbers dance and those who criticised her appointment look foolish. Imafidon was prepared for negative comments on social media, she tells me, when we catch up by video call, such as accusations of tokenism.
“I’ve been black for 30 years, so a lot of these things aren’t new to me at all,” she says. “I’ve been disrespected before… I’ve been disrespected in professional settings. I’ve been disrespected in social settings… and we’ve all heard of social media, we know what the game is.
“So I’m not surprised that I might be trolled. I wasn’t hurt. It was the outpouring of support which was overwhelming for me.”
She’s a former child prodigy, who passed GCSE Maths at 10, then AS Maths and A-level Computing at 11, and an abridged Maths degree over one summer at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, USA at the age of 13. She was admitted to Oxford University at 15, although she didn’t start her degree in Maths and Computer Science until 17, as it would have meant her family having to move.
As the eldest child, Imafidon blazed a trail for her siblings to follow. Her younger sisters Christiana and Samantha, plus twins Peter and Paula, have all broken records for age-related attainment, with the twins both passing AS Maths at the age of seven. They have been dubbed “Britain’s brainiest family”.
That doesn’t mean that the show isn’t a challenge, Imafidon says. “Seventy-five-times tables are not part of the syllabus of a Master’s in Maths and Computer Science. So as much as people think they’re related… you don’t do any arithmetic.
“For four years, you don’t see any numbers, you just go straight to letters – and omicron features a fair amount. Also, academic maths, classical algebra, all of that stuff, is very slow.
“You don’t do any of it against the clock in 30 seconds with cameras in front of you.
“It’s unlike anything I’ve ever done, because it’s literally six things happening at once, like having to remember to smile, plus my hair mustn’t cover the numbers when I work out the calculations – and I’ve got big hair – and if you’ve ever counted things while someone else shouts numbers at you, you’ll know what that’s like. So it stretched my brain in a different direction.”
There is a failsafe in that it’s pre-recorded, she adds. In case of a mental block, “Rachel was like, just say, ‘Leave it with me,’ then they can cut to the ads…”
Did Riley give her any tips for dealing with Anne Robinson? There were reports last year that Robinson had turned off Riley’s microphone after becoming infuriated by her small talk. “There was no ‘We’re at war with Anne, so don’t talk to her’,” she laughs. Robinson is famously no-nonsense, though, isn’t she?
“I don’t want to ruin or improve or change Anne’s standing in any way. So I’m gonna say, no comment. Who likes small talk, though? I also hate small talk.”
She and her siblings all attended state school, although Imafidon remembers that she was “bouncing off the walls and driving my teachers crazy” – “Repetition, of course, is good for learning,” she says, “but for me it was like, ‘You said that last year!’”
The head of maths at her school – Mr Davies – mentioned to her parents that “doing an exam early could be something Anne-Marie might enjoy”, and the rest is history. When she took the GCSE, “I was just as surprised as anybody else I’d passed,” she says. “My dad took me to McDonalds; I didn’t have to wash up for the week.”
In fact, their father Chris Imafidon, a university lecturer and academic consultant, is crucial to the children’s success. Anne-Marie compares him to Venus and Serena Williams’s ambitious father Richard Williams, as captured in the recent film King Richard.
“That was my dad to a tee… He’s so optimistic. And he’s as eccentric as they come. But he wasn’t pushy,” she insists. “He wasn’t hard on us. Famously, people think we sat in silence in our house and just revised… we literally had two TVs in our living room. One on top of the other. My dad would watch the one at the top and we’d watch the one at the bottom.”
Her parents came to the UK from Nigeria three decades ago. “Education is really important [to Nigerians],” she says, although her father always stressed the ways that learning interacts with everyday life, from sending the children to the shops to budget carefully and keep the change to asking them what they learnt from the films they watched. Imafidon has written a book about maths for seven-year-olds and insists that toys and play are the way to capture a child’s attention, especially ones who have no interest in lessons. “It’s important to link it to what your child is already interested in, whether that’s trainers or football.”
She’s written another book, to be published in June, specifically aimed at girls and young women. Imafidon set up STEMettes when she was 23, while working for an investment bank, which she loved. She saw the social enterprise as a side-project but within two years, she says, it had grown so fast that she had to make a choice, or give up sleeping.
After some soul-searching, she realised: “I can’t choose the bank and leave the girls in the lurch.” Imafidon has since been awarded an MBE for her efforts in the sphere. The lack of women in STEM roles, she says, is a multifaceted problem.
“On the surface, it’s about underrepresentation in those careers, but the fact that we don’t have women influencing technology at all leads to them becoming almost second-class citizens in what happens next.”
She picks out an example of how this has worked in the past, in engineering – the way that seatbelts were designed for the average adult male, ignoring the shape of women’s bodies altogether. Today, there is a similar problem with the algorithms that decide everything from whether we can extend our credit limit to our success in a job application. “Decisions are being made as if we don’t exist,” she says. “Because women have not been there to feed into [the design of the algorithms].”
‘People think we sat in silence and just revised. We literally had two TVs in our living room, on top of each other’
It’s all happening fast for Imafidon, and offers are coming in.
“I don’t want to be famous for the sake of being famous,” she says. “But I think representation matters. Every time I do something, there’s a whole swathe of Anne-Maries who now know that that’s part of the realm of possibility. My aim is to change things. Would I do Strictly? Yes. Would I do Masterchef? I’d consider it. Would I do Dancing on Ice? No.”
She laughs. Effervescent, committed and rather good at 75-times tables. I have a feeling we will be seeing a lot more of Anne-Marie Imafidon.
Countdown is on Channel 4 at 2.15pm Monday to Friday and on All4