Ep 415: Louise Broadbent, Craig Hill (March 30, 2012)

Louise is trying to reduce her carbon footprint.  She says that there is so much waste and that people should do a lot more recycling and reuse what they can.  She makes specific mention of there being too many cleaning products, and that a different product is not necessary for each task.  I'm happy to believe this, but using one product twice as much would seem to have essentially the same impact as using two separate products, so I'm not entirely following the reasoning here.

Challenging Louise is systems engineer Craig Hill.  He has taken flying lessons... or at least, a flying lesson.  Craig says that it unfortunately was too expensive to continue right now, but it was a great experience.  Under an instructor's guidance he did the take-off, landing, and the flying in-between; that seems impressive for a first lesson!  It was great fun, and he'd love to do it again one day.


The game twists each way; Craig wins two early letters rounds to get a potentially winning lead, but then Louise wins the last two to level the scores again.  The first two numbers rounds fail to distinguish the contestants, and although Craig gets ahead in the last numbers round it comes down to the conundrum.  Louise buzzes in with an incorrect answer, and that gives the game to Craig, 45 to 38.

I started out decently, but then had some oversights after the first third, culminating in mental shutdown on the final numbers round.  The conundrum proved too difficult for me again, and the game fizzled out in disappointment although I had done enough to win.

Ep 414: Margaret Zimmer, Louise Broadbent (March 29, 2012)

Margaret likes ten-pin bowling; she would not say (as Richard suggests) that she is pretty good, but she does have flashes of brilliance.  Occasional strikes, and once she managed to get four of them in a row.

Tonight's challenger is Louise Broadbent, a personal care assistant.  In her case, this involves working with people who have had spinal injuries and enabling them to stay in their own home after the accident.  So she aids them in physical tasks that are now difficult or impossible, and helps around the home also.


It's a very close game tonight, with the only difference being two letters rounds (one going each way).  Their three numbers answers are identical, in fact, and so it comes down to the conundrum with Margaret a single point ahead.  It is a tough one, but Louise finds the answer and takes the win, 61 to 52.

I could not hit the high notes tonight, only getting the best letters round once; additionally, I ended up deeply confused on one of the numbers rounds and ended up further away than the contestants.  The net result was that I could have been caught by Margaret on the conundrum.  I was relieved to get to the solution first and scrape home the win, although since Louise was the one to solve it I would have won in any case.