A contestant on the popular TV show countdown decided to play it safe with a six letter word… which happened to spell out ‘w*nker’.
Mark Murphy will now forever be known as the guy who said ‘w*nker’ on Countdown, but in fairness, that’s a pub story and a half.
The IT consultant from Edinburgh managed to form the word ‘w*nker’ out of the letters RAEPKWAEN. To Mark’s surprise the word was in the dictionary and he was awarded his well-deserved six points.
Sadly, the show is pre-recorded so when Mark said the six-letter profanity it was duly bleeped out.
The shows new host, Nick Hewer (Sir Alan Sugar’s right hand man from the English version of the Apprentice), was, well, left for words. Ironic, seeing as it’s Countdown.
Hewer managed to keep a straight face throughout, although you could tell he was somewhat taken aback by Mark’s answer. Hewer asked expert Susie Dent, in the dictionary corner: ”Where does Mark stand on this?” and she said: ”’He stands fine on this, absolutely, it’s in the dictionary. We must allow it.”
Funnily enough, this isn’t the first or even second time that ‘w*nker’ made it onto the show as you can see from the videos below:
Skip to 58 seconds for the profanity…
Best to skip to around 1.13 for this one, but we will warn you that the censors were a little bit more relaxed back in 2003…
