Sixty-one-year-old Bradley Walsh has been the host of the show The Chase since it first aired on ITV back in 2009. In each episode, he puts a series of questions to a handful of contestants who face off against ‘the chaser’ in the competition.
The teatime quiz show has established itself as one of the UK’s most popular, longest running and successful game shows, with a steady viewership of 3-5 million. It is also one of ITV’s top daytime series and has been nominated 6 times at the National Television Awards, taking home the crown in 2016, 2017 and 2019.
The show’s huge success is without a doubt down to Walsh and his humorous approach to hosting, as well as the banter he shares with the chasers. As a result, they have all become internet sensations.
The chasers you might already know and love consist of The Beast (Mark Labbett), The Dark Destroyer (Shaun Wallace), The Governess (Anne Hegerty), The Sinnerman (Paul Sinha), The Vixen (Jenny Ryan), and (The Menace) Darragh Ennis. Each chaser is impressive in their own right, with all of them possessing encyclopedic knowledge.
Now, to fans of the show, it might look like a well oiled machine. But in reality, there’s a lot of legal measures that have to be put in place before every episode airs.
And it seems there has been more than a few times when things haven’t gone exactly to plan, resulting in lawyers having to step in on set.
Bradley Walsh opened up to the Radio Times, explaining: “If there is a slight misread, I am stopped immediately – bang – by the lawyers,
“We have the compliance lawyers in the studio all the time.”
To safeguard themselves legally, the show employs Beyond Dispute, an external monitoring service.
Walsh continued: “What you have to do is go back to the start of the question, literally on video tape where my mouth opens – or where it’s closed from the previous question – and the question is re-asked. It is stopped to the split second.
“It means no time is lost for either the contestant or the Chaser.”
Bradley has a commendable knack of getting things right most of the time, even if he does crack up sometimes.
The host has to fire off questions as quick as possible if the contestants are going to have a chance at keeping up with the chasers. In reality, he needs to read out around one question every four seconds, so it’s anything but easy work.
Walsh explained: “You have to be at such a speed: if you’re a contestant and I go ‘what’s… the capital… of France… ‘ they’d be dead and buried in thirty seconds.
“I have to make sure they get up to speed and they’re getting about eighteen or nineteen questions answered correctly.”
He continued: “That’s the real banana skin score [that will trip the chasers up]. Once the chasers get in a rhythm there’s no stopping them.
“They can answer twenty-four, twenty-five questions in 2 minutes. We’ve even almost reached thirty.”
Who knew there was so much work that went into the quiz show!
