Today in New Zealanders punching above our weight on the world stage: Napier’s Anna Foley on how she and her husband beat a beloved British TV game show.

Every so often, my mind wanders and I think back to the sunny afternoon of 11 June, 2021. As I do, I turn to my husband and say “Hey Ollie, remember that time we won Lingo?”

For anyone who doesn’t know, Lingo is an easy to follow word-based game show filmed for ITV in Manchester, England. I’d lived in Manchester for about 18 months at the time, having grown up in Napier, New Zealand. I come from an extremely theatrical family and I was hoping to find an amateur dramatics group to get involved with in my new city. I joined a couple of Facebook groups and the posts were generally what you’d expect: local pantomimes looking for their Prince Charming, a community production of Grease held in a school hall… but then I came across something different:

“Hey everyone, I’m casting for another series of ITV’s gameshow ‘Lingo’ and we’re looking for teams of two to take part! It’s a fun and simple concept (no general knowledge involved!) and the chance to win thousands of pounds!”

This immediately piqued my interest. We spend many an evening watching back-to-back episodes of quiz shows from the early-2000s and assessing how the presenters’ behaviour towards female contestants would fly in the modern day. (Spoiler alert: a lot of their behaviour absolutely would not fly in the modern day.) We were adamant that we would do what it takes to get our own moment in the spotlight.

We had no idea what “Lingo” was, but we knew that we wanted to be contestants on it. As it turned out, Lingo is essentially a drawn-out version of Wordle, that game you probably played religiously for about three weeks in January 2022. In Lingo, you’re given the first letter of a word and then you get a number of attempts to work out what the word is. Easy enough. Our understanding was that if you were good at word games, there was some cash to be made.

As much as anything, we were keen to understand the mechanics of a show like this. How do you get to be on it? How long does a half-hour episode take to film? What snacks do they give you during filming? I am here to reveal all of this for anyone else who also ponders these big questions in life. 

Getting on the show was surprisingly easy. We filled out a form and had a short Zoom interview with a producer where we were also given a few practice runs of the game itself. This didn’t go particularly well. However, we must have been at least a little bit charming as we got a call back from the producer in question to ask if we wanted another crack at playing the game. What followed was a week of intensive Lingo practice. We had notepads full of different four and five letter words and we were hoping to show that there was more to us than just some nice stories about us and our cats. We were on top form during this second run-through and we found out the next day that we were in!

The day itself came around very quickly but it gave us a couple of weeks to re-watch all previous episodes of the show. Our game-playing technique was on point and we had also managed to hone our best 30-second anecdotes for when we were introduced by the host.

We arrived at ITV studios on the morning in question. They were happy enough with the dress I selected to wear – the instructions on clothing were essentially: no black, no slogans, and nothing too “booby”. Ollie, who is very much a “modern man”, proudly ironed his shirt before we left the house – the producer took one look at it and decided it needed a do-over. We had about three hours to wait, which was only interrupted by various producers coming in to either feed us lunch (gnocchi – one of the big questions answered) or to explain that we needed to brace ourselves in case anyone was nasty to us online afterwards. 

We also met our fellow competitors in the green room. There was a lovely older couple who met as entertainers on cruise ships, and a couple of young students who were unfortunately far cooler than we were.  

Finally, it was time to go on set. The first thing I noticed was how massive everything was! The screens that the game would be played on loomed large above us, and everything was brightly lit in shades of blue. We stood behind our podiums for a practice round of the game. It didn’t go well. We were the only team not to get a single point and serious pangs of regret and anxiety started to kick in. 

We had no time to dwell on this, however, as host Adil Ray came out to introduce himself to us and then we got going for real. In terms of the specific details, the filming was mostly live, but there were a few re-takes every so often. Otherwise, a lot of it was a blur that I didn’t remember until watching it back on TV some months later when it aired (more on that later). There were breaks between each round where we were given water and a pep talk by the producers – apparently we were doing well, but Ollie was told to stop pacing as it was making us difficult to film. In contrast, I had been staying very still, hyper aware of how I might appear on camera. I felt unable to relax.

We somehow made it through each of the first two rounds and ended up being the last pair standing for the chance to actually win some money. We had “banked” £3,470 and needed to get a four-letter word and five-letter word in 90 seconds to take that money home. We managed to do it with plenty of time to spare. We would have managed to double our money if we could also get a six-letter word, but by that point we had run out of luck. Still, we won about $7,000NZD and left the studio with an overwhelming sense of disbelief at what we had just spent our afternoon doing. 

Our celebrations were only slightly dampened by the news that we weren’t allowed our cash prize until the episode aired some months later, although we were saving for our wedding and having the money kept safe by far more responsible adults wasn’t the worst thing in the world. 

We were warned before filming that daytime TV gameshow contestants often receive some very direct feedback on social media when the episode airs. I misspelt a word in the first round, which led one unimpressed Twitter user to call me a “dozy cow”. I was referred to as “juggasauras”, “norks”, a “filth monkey”, and a self-described “Bad Santa” asked if I had an OnlyFans account.

We decided to watch the airing of the show with Ollie’s parents – a move I regretted in hindsight when Ollie was proudly reading out these messages to the room as they came in.

Over a year later, our episode finally aired in New Zealand. Somebody back home tagged me in a photo of us in the ad for the episode, and then a few days later I was getting messages from people I hadn’t spoken to in years letting me know they’d seen and enjoyed the episode. And, best of all, I am happy to confirm that not one comment was made on Twitter during the New Zealand airing referring to any of my body parts. Ka pai, New Zealand!

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