Weaver's Week 2009-07-12

Except it's not. The Chase is more of a Davids versus Goliath battle, in which four plucky contestants come to the studio to do battle with one of the people who the UK's quizzing community has come to fear. Their name is spoken in awe and reverence, because of their many amazing feats; or is shouted from the rooftops so that the easily-scared can head to the hills before he arrives.

Bradley Walsh isn't actually going to be answering any questions, he'll be asking them. He'll mostly be asking them of the four contestants, the team who hope to come away with money. In turn, each of them will step forward and answer one minute of rapid-fire questions from Mr. Walsh. He'll pay them a thousand pounds per correct answer, so a decent contestant can easily rack up six or seven grand. And then the stage is graced by the star of the show, The Chaser.

Oh, who are we kidding? This isn't Inter Retiarii versus Olympic Lions at the Stadio Olympico, this is a small-budget ITV quiz show for late daytime.

So, small ITV studio, Bradley Walsh the grinning host, and four members of the public behind the counter. One by one, they'll come out, and Bradley will ask them questions for a minute, with £1000 per correct answer. Then The Chaser enters to his platform. It's physically raised above the main play area by perhaps three metres, and is a small pod at the top of a sloping display screen.

Each of the four team members plays this bit of the game. There is some spice: The Chaser will quote three figures. If the player wants to start three spaces ahead of The Chaser, they'll be playing for the amount of money they won earlier. However, if they want to gamble and start a space nearer The Chaser, he'll up the stakes by two, three, four times as much. On the other hand, if the contestant wants to start a space nearer home, the prize will be slashed to a couple of thousand, maybe even less.

Eventually, we do reach the final round, and it's only played by those people who won their solo game. They're playing for the money they won between them, and they have two minutes to answer as many questions correctly as possible. The contestants have individual buzzers, and wrong answers aren't passed over to fellow players. The total number of correct answers from any member of the team is their score, and they're also given one correct answer for each player participating in this round.

On screen, these are represented in a slightly different way: the bonuses for the team are added in before the questions, and correct answers are represented by stones on a computer-generated board at the bottom of the screen. When later questions are thrown from Chaser to contestants, a correct answer moves The Chaser back a space, rather than extending the board. It's all the same, really, and the format never fails to give an exciting finish. It's the middle bit that's lacking: the same round four times does tend to become very samey.

The Chase is a straightforward quiz show, with very little room for tactical play by either side. It gets through the questions at a fair clip: we can expect about 18 to be used for each individual round, and anything up to 50 in the final game. We're wondering when the last new, successful, straight quiz without much tactical spin was: has there been one since the demise of Fifteen-to-One?

If there's one thing the producers have got right, it's casting. The Chasers need to be a larger-than-life character, a pantomime villain who the audience can ritually boo. Both Chasers bring something to the table: Mr. Labbett is a physically-imposing figure, Mr. Wallace has a sharp line in repartee. It helps that both are perfect sports, taking defeat with very good grace. Eggheads only worked because it had a resident team, always the same every day, always difficult to beat, always beatable. Messers. Wallace and Labbett have interchanged, they're always difficult to beat, but both have come off second best to quality teams. We understand that a female quiz champion was sought for this pilot series, but one could not be found; whoever she is, she's got a hard act to follow.

For a quiz in the 5pm spot, three questions. Is it better than Golden Balls? Yes, anything is better. Is it better than The Weakest Link? We reckon so: the best quiz team will almost always win, and it's very rare for Link to be won by the trivia whiz. Does it have the cult potential of Blockbusters? Here, we're going to stick our neck out and answer in the affirmative.

The producers issued a press statement saying, "Each contestant will now be individually responsible for the accuracy of their submission. Prior to each recording participants will be asked to re-affirm their eligibility to take part and this will be verified by the registrar of their respective universities."

But enough of this, let's get on with the new series. Jeremy, Jeremy, look sharp, you're back. We'll kick off with Word of the Week, Jaffa. It goes to Warwick, the winners in 2007 (that's three series ago now), and a university often criticised for having too many links to commerce and industry. Are we the only commentator who found the university fine, but the administration to have more red tape than Whitehall? Anyway, the side polishes their expertise on Polish life and culture, and on pies made out of human flesh, and races away on the buzzers.

Christ's get a set of questions on Abolished Counties of the British Isles, and we need to check our calendar: these contenders were still in short trousers when Berkshire and Clwyd were abolished in the mid-1990s. Knowledge of the date when Cleopatra's Needle sailed up the Thames draws the Cambridge side level, and deduction that "Martin Amis" when said includes all three present singular conjugations of "to be".

The audio round falls over in a bit of a heap when one of the Warwick side dallies forever on a film title, giving the answer when the host's passed it across. Thumper's right to kill the question there, but wrong to ask Christ's to give an answer before one of the bonus music pieces have faded. That may have been a cut from what happened in the studio, but slapped wrists for misleading the viewer if that's what the producers did. Christ's has certainly come back, leading 85-55 at this point.

No-one can recognise a picture of Iris Murdoch and John Bayley, and the Warwick side goes on to confuse John Betjeman with the male companion of W H Auden. Just when Warwick think they've got the match won, they're tripped up by the question-writer's precision: "quadratic equation" is not sufficient when they're after "a-x-squared plus b-x plus c equals 0". Christ's picks up fifteen points in as many seconds on gases of the ethane family, and shortly afterwards their last player gets a starter correct: Warwick achieved that just before the half-way mark. The gong goes just as Warwick are hitting their next bonuses, and they've won by 200-170.

Next match: Royal Veterinary College v Manchester