A Deep Dive Into ‘The Chase’, The Greatest Show on British Television

You think you know what The Chase is about, but you do not. You think The Chase is about Bradley Walsh's twinkly eyes and the bombastic reveal of a minor quiz league champion walking out from the shadows in an oversized ASDA suit, and the glowing lights and the dreadful sounds of another round pressing ever onwards, or about the gentle patter, Where Do You Work, And What Do You Do For Fun, And What Would You Do If You Won The Money Today, or about the thrill of it, the chase of The Chase.

But it's not: The Chase, I'm afraid, is about none of those things. The Chase is fundamentally a show designed to – in 45 flat minutes – heighten your involvement in it to fever pitch. It is a show designed for contestants to panic and get the simple questions wrong. It is a show designed for people, failing in their own confidence in the quiz, to take a -£1,000 hit to the overall pot just to get their grubby little idiot hands on the overall jackpot. The Chase is designed to ruin your teatime by making you yell. The truth of The Chase is this: it is a gameshow designed to make you angrier than you ever thought it was possible to get in your entire stupid life. A scene from The Chase:

BRADLEY WALSH: What office equipment turns documents into unreadable fragments?
AN IDIOT: Filing cabinet
BRADLEY WALSH: A shredder

A scene from The Chase:

BRADLEY WALSH: The Chaser has offered you £50,000, £5,000 and -£1,000. You got five questions right, that's a goo—
AN IDIOT: I'm going -£1,000
BRADLEY WALSH: Now I think you're a better player than that
AN IDIOT: [ Turns to team] I'm sorry, team! I'm going -£1,000

A scene from The Chase:

BRADLEY WALSH: What is the only planet in the universe known to support life?
AN IDIOT: Mars
BRADLEY WALSH: Earth

A scene from The Chase:

Me, with a cup of tea on the go and a small plate with my three biscuits, dressing gown on because it's my day off and I've just had a late-afternoon shower, watching The Chase in full on ultra HD, and just yelling. Yelling and yelling and yelling. And yelling. Yelling and yelling and yelling.

You are on my team. Come with us now as we take on the chaser in The Chase.

Quizzes are jolly, aren't they, but TV does not understand this. TV quizzes are split neatly into two, both at extreme ends of the quiz-mood spectrum: ominous, harsh, full of dread (Weakest Link); cheerful, quietly unchallenging, chummy (Countdown, Pointless, Bob Monkhouse's Wipeout). Quizzes, we know from our pubs and our holiday camps and our grey drizzly days on the last day of school at the end of an autumn term, are friendly affairs, a battle of wits: winners experiencing only tiny spikes of joy; losers only shallow troughs of despair.

But crank them through the TV mincing engine and somehow they come out all wrong: deep blue uplighters, black screen backgrounds with stars shooting at hyperspeed across them, blood red lighting and shiny floors. Quizzes, TV tells us, are actually a hop-and-step away from the kill floor on an especially well-developed star destroyer. The hosts of our TV quizzes are mad at us. You Are the Weakest Link, they say. Goodbye. And they close their eyes, the contestants, as the lights furl down from the ceiling and illuminate them with their stupidity, and they say: ahhhh.

The Chase is not like that, in that it is, but it also very much isn't. This is due to the craft and light touch of Bradley Walsh as a host, and we need to discuss that. We misunderstand him because he so effortlessly straddles so many categories: singer-actor-presenter, Bradley Walsh the ultimate triple-threat. But we underestimate Bradley Walsh; we see him as lightweight. And that is fucking bullshit; Bradley Walsh is anything but lightweight. I will make you respect Bradley Walsh.

Bradley Walsh, an act in four parts:

Bradley Walsh is talking very quickly at the top of the show as the camera zooms down from the ceiling and swoops slowly towards him. Bradley Walsh is talking in sharp staccato sentences and not fucking about with punctuation or anything like that. The hands of Bradley Walsh are crossed softly in front of his crotch. Bradley Walsh's team are here to play for a cash prize of £150,000. Welcome to The Chase.

Bradley Walsh has ushered each contestant in turn to the middle of the floor now, where he grills them with the exact same three questions: What's Your Name, Where Are You From, What Do You Do. At this point Bradley Walsh is the yawning, disconnected guy from accounts at your first Christmas party at the company, forced into light conversation with you in the queue for the bogs. Bradley Walsh doesn't care. Bradley Walsh has two minutes to kill and needs to acknowledge you now you both accidentally made eye contact. And then Bradley Walsh turns, imperceptibly, on his toes: What Do You Do For Fun? he presses. And What Would You Do If You Won The Money Today. Subtly, without you even seeing it, Bradley Walsh has twisted the knife just that exact half-inch he needed to, and found the soft undercarriage beneath you.

The contestants are now putty in Bradley's hands. They purr and giggle beneath his searching fingers. "Well I've just moved house and I need to buy a back door, Brad," they say (they all, at this point, call Bradley "Brad"). A stiff-backed student, squinting into his glasses, says, "I'd buy a kitten for my mother." Another wants to fly to Canada next year. Another's partner just started a business, so the money would go into that. Bradley Walsh seeks and presses and touches in just the right places to make you ooze out the secrets of your life. Bradley Walsh knows your deepest desires and greatest needs and wants. And Bradley Walsh wants you to have it, too. Bradley Walsh turns and looks up the ramp in the direction of the looming Chaser. Bradley Walsh is on your side now. "Let's—" Bradley Walsh says, as the camera lurches away from him again, sweeps up to wild applause now, "Let's win you that door."

Nine times out of ten Bradley Walsh turns up to The Chase with the red, tired, half-pissed eyes of a friendly uncle waiting for the DJ to start at a wedding, so that when he finally collapses into giggles – cursory testing has found this normally strikes somewhere around the 13-minute mark in any given episode of The Chase, although obviously it differs wildly – he truly gives the impression of someone who is three-and-a-half bottles into a four-bottle night, and that – Bradley knows, the calculating little light entertainment fox – Bradley knows that this endears you to him, and the team to him, and builds a small breakwater between his team (they are "his" team now; he takes ownership and asserts it with his possessive pronouns) between his team (good) and The Chaser (bad). Without you even seeing it Bradley Walsh has set up a good vs. evil dichotomy which you can only escape in 45 minutes once four people from Bude or fucking wherever have failed to win £13,000. This is the magic of Bradley Walsh.

The great thing about The Chase is that contestants are very bad at winning The Chase and Chasers are professionally good at winning The Chase, so the odds are always stacked. And this is a slow, dawning realisation that comes over every contestant on The Chase: they start, with hope in their eyes and a dream of a door in their hearts, with a small optimism, slowly crushed out of them by the opening quickfire round. Suddenly they doubt their own knowledge: how many questions can they answer against The Chaser? They got two wrong and passed on three in the last round: do they actually know anything at all? Bradley Walsh has really got to press you here. And so, deflated, they pick the lowest offer from The Chaser, the closest to home: a measly £300. But then the second round is easier than the first. It is multiple choice vs. on-the-spot. Bradley Walsh, The Chaser, the very game itself: it wants four people to make it to the final round of The Chase. And so there is now reluctance in the ranks: the team, deflated at a £300 win when they could have gone for £3,000, turns inwards on itself.

We have to work ourselves away from The Life And Times Of Bradley Walsh now to focus on the team dynamic of The Chase, which is extremely fucked up. The format of the show, in case you've never been off sick from work and seen it, is this: four contestants take turns up against The Chaser to win money for a central prize pot. The contestants answer quickfire to put a marker down, typically answering three to five questions correctly for a £3,000 to £5,000 prize: you are with me so far. The Chaser, though, in their dastardly way, offers temptation – an easier shot at getting to the prize round at the end of the show, by taking a smaller cut of the prize pot. This is where the team splits, from "single unit" to "grubby little solipsists": faced with a threat of less money, most fools will take it in exchange for a crack at more. And there discordance comes into the ranks. And these piss fuck shitheads often take that option, the little fucking di—

We have talked before about how The Chase is the most frustrating show on television, and this is where it becomes that: stuttering quiz idiots from satellite towns stare down the offer of less money but an easier ride to the final, pause a moment, consult their team and then fucking take it. Worst of all is when they take a -£1,000 hit from the overall prize pot to assure themselves a place in the final and a shot at it: they actively remove money from the pot, these fucking sticky-fingered idiots – money other quizzers have earned! ­– just to have their piece of the final pot. YOU DO NOT DESERVE A GO ON THE FINAL POT. YOU HAVE ONLY TAKEN MONEY OUT OF THE PRIZE. HOW IS YOUR PRESENCE IN THE FINAL SUPPOSED TO HELP ANYWAY, YOU FUCKING THICK DIPSHIT—

(and now I'm sorry because I'm yelling again, because The Chase gets to me like this, such is the point of The Chase)

— YOU FUCKING THICK CUNT DIPSHIT FUCKFACE, WHAT IS THE POINT OF YOU, WHAT IS THE POINT OF YOU, WHAT IS THE POINT OF ANYONE WHO TAKES MINUS ONE THOUSAND ON THE CHASE, WHAT MAKES YOU THINK YOU DESERVE ANYTHING, WALK YOURSELF HOME IN DISGRACE YOU LIVING WASTE OF SKIN

And Bradley Walsh, an angel on this disgraceful earth, says in a quiet voice: Well I think you're a better player than that.

And they say: Okay.

But then still take the minus one thousand. I hate them, I hate them, I hate them with my life.

Chase contestants roughly fit into nine simple categories, deviations are rare:

– Genuinely intelligent local league quiz masters who work in the science department of a top-20 university and win the team £49,000 first round, which they then manage to fuck up and fritter down to £42,000 because 80 percent of the contestants on The Chase, you feel, have a special app on their phone that periodically reminds them to breathe;

– "I'M BRYN, I'M 20, I'M FROM CARDIFF, I'M HOPING TO BUY A HOUSE"

– Extremely badly-dressed student men w/ glasses

– Middle-aged administrators called Carole (nine questions attempted, one correct answer, took the -£2,000 offer and is somehow one of two left in the final);

– Extremely badly-dressed professional musicians;

– A teacher from Birmingham who should be immediately struck off based on their round one performance alone;

– Quiet wide former nurses from Cumbria;

– Dead-eyed shaven-headed Scottish fathers who just want to take their daughter to Disneyland Paris but can't achieve their dream via Chase winnings because they know absolutely fuck all entry-level trivia, so back to the grind, Malcolm, back to the grind;

– Blonde girls with excessive car insurance premiums due, and Chase viewers at home all tweet, in unison, how they are in love with them, how they are the most astounding babes they have ever come across, these women, how they would marry them on the spot if they would, or turn for them at least, these babes, such mega-babes, The Curious Need We Have In Britain To Sexualise Our Quiz Contestants, and then they take a -£1,000 hit or get a question wrong about the battle of Hastings ("1266? Thick shit!") and that lust inverts as quickly as it crawled out of our crotches;

Once they have introduced themselves, Bradley asks them which Chaser they would least like to face. And they always say, "Well the Dark Destroyer is a tricky fellow." And then the lights dim down and the studio falls into a hush. And then The Dark Destroyer walks out, clad in black like Vader, and opens exactly one half of his mouth, and growls: Well, hello there.

Listen: would you fuck The Chaser? It doesn't matter which one. The Beast: yes, you'd fuck him for the story. The Governess: yes, you'd do it for the story. The Dark Destroyer: look me in the eyes and tell me you wouldn't fuck The Dark Destroyer. The Vixen: obviously yes. If you would not fuck The Sinnerman I have no time for you, because imagine – and we have not even begun to factor sexual ability in, here – just imagine, imagine, the pre- and post-match sexual banter that man would pepper down at you from the top of a ramp.

This I suppose is the nub of The Chasers, and the nub of The Chase itself: that it is darkness struck through a thousand times with light. To a lay observer, to someone who had The Chase on mute, you would imagine it a doom-ridden quiz, a Weakest Link redux; but, with Bradley there ­ with The Chasers walked in as though they are fearsome medieval warriors and slowly punctured by Bradley Walsh's banter and genuine moments of human warmth, and then that bit again where Bradley Walsh rubs his big pissed tired eyes and giggles because someone said "mulch" – with all that, it becomes more sedate. The Chase is a story about how the glossiest hyper-quiz can actually become a village fete laugh-fest. Then it flips and has you tipping the front room table over so furiously your mum shouts at you from the kitchen.

And we need that: teatime is a holy slot in daytime television scheduling; we don't want to be yelled at, we don't want our backs getting up, we want to get quick-spike furious at someone getting a softball quiz question wrong and we want to mildly fancy a girl from Hertfordshire. We want to watch people win £12,000 and split it three ways and buy a bungalow extension with it. We want Bradley Walsh to get a cheap laugh for looking at an obviously wrong multiple-choice answer and asking "not that one, then?". We need to watch contestants do that quiet slow blink when they get an easy question wrong. We want to watch Brad recount how much money a team could've won, if only they'd held their nerve. We want to watch a middle-aged mum flop out at the first round and Brad call her "darling" a lot, and say what a great contestant she was, then shake her hand – always a handshake; Brad pretends he is your friend but he keeps the distance, only he knows the exact shape and size of the boundaries between you. The Chase is often a game of misfortune as much as it is luck: if only they trusted themselves, if only they believed they could dig deeper, if only they went a step higher instead of a step lower, if only they pushed The Chaser back, maybe they would have won something today. We want every advert break to be punctuated by Gala saying they are "happy to sponsor" The Chase, Gala somehow sounding begrudging about this arrangement, like a reluctant stepdad taking you on when he marries your mum. Walsh's easygoing banter to soothe the nerves of contestants in the quiz megadome is what makes this show what it is: he blows air out his lungs, looks quizzically to camera, chides, takes the piss, encourages: he makes this what it is, which is the ultimate student watch, a classic of the format. He's getting nearer. Bradley Walsh is there, on your shoulder and on your side, like the half-pissed bloke at the pub who comes to silently watch you play the fruit machine. This one to push him back: what country— We need a question about the Monopoly board, and about the elemental table, and we need to be asked what century a philosopher was born. Just five questions away: what tablet PC is commonly known as— And before you even know it you've eaten half a pack of biscuits and two cups of tea, and 45 minutes has passed, and you don't know where the time went but you know you were rapt throughout it, Two more ten seconds on the clock, and you think: is The Chase ultimately a game of selfishness? That you watch idiots choose to chip money from the greater whole at the behest of the team and only to their own end, He's getting closer now, breathing down your neck, but then what would you do? With The Chaser three moves away? And the answer is right in front of you and you are surrounded by doom? With the lights and the floor and the roar of the audience? With the beams and the cameras and the lights, the lights. And you reach out across and look at Bradley Walsh – those sparkling blue eyes, that unnecessary swing album – and he believes in you, he believes. You're A Better Player Than That, I Think. "Is it," you say, and you shape your lips into the rough form of it, and this is your chance to push The Chaser back, five seconds on the clock and one question to answer, this is your chance to make everything you've ever needed, the money, the holiday, the door, but you can push them back if you just get it right, "is it: Casablanca?" And Bradley pauses:

"No," he says. "Chaser—"

And The Chaser gets it right

And you listen to him say humble compliments about your failure as a team in a daze

And you go back home, to your house, without the door on it, the wind whistling through

And you realise

None of it matters, really, the joy and the rage

None of it matters.

Because—

Nobody wins The Chase

There are only losers here

@joelgolby

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A Deep Dive Into 'Four in a Bed', The Greatest Show on British Television

A Deep Dive Into 'Come Dine with Me', The Greatest Show on British Television