Friday 14 January 2011

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.

4 comments:

Ben Dutton said...

A very enjoyable episode of The Chase - watched it with my mum, who'd not seen it before, and tuned in again this evening. Mark just got unlucky. My mum did ask me though whether the show was rigged: today, Anne's questions seemed noticeably easier than the contestants. But nevertheless it is a good show - but really comes to life when you have some decent challengers against the chaser.

Londinius said...

Hi Ben

I agree entirely about your comments about how the show comes to life when there are good contestants on it. As regards Anne, I've played against Anne twice - lost one, drawn one, and believe me she does not need it rigged in her favour - she is that good. It was probably the luck of the draw the way that the questions worked out.

Dave

Des Elmes said...

Definitely the most dramatic Final Chase yet - and I too don't believe that Mark deliberately said 4 before he said 6.

In all fairness, though, it would have been quite heartbreaking if he had said 6 first - the challengers would have then missed out on £14k each by pretty much the narrowest possible margin...

Ian F said...

I do enjoy The Chase, but I always feel a bit dissatisfied by the final round because the team and the chaser compare their scores on a different set of questions. It doesn't feel like a match to me, it has a sense of 'parallel play'.

Perhaps it would be a bit more dramatic if the chaser sat in a soundproof box while the team had their go, then emerges to try beating them on the same set of Questions...