And that what Carol Vorderman earnt on Countdown. That’s Countdown, mind you – the mid-afternoon Channel 4 gameshow watched exclusively by ironic students and the infirm. A million quid for sticking bits of card on a wall and pretending to find Des O’Connor amusing. Still, it’s a million quid she won’t be getting any more.

Carol Vorderman has quit Countdown, you see, claiming that her bosses demanded that she took a 90% pay cut. And, insulted, Carol Vorderman has taken to just about every newspaper on the face of the earth to bitch about the injustice. On the plus side, at least now Carol Vorderman will be best known for being greedy and vindictive instead of for thinking she’s about 500 times more attractive than she actually is. That’s a step up.

Countdown has a special place in the hearts of the British. It was the first show broadcast on Channel 4, it has survived for 26 years without any format changes and they repeat it at about 3am so you can be comforted by it even when you’re having a panic attack because you’ve just chased some masked intruders out of your house.

Countdown has been defined by those who appeared on it. Richard Whiteley made the show his own before his untimely death, Des Lynam briefly hurtled the show into the realms of frighteningly raw animal sexuality and then Des O’Connor was, well, Des O’Connor. Pfff. Even the Dictionary Corner lady, Susie Dent, has made an impression as the most confusingly alluring female Jimmy Carr impersonator in the land.

And then there’s Carol Vorderman, the woman who’s been there from day one, slowly morphing from a chubby geek with a bad fringe into the sort of alarmingly sexual old lady who dresses like a girl a quarter of her age and looks as if she spends her weekends pinning frightened young men up against the railings at yacht parties to their obvious discomfort.

But Carol Vorderman isn’t going to be on Countdown any more. This is because, as she told every single newspaper in the country yesterday, she was forced out by evil TV bosses who demanded that she took a 90% pay cut. Here’s one of Vorderman’s shorter diatribes, this time to The Sun:

“It was such a callous thing to do. What on earth was possessing them to behave like this. They knew which buttons to press and were just kicking me.”

And it does seem that a 90% pay cut does constitute something of a kicking, at least until you discover that for being the assistant on Countdown – which, let’s face it, is hardly deep sea trawler fishing – Carol Vorderman was paid a million quid a year. That’s just a bewildering amount of money, like suggesting that John Craven gets paid in giant ruby statues of himself for presenting Castle In The Country.

Still, it’s too late now. Carol Vorderman has left Countdown, so she’s given herself a 100% pay cut. We just pray that churning out endless volumes books and games about Sudoku, banging on in public about detox diets like she invented them and doing adverts for everything from dubious-sounding loan companies to butter pays the bills.

And will Carol Vorderman be able to get any more TV work after this? It’ll be a brave executive who hires Vorderman now, knowing that she’ll run screeching to the press as soon as she’s made to do something she’s not keen on. What sort of show will want a vindictive, over-opinionated middle-aged woman with an unusually high opinion of herself anyway?

Loose Women? Oh.