Carol Vorderman

In just a few days, I’ll be launching my new online maths school for children aged 4 to 16 to use at home. For 5 nights a week, I’ll help your child master Arithmetic or Times Tables and as a parent, I’ll be your own personal support. With hundreds of lessons and constant practice, you’ll see dramatic improvements in your child’s mathematical ability.


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Carol Vorderman reveals the truth about her vicious battle with Channel 4, her tumultuous love life - and why she's decided to turn her back on celebrity...

Carol Vorderman loves change. Which is a good thing, really, given that in the past few years everything has, well... changed.

There's no more Countdown. No constant whirl of red carpets and celebrity parties. No more London. Oh, and soon, no more 40s.

Carol will be 50 later this year. She now lives with her two children - Katie, who is almost 18, and Cameron, who has just turned 13 - in the countryside near Bristol, where her partner, Des Kelly, has a trendy apartment.


Living apart but being together suits Carol. She and Des separated when she first moved to the South-West four years ago, but couldn't manage without one another. So now, he has 'an amazing flat' and she has a stunning family house with a four-door Aga and open log fires. He is, it turns out, there for the long haul, albeit in a semi-detached way.

'We're both happy that way. Des is a constant. We just had a couple of temporary blips. But I've realised I don't need to be married,' says Carol, who has actually been married twice, once briefly in her early 20s and then, for ten years, to the children's father, Patrick King.

'But I do need my independence. I have to have that. My first marriage was totally unsuitable and shouldn't have happened. It was a whirlwind, rebound thing. I was 23 or 24 - a baby.

'I tried to say I didn't want to get married a few days before. Then, when it's done, you think, "I can't leave now". I didn't even like him.

'But I'm really glad I got married to Paddy.

I'm really glad I've got the children. Once you have children it's love without bounds. You would die for them in an instant, without question. How can you better that?'

Carol and her second husband made a 'pact' following their divorce not to launder their dirty washing in public for the sake of their children. Besides, says Carol, she's not one for 'the modern way of telling everyone my business'.

Which is why this interview is particularly revealing. Carol, you see, has been delving into her own business to write her autobiography, It All Counts, which will be published later this year. Perhaps because of this, she's more open than usual. Or perhaps it's just because she's happier in her almost-50-year-old skin.
A constant: Carol with her partner Des at Royal Ascot

For she is, she says, 'blissfully happy' and it seems to shine out of her, making her funnier, softer, easier to know.

We actually meet to discuss The Maths Factor, her interactive online maths lessons for kids, a business she focused on full-time following her departure from Channel 4's Countdown last year, and which now employs 30 full and part-time staff in Bristol.

Carol, who is also advising David Cameron on the teaching of maths in schools, is as passionate about the subject as she is brilliant at it. She's also a perfectionist, a compulsive over-achiever.

'All I wanted to do was put together one of the best home maths systems in the world, and that's what we've done,' she says. 'I've loved numbers since I was two or three, and I get really excited about them. Now, I'm allowing myself to get excited about things. If you're doing it for a TV network or any major corporation, you have to put a lid on it a little.'

I last interviewed Carol before she was very publicly forced off Countdown 18 months ago over the reported £900,000 pay cut she wouldn't take, but was made to record a further 60 shows. It was an unseemly, humiliating episode.

'The way it happened was very hurtful, particularly after having worked on Countdown for 26 years. It was vicious,' she says.

'It was all about the 90 per cent pay cut and there was all this good cop, bad cop stuff going on. Then I gave in and said, "I'll go."

'I announced it late on a Friday, and then their press officers were...' She stops, not wishing to mudsling, but basically the Channel 4 spinmeisters leapt into action, leaking claims about her extortionate financial demands.

'I thought, "If I've got to go, let me go with dignity. What's the point of trying to stir it up?" I had to tell the truth, and they never forgave me for that. I just wanted to go with some grace, and they just kept on - and still do. But it's all done and dusted now.'

I wonder what she thinks of her much younger, blonde successor on Countdown, Rachel Riley?

'It's new Countdown now,' she says. 'I take no pleasure [the viewing figures have taken a huge dive since her departure] in it. I've been told I'm never welcome in the studio again, so it's nothing to do with me.' Ouch. Barred from the studio - that must have hurt.

'They're life-changing moments,' she concedes. 'But I love change. Change is one of my favourite words.' And she means it. Carol, you see, is a fighter. Like her mum, Jean - who, by and large, raised her single-handedly and now also lives in Bristol - she admits to a rod of steel running through her.

Carol's decision to move to the country was, in fact, made several years before she left Countdown, following the death of the game show's host, Richard Whiteley, five years ago following heart complications from septicaemia. They'd worked together on the show for 23 years and Richard was, says Carol, 'one of the great consistencies' in her life.

'I've never grieved for anybody before or since,' she says. 'I was lost. I didn't know what to do about anything. I'd wake up in the night and sit bolt upright with night sweats.

'A year after his death, I got myself together again. I just thought, "I'm not going to do the things I don't want to do any more. What's most important to me? My kids. Those are the people I'm going to spend my time with."

'We moved to Bristol to a small, rented flat [Carol's home was, for several years, a building site while it was rebuilt to her liking]. Des and I split up, although I'm not allowed to talk about him, he won't let me. We got back together.

'The kids and I had always lived in big properties. Suddenly we were living in a tiny flat. I had two Argos canvas wardrobes for two years. We were so happy, just blissfully happy. For the first six months, other than doing Countdown, I took a lot of time off just to be with them and I was literally skipping down the street.

'You drive, drive, drive for decades. I remember seeing Rory Bremner one day and he said, "You get bone-tired." Tired to your bones. I think I'd got to that stage after Richard died.

'Now, my kids are everything. If everything else disappeared, they are more than enough. Before, in the course of a normal day, I'd have a thousand things to think about.

'All my life, until last year [her contract with Countdown ended at the beginning of 2009], I'd be doing that. I'd get so involved in the programme. I cannot do the piece-of-talking-meat thing, the "Here's your money, wear a pretty dress and take the cheque." I'm not made that way. I have to be as good as I can be at whatever I do.

'Now when I wake up in the morning, instead of haring up and down the motorway, I wake Cameron up. I get a beaming smile and know all's right with the world. It was his 13th birthday yesterday. He became taller than me just the day before.'

She babbles on about her kids, their laughter, the sleepovers. 'You know, I moved out of London because I thought it would be a better life for them, but it's turned out to be the right thing for me, too.'

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Carol Vorderman is urging men in Bristol to get tested for prostate cancer.

Every year the disease claims the lives of more than 10,000 men in the UK.

The TV presenter, who lives in Bristol, launched this year's Run for the Future in the city this morning.

The 5km charity run takes place on the Downs in Bristol on Sunday, 19 September 2010.


Over the past four years, the event has raised over £175,000 to fund research into the detection and treatment of a disease.

Men in Bristol who are over 50 are being encouraged to have regular PSA blood checks with their doctor, which can detect whether they are likely to have the disease.

Carol Vorderman is also encouraging women in the West to talk to the men in their lives about getting tested for prostate cancer during March, which has been designated Prostate Cancer awareness month.

Carol Vorderman said:

"Over the last 30 years, the chances of recovering from cancer have gone up from one third to three quarters now, and the early diagnoses is a very important part of that. So girls, I would say challenge them to go to the doctor, but in other words, nag them! I honestly can't strees it enough.

"If we can get more families talking about this disease and persuade men to have regular checks we could save thousands of lives. You don't have to be good at maths to work out why that makes sense."

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8 out of 10 Cats Series 9 Episode 6

Jimmy Carr and team captains Sean Lock and Jason Manford, together with celebrity guests Carol Vorderman, David O'Doherty, John Bishop and Peter Serafinowicz compete to see who knows the most about this week's topics.

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23:10 • Carol Vorderman, Carol Vorderman 8 out of 10 Cats, Carol Vorderman Pictures, Carol Vorderman Videos • 1 comments

Most people know that I love a bit of science as much as the next geek, but I think Professor Christensen at the Centre for Mental Health Research in Canberra, who this week claimed that 'women's brains do not turn to mush when they become pregnant' (technical talk obviously), must be pitching for his own slot in the Pregnant Woman's Jokebook.

You know the publication. Q: Does pregnancy affect a woman's memory? A: Most of the ladies I asked don't remember.

Apparently, Professor Christensen's team interviewed 2,500 young people aged 20 to 24 in 1999, and then interviewed them all again in 2003 and 2007, and concluded that neither pregnancy nor motherhood had a detrimental effect on cognitive capacity (the amount, and speed, of thinking our brain can do).


'Our research suggests that although women think there may be a link between brain capacity and pregnancy and motherhood, there are certainly no permanent ones that we can find.'

But if, as the good Professor says, 'mumnesia' comes from the world of science fiction, what happened to me at the age of 31?

This was a time when, during my first pregnancy, I would happily put the iron safely back into the freezer before going to bed, offer tomato sauce to go with your scone and clotted cream and carry the towels up and down the stairs three times before I could actually remember what I was meant to do with them.

The year was 1992, and the world has spun ever faster on its axis since that moment.

I was a round-faced maths bird who spent most days eagerly counting down on a daytime quiz show.

Competitive with numbers since the age of three, I prided myself on being blisteringly hot at arithmetic. I was utterly obsessed with scorelines on the numbers games on Countdown.

It was my job to solve the number puzzles at the same time as the contestants attempted to. I would record how fast I could come up with the solution, and put special marks in my shorthand notebook for posterity.

The show worked by pitting the contestants against the clock - but I would often find the answer before the clock even started (more than 50 per cent of the games) and I would put a little asterisk in my book.

But God forbid, the rare times when I didn't get the answer within the 30 seconds - I would have to register a big fat X in my notebook.

I have notebooks full of this stuff going back years and no one but me has ever been remotely interested in it.

However, it was accurate and my score for getting the answer spot-on within the 30 seconds ran at 97 per cent. Yee ha. Then came the 'bun in the oven' and it all changed.

I was sick and tired of being, well, sick and tired. I was pregnant from my knees to my third chin and it took over my life.

The comments about 'how you're glowing' were reserved for other pregnant beings. No, the best I got from the security guards in Leeds was: 'Hey Vorders, you don't look as rough as you did yesterday.' What joy.

Richard Whiteley and I used to record six or seven shows a day - back then, Countdown was just 30 minutes long and I carried on marking my scores down into my notebook during pregnancy.

We had to record so far ahead in the diary that I was pregnant on screen for about 13 months and Terry Wogan said every morning that surely I must have given birth to an entire chess team by now.

By the end of the first 'pregnant series', my 'getting the numbers target spot-on in 30 seconds' score had dropped from 97 per cent to just 93 per cent. I was horrified.

I hoped that to the outside world it seemed like a marginal discrepancy but I knew something had changed and I had the proof. My brain was being mashed by this little being within me.

But my evidence seems to fly in the face of Professor Christensen's new research.

So I have investigated what other evidence might support my theory - and sure enough, it's there. (One of the great things with science is that just when one piece of research comes along, another might pass by that says more or less the opposite.)

A study in 2002 from Hammersmith Hospital, in London, reported that brain scans of pregnant women (not interviews with young people as with the Australian research) showed a 4 per cent decline in brain size between pre-pregnancy and during pregnancy - exactly the same decrease as in my scoreline.

My cells had shrivelled up. My cytoplasmic matter had been vaporised. Proof. And there's a lot more to back it up. Late in 2008, Professor Kinsley of the University of Richmond, Virginia, also confirmed mumnesia.

He went further to say: 'Women's brains are being remodelled for motherhood to cope with the many new demands they will experience.

'These changes could then last for the rest of the woman's life, bolstering cognitive abilities and protecting them from degenerative diseases.'

And the final proof? Professor Kinsley compared the brains of mother rats with non-mother rats, and he found physical changes had taken place during pregnancy which supported his observational data.

It showed that mothers become much braver, are up to five times faster at finding food (don't we know that one, particularly in the biscuit barrel) and have better spatial awareness than those without offspring (that's the bit where you don't even need to be looking at your child and still say 'don't touch that, I know what you're doing' and you'd be right).

So break open the Calpol and hang the bunting on the buggy - our brains do change when we're pregnant, and in a quite magnificent way.

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