[Steve in Pudsey]

Having watched the mewest 8 out of 10 Cats Does Countdown Christmas Special tonight, I note that they've now moved to using the virtual conundrum board - had this occured before tonight's edition?

I've been watching a few episodes of the Australian Celebrity reboot of Letters and Numbers, which is now an ITV Studios Australia production and has an almost identical set to Countdown (albeit with a numbers and letters board that is at least a foot too short to be comfortable), the traditional Alan Hawkshaw music and a Dictionary Corner guest.

What I found interesting is that they are doing the superimposed letter and number selection during the clock sequence using graphics in the same style as the UK conundrum graphic rather than a masked shot of the board. The graphics use the same font used in the UK despite the physical cards on set for the number round using a different font. It doesn't look too bad.

SBS do show 8 Out of 10 Cats do Countdown, so it feels like they have tweaked the format a bit to differentiate it. They seem to be playing the game properly rather than the game being a vehicle to put comedy around as on CatsDown. They have three celebrities playing as individuals rather than two pairs. Almost surprised they didn't call it Celebrity Countdown as it's about 35 years since the original Coundown pop music programme last aired.

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(Anybody know why there are five big numbers cards?)