Carol Vorderman’s connection to the festive season goes all the way back. She was born on Christmas Eve 63 years ago and owes her first name to that date. “People going, ‘What’s your favourite Christmas carol?’” she says, with an indulging eye roll. “All the jokes come out.” But Vorderman has always loved this time of year, especially in her 30s, when she was married to the management consultant Patrick King (they separated in 2000) with whom she has two children.
“I would always go over the top for Christmas,” she recalls. “When the kids were very small, we’d have five Christmas trees and around one Christmas tree there was a train set that would go through different rooms and make these ding-ding sounds. There wasn’t a thing in the house that didn’t sing: you know, that cactus that would sing or the Santa Claus that would sing. Yeah, I absolutely loved it.”
And then there were the games: the puzzles, quizzes and boardgames that, for a few days at this time of year, have an irresistible hold on many of us. Vorderman, perhaps more than any British public figure, has an instant association with mental agility. Between 1982 and 2008, she was the maths whiz on Channel 4’s Countdown, so quick and flawless with the numbers that it seemed impossible there wasn’t some television trickery going on. In January, she launched a podcast, Perfect 10: a 10-minute, 10-question quiz that drops five times a week and is designed “to educate, to entertain and to irritate the life out of you”. The podcast has proved to be an addictive hit and led to a quiz book. In her spare time, Vorderman has also recently become an unlikely firebrand, named by Alastair Campbell as one of his two political heroes of 2023: “Proof that one person can make a difference and you’re never too young or too old to do so.” But more on that later.
“There are lots of general knowledge quizzes out there,” says Vorderman, when we meet in west London in early December. “But I didn’t want that; with Perfect 10, we were trying to test different parts of the brain, so everyone can have a go. That was the beauty of Countdown: you could either have five-letter words or seven-letter words, but you could score something. Against yourself, not necessarily against a champion. And on Perfect 10 it’s quite easy to get five, but to get 10 is really bloody hard.”
Quizzes and games may be just for Christmas for some of us, but for Vorderman they are deeply ingrained. She traces the obsession right back to the beginning. She was born in Bedford, the youngest of three, but her Dutch father, Tony, walked out on the family when she was three weeks old. Vorderman’s mother, Jean, moved back with her children to her home town of Prestatyn, in north Wales. “When I was growing up we were dirt poor, we literally had nothing,” she says. “We were in a little one-and-a-half bedroom flat, the downstairs flat. My brother Anton, who is seven years older then me, was really good at chess, so he taught me how to play. We used to go jumbling, as we called it, to jumble sales, with a shilling or sixpence. And those were the days really that were all games, games, games.”
Vorderman didn’t see her father again until she was 42, but she does connect some of her aptitude in maths to him. “I’m pretty convinced that there’s an element of DNA in it,” she says. “I didn’t know about the Vordermans, but after I met him, so maybe 20 years ago, I discovered my great-grandfather was the Dutch scientist Adolphe Vorderman, who discovered the cure for beriberi, which led on to the discovery of vitamins. He’s considered one of the great Dutch scientists in what we would have as Victorian times. And lots of doctors, pilots, all on that scientific side since then. So I think it must come from that.”
Anton and Vorderman’s sister Trixie also seemed to inherit the maths genes and they would endlessly test one another on chess and logic games: because Carol was younger, she’d usually lose, but she didn’t mind. Out jumbling, they would buy thick books of sums and brain-teasers. “We used to love those,” says Vorderman. “We used to buy 10 books for a penny, because they were just books that people had at home and chucked. Who wants a maths book, you know? Me!” Aged 16, she was offered a place at Cambridge to study engineering: the first student on free school meals from a Welsh comprehensive, she thinks, to ever attend that university.
Countdown came totally out of the blue. In the early 1980s, she left Wales for Leeds with her mother after Jean separated from Vorderman’s stepfather. “For a year, we were basically living out the back of a car,” she says. “I said to her, ‘This can’t go on, Mum. I can’t live like this and neither can you.’ So we moved to Leeds and then three weeks later, she saw the advert for Countdown [in the Yorkshire Post] and that’s when things changed. But it never leaves you, being without a home. Certainly through the teenage years, my mum would leave my stepfather yet again, and we’d end up, I don’t know, in a bloody circus once! Here, there and everywhere. The memory of it doesn’t leave you.”
Vorderman laughs when I say that some people are still convinced she did the Countdown sums with the help of advice through an earpiece. “I could see the answer to the numbers,” she says. “I see it – in the way that some people can see the conundrum. So it’s patterns for me, rather than calculation. If you said, ‘Right, you’ve got to go on telly live and do some Countdown games,’ I would be half the speed that I used to be. But if I devoted a week just to Countdown games, I’d get back to speed. I’d have to get that muscle going again, those synapses going. But I’d go, ‘Yep, bring it on.’ I’d love a challenge like that.”
In 2014, Vorderman qualified for a private pilot’s licence and it’s clear that a big part of the appeal was testing her mental limits. “Flying is great, because you’re in real time and you have to concentrate or you die, basically,” she says. “There is the potential of dying very quickly as a learner. A lot of people who learn to fly – private pilots not military pilots – are very busy people, and they find that this necessity to be in real time is very relaxing. There are squeaky-pants times, but I found learning to fly very relaxing.
“There’s a great phrase in flying, which is ‘I’m at capacity,’” she goes on. “So that’s brain capacity. There’s a sudden weather thing that comes in when you have only got 100ft before you land. You’re at capacity. But there’s something that I find really beautiful about that.”
Vorderman mainly just wants to keep stimulating herself in new and surprising ways. “I sound odd, but I enjoy my brain,” she says. “So it’s like dressing up and all of this…” Vorderman, who wears a red OnePiece jumpsuit with black leather boots, gestures to the photoshoot that is being prepped around us and makes a snoring sound. “I do it, it’s part of the job. But this is me: happy in a onesie and no makeup. But the brain side of it, I really, really enjoy. That’s part of the reason why I’m enjoying the politics. Deep dives.”
* * *
Yes, politics: the second act of Vorderman’s life that precisely no one saw coming, not even her. As Tim Burgess, the lead singer of the Charlatans, wrote on Twitter (now X) in January this year: “Carol Vorderman helping bring down the government wasn’t on my 2023 bingo card but I’m very much here for it.”
Carol Vorderman helping bring down the government wasn’t on my 2023 bingo card, but I’m very much here for it
— Tim Burgess (@Tim_Burgess) January 29, 2023
This new chapter began in November 2022 when Vorderman went on Twitter to criticise the Tory peer Michelle Mone, who had once been a close friend, over the PPE contracts scandal. We didn’t know it then, but she was just warming up. Since then, she has put that black leather boot into the Conservative leadership with withering takedowns of Suella Braverman, Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak. The Guardian called her “a more effective opposition than Labour” and Vogue selected her as one of 25 women “defining and redefining Britain”. Then, in November, her notoriety increased dramatically when she resigned from her weekly BBC Radio Wales show, because she would not comply with her employer’s social media guidelines, which required staff “to uphold the BBC’s impartiality”.
When I ask Vorderman how she reflects on her surprising, combative 2023 – her comments have attracted almost as much opprobrium as praise – she explains that she gives everything in her life marks out of 10. “So for this year, I’d give a 10, absolutely a 10,” she says. “I’m very lucky because I’ve had a 40-year career. I’m not a jobber. I don’t have to pay the mortgage, I’ve done very well. Kids are great. Health is great. And I genuinely have never felt freer or with more purpose in my life than I do now. That’s why I say it’s a 10 out of 10.”
Vorderman’s activism may have looked to many to have come from nowhere, but she traces it directly to her upbringing. “To witness what has happened, particularly in the last five years, is horrific,” she says. “And to not say something, I can’t be that person. Now, obviously, it has led to changes in work patterns, let’s say like the BBC, but that was my choice. I thought: ‘No, you’re trying to close me down, I’ve tried to do what… Well, I’ve half-tried to do what you’ve said for about four weeks. No, you’re trying to close me down.’ So I knew what I wasn’t allowed to say and I said it all: ‘Here’s a list of words you can’t use…’” Vorderman mimes tapping a keyboard. “Here you go! Resignation by Twitter really. And sure enough, that’s what happened.”
Vorderman is adamant that her political commentary is not tribal: over the years she has “voted for everybody, I’m like a rainbow”, and in 2009 she was responsible for a maths taskforce for David Cameron. It’s what she sees as the corruption of the current government that irks her. “This is something else,” she says. “This is really sinister and cruel. But I’m a fighter. And never for me but I’ll fight for someone else.”
Looking ahead to 2024, Vorderman is confident that she will not be short of work opportunities: there are advanced talks to turn the Perfect 10 format into a daily television series; maybe something else. But you can clearly see that’s not where her focus lies. “My primary purpose is all about the election and dismantling them [the Conservatives],” says Vorderman, with fire in her eyes. “And if I lost every job and dismantle them, I’d be more than happy.”
Vorderman’s big push is to encourage people to vote tactically. “I honestly believe – I know – that we can reduce them to 70 members of parliament or less at the next election,” she says. “74% of voters have said they will use tactical voting to actively reduce the number of Tory MPs. So polls are bad for them, but they’re not as bad as it will be on the night. A bonfire of their vanities. Yes! I want it so that it would take at least a generation for them to regroup.”
She’s done the sums and Vorderman’s hoping that, as usual, she’s right.
• Carol Vorderman’s Perfect 10 Quiz Book is published by Ebury (£14.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
