One day we’ll come to see this as the golden age of the 5pm quiz show. Pointless is there if you want to bathe your brain after a long day of existential dread. Latterly it’s been joined by the jolly parlour stylings of Richard Osman’s House of Games too.
But sometimes you want more. You want real drama, a rush of adrenaline with your tea and biscuits. That’s when you turn to The Chase. It’s been on our screens for 15 years now, and next to the gentility over on the BBC, it feels like a headbutt to the face.
The Chase sounds a lot more complicated than it is. Each contestant gets a solo quick-fire round against the clock to build up cash, then has to choose whether they reckon they can answer enough questions right to earn a place in the final chase. They can go with the cash prize they earned and be safe after answering five questions right; they can take the easy route, answering four questions and taking a lot less money; or they can answer six and boost the cash pot significantly.
They are, however, being chased down by one of a crack squadron of quiz professionals called the chasers. Get enough answers wrong and they’re out. Then the contestants who make it through answer more questions, hoping to bank up more correct answers than the chaser can in the same amount of time.
It does not sound sexy and exciting when it’s laid out like that. But truly: it is gripping. That final chase is the closest TV has yet come to matching the intensity and franticness of the bit in Mission: Impossible where Tom Cruise is sweating while breaking into that vault. It is the quiz game show in its final form. Even 15 years after its debut, it’s a very solid ratings pull too: the run earlier this year averaged 3 million viewers.
My flatmates and I used to decide whether we were going out of an evening based on whether the chasers won or not. If they made it, it was bedlam. After one particularly close chase someone jumped on a coffee table and snapped two of its legs off. The pure high of seeing Marjorie, Andrew and Rhiannon split £5,000 between them – and the begrudging congratulations of the chaser who had been defeated – would usually keep us going until we got to the club.
It might be part of the furniture now – and one festooned with spin-offs and celeb editions – but it’s important that we don’t forget how reliably excellent The Chase is. Since it first aired in 2009, many teatime game shows have come and gone, having failed to adequately bridge the time between the end of children’s TV and the start of the early evening news. Remember Noel Edmonds’s quiz-cum-70s sitcom Cheap Cheap Cheap? Or Robert Kilroy-Silk’s Shafted? Or the stinker of all stinkers: Don’t Scare the Hare? That was canned after six episodes, the animatronic hare that co-hosted with Jason Bradbury presumably humanely destroyed before it could co-host anything else.
Even a straightforward, robot-less quiz can be a notoriously tricky thing to get right. Make the questions too straightforward, and you risk insulting your audience: see Len Goodman’s Partners in Rhyme, in which the late, great ballroom dancing expert asked contestants to guess a rhyming phrase that fitted with a cartoon they were shown, like Catchphrase for anyone who had been recently roused from a coma. But make them too difficult and you’re treading on University Challenge and Only Connect’s turf, and there’s only room for one evening of chin-stroking on the telly each week.
No, what The Chase got right from the beginning was in evoking the pacing and menace of a hotly contested pub quiz, but also giving that hotly contested pub quiz the shiny-floored ITV treatment. The contestants are your average cobbled-together chancers, in with a puncher’s chance of taking home the meat raffle. The chasers are the joyless ringers who turn up and clear out quizzes all over the county. The £50 bar tabs, the room temperature bottles of chardonnay, the branded pint glasses: none of it means anything anymore. It has long since ceased to be a joy for them. They win because they win.
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Everyone who has been on a fitfully competent quiz team has felt that tension the contestants have. Come the music round you know you’re doing well, maybe even have a lead over the quiz nuts. But you also know that you have angered them, and they are bearing down on you. You hate them, and you fear them.
The Chase maximises the feeling by giving the chasers themselves nicknames that amp up their auras until they sound like WWE stars. The Sinnerman. The Governess. The Beast. If the show were starting over again, it might think twice about calling Shaun Wallace, the only black chaser, “The Dark Destroyer”. But still.
And to ratchet that up, the whole thing is taking place on a set that’s somewhere between the stadium from The Hunger Games and the carbonite freezing chamber from The Empire Strikes Back. The chaser takes up their position in the kind of box from which a Roman emperor might have surveyed the pitiful mortals scrapping for their entertainment.
It sounds like it really ramps up the pressure for the chasers too. After losing to the contenders on a 2022 edition, chaser Mark “The Beast” Labbett stormed off and punched a wall. “I apologise to all the kids watching,” he said afterwards. “That’s not how you should take defeat.”
But the key masterstroke was picking Bradley Walsh to lead things. Walsh and The Chase are a perfect match. His face looking up scornfully at the chaser, always fighting for the little guy just trying to take home enough money for a new bathroom suite; the sympathy with which he greets even the stupidest answers. That was baked in from the beginning. The pilot of The Chase was performed in front of ITV bosses and using a random ITV employee as a contestant.
“Straight away I took the contestant’s side,” Walsh recently recalled. “I saw the Chasers as these big, all-knowing, bully types, so I started taking the mickey out of them. When they got a question wrong I really gave it to them, and everyone was laughing. That’s when I knew we had something.”
Walsh has compared the gig to doing stand-up while a quiz goes on around him, and that’s true to an extent. But his willingness to lose himself completely in things is a big part of the appeal too. It’s not big and it’s not clever, but Walsh losing his mind at the idea of a German alpine skier being named Fanny Chmelar will always, always make me grin.
Walsh’s combination of knockabout prattery and deadly seriousness is exactly what The Chase is all about. The show is holding up the end of campy, bombastic light entertainment at a time when former exemplars are falling prey to accusations of bullying (Strictly), a culture of competitiveness that runs counter to the jolly tone (also Strictly) or alleged poor treatment of production staff (also Strictly).
And that campy bombast is what made me and my flatmates smash that coffee table. It’s a show that has made its own mythos, and knows how ridiculous it is. But it fully believes in it, and demands you do too.
‘The Chase’ 15th anniversary special is on tonight at 5pm on ITV1
