Did You See -

- yesterday’s 'The Chase' ? I’ll be honest that this is the first time I have caught the show during the current series. Chasing was Mark, and he’d probably be the first to admit that he was a little bit off form for much of the evening in yesterday’s show.

In a nutshell what happened was that the first three challengers all had a pretty decent general knowledge. 2 of them took the money offered, and one of them even had the confidence, or chutzpah, or whatever to take a step closer, and he pulled it off, adding a massive £21,000 to the prize pot. The first three contestants all made it home, and carried forward £42,000 into the Final Chase.

OK, with me so far ? What happened next was pure theatre. The fourth contender, obviously nothing like as good on General Knowledge, was offered the chance to take a step further away from the Chaser, but it meant that if he got home it would actually mean £2000 being taken off the total. He went for it. Needless to say this did not impress the three players already home and dry, and they happily cheered on every correct answer Mark supplied. To be fair it didn’t take a long time to catch him.

So to the Final Chase. The team actually started as if they were going to get a huge total, but just ran out of a little bit of steam. They set a gettable total of 25. Then Mark started getting his own answers wrong, while the team kept getting them right and pegging him back. There looked to be no way that he could do it. Then suddenly he clicked into form, and with a string of terrific answers he had a fraction of a second left to answer ‘How many legs does a flea have ? ‘
‘ Four ! NO ! Six!’ he shouted, but the first answer had to count. You probably couldn’t have scripted that ending, and believe me I know Mark well enough to say that I cannot envisage any circumstances under which he would have deliberately got that last answer wrong.

Why mention it ? Well, simply because yesterday evening, and then today, no less than 7 different people all asked me, independent of each other, whether I’d watched the show, and raved on to me about how much they had enjoyed it. Keep up the good work, guys.