Countdown

The frosty mysticism of a letters game

Countdown (Channel 4) begins as a Hans Andersen tale, told through a too-blue window, and each stray child (passing through roses, through Lapland) must look into the Mirror of Reason, must rearrange its shards of ice. ENTIRETY. ETERNITY. The child returns to bright Christendom, embraces a lost sibling. The Snow Queen lowers her enamel stare and is flung, strings flailing, into the rails, the lights.    

[The Snow Queen’s Palace by Edmund Dulac]

Countdown is a post-1656 distraction in a Seventh Seal Christian telescape. Bake-Off is too reminiscent of the Viking Alfred, Attenborough reliant on awe like a Catholic church. The British Jew wanders this country from end to end (Southampton a plastic Nineveh with miniature whale, Glastonbury Tor the new Horeb - the ocean parts somewhere off the coast of the Isle of Man) and somewhere, somehow, finds a word game dwindling in its daisy-specked hills. Finally the lexical subtleties of the Old Testament are beamed, payback, to each established waypoint. The appointment of Rachel Riley (a magician’s assistant, or Judaean high priestess) settles the bargain - dominion over the lexical field, with all its little animals.  

Kai pieces together a ‘Chinese puzzle’ in The Snow Queen, but the mystical potential of letter-gaming is lost to the Chinese: Chinese characters are limited even in their thousands, known at a glance in full glassy transparency. There is no Chinese Countdown - instead there are competitions for remembering and assembling chengyu, aesthetically beautiful idioms of a few characters apiece: ‘person-mountain-person-sea’, ‘stroll-horse-gaze-flower’. Each meaning is stranded in its own tiny square, lined or dotted and reserved on the page, held forever in a shadowbox of ethnic origin, brought back to mind in sequence by writer or reader. There is no infinite void from which comes a word, no loss (the burning bush extinguished) of an entire semantic field set off by means of simple anagram. Countdown is only magical when we buy into its all-powerful alphabet.   

[The Case of the Bloody Iris]

In 1931’s Maedchen in Uniform, a young girl freezes up around scripture, deprived of the capacity to recite, so embarrassed by the presence of the teacher she loves that the origins of her religion lie untouched, misunderstood. This motif repeats itself in books and films and scientific studies and in our own lives: I was so rapt with adoration for my Latin teacher that I forgot how to assemble an ablative, how to decline a verb, how to scan a line of verse for the sound of katabasis and galloping hooves. Ars est celare artem.

Countdown fixes this conundrum, supplies us with both a mistress and a psychopomp for navigation: at Dictionary Corner lurks a pseudolesbian vampire, waiting to lead us through the city and into the tower, around the hilly labyrinths of the human tongue. She is the image of European androgyny (the corrupting lesbian influence in a giallo film - high-cheekboned, drilled from stone), she is graceful and retiring, she is always with us. The words are Germanic (Anita Strindberg, Dagmar Lassander) and Romantic (Edwige Fenech, Ida Galli). This does not matter in the standardised practice of Countdown, in the stylish beige universalism of ‘70s genre cinema. A phrase will be assembled and someone will die, stabbed from behind in a marble lift, brought down to a crowd of directed onlookers: hippies, strippers, women in furs, bearded men flogging yellow paperback books.    

The walls of the palace are driven snow…