A Coalisland hotelier has pledged never to return to the Channel 4 hit TV show Countdown after producers refused to allow his 5-letter word ‘clift’ to stand, which would have seen him take the lead before the final conundrum, on a matter of principle. 

Theodore Talbot (58), who owns two hotels in the town, maintains that this was a clear example of lingual discrimination after he had already turned a blind eye to three other words he suggested earlier which were similarly disallowed:

“I was already fuming that ‘footer’, ‘handlin’ and ‘balleeks’ were thrown out, but since I was leading I let it go. But to disallow ‘clift’, even though I gave them an example (that presenter is a quare clift), was just bad manners and another example of post-Brexit intolerance. I walked off, calling them worse things than clifts.”

Talbot is not the first East Tyrone contestant to prematurely leave the show in recent years after an Ardboe contestant was caught in 2009 using a solar powered calculator under the table during the first numbers round.

Gretta Quinn’s cheating was discovered whilst shouting ‘for frig sake put the lights on‘ after getting frustrated at the blank screen on her device.