First of all, it appears that Sarah was right.
In the shows I recorded, the youngest person won most of the time. Remember, I only counted shows where there was an obvious age difference. There were 121 programmes fitting that criteria.
Not a huge difference between scores in the early age groups, but a noticeable tailing off after 50.
Is Countdown a man's game? It appears to be. This is quite a big difference.
To be honest, I don't hold much confidence in this data. There were not enough people in each job category to treat these averages as realistic. I think there was only one person in "Religion", for example. It could be just be random chance that we got a clever vicar!
These charts show how many numbers from the top row were chosen by contestants in each age group. As you can see, the older the contestant, the more conventional their choice of numbers. Choosing one from the top is the standard. Choosing zero from the top is rebellious, and seems to indicate a high level of confidence in one's abilities or possibly a tactical strategy to make your opponent fail.
Sneaky contestants are more likely to be younger contestants.
This is an indication of how many scores were recorded, to give you an idea of the quality of the data. As you can see, the majority of scores are for contestants who are above 50 years old. This means that the data for the lower age brackets is not as good, as the sample is lower. Note, this is not the number of contestants who have taken part. For example, only 22 people aged under 21 took part, but their success means they appeared in 57 shows in total.