Article

Community

Culture

Film & TV

Fun & play

5 February 2025

5 min read

Here’s why strangers unite on The Chase

Chasing the prize isn't everything on the TV quiz show.

Stuart Haynes

Stuart is communications director for the Diocese of Liverpool.

Four quiz show contestants stand behind a table with the show host.

“I’ve had a great day Brad”. How quickly we fall into the staple clichés of daytime TV quiz shows. I tried to avoid hitting that trap, but my lips uttered that gem, as well as pushback phrases exhorting other contestants not to take a low offer, as I made my way through the lexicon of phrases to be uttered by a quiz show contestant.

Yes, I was on The Chase. A longstanding mainstay of ITV’s teatime schedule this popular quiz combines individual rounds, a multiple-choice battle against the Chaser of the day, in my case the one known as The Beast (in reality a nice guy). It all culminates in a team effort to score as many points as possible to set a target the Chaser cannot possibly beat. (another show cliché). All this presided over by the ever-genial Bradley Walsh makes it a bankable show in the schedules.

So why did I end up (nearly a year ago now) in Elstree studios with three people I had never met trying to win some cash? Well to be honest for me winning the cash was not the most important thing. My main aim was to not look a fool. My greatest fear was to get a low score in the first round inviting inevitable scorn and a trolling over my visibly clear lack of intellect or general knowledge. (To be clear as well, ITV prepare us for any potential abuse we might get, giving advice on protecting our social media and access to a helpline. I did feel protected).

Actually, another fear was getting a bible or religion question wrong. I avoided that.

If I met my first objective to not look stupid, my next aim was to get into the final round (otherwise my aunt would have done better than me and that would be disastrous for my poor little ego). But overall, it was the experience, it was the day out, it was chance to step outside of the daily routine that drew me to the long audition process and brought me on air.

I would love to say that as a Christian minister I did it for God. I didn’t. I considered whether to wear my clerical shirt rejecting that for, as a self-supporting minister, I have developed my own rule for wearing it; to signal I am in active ministry. I was open about my faith and had a nice chat with Brad about churches and churchgoing. But this was never going to be about converting folk through knowing facts about history or music.

And watchable television in the context of a daytime quiz is about telling a story. It’s almost a pantomime story we willingly enter involving heroes and villains.

But I learnt a great deal about life through this. First, the day was surreal. It started with the awkward meeting of us four contestants in a hotel lobby uncertain who was also a contestant until we were brought together by a show member. We were then welcomed into the Chase world, an experience well known to the team supporting us - they work on up to three shows a day, five days a week. With our electronic devices temporarily confiscated we were in a timeless environment effectively ceding control to the team who guided us carefully to the filming. This included preparing our minds and talking points so that we all have interesting stories to chat through with Brad.

And we start to bond as a small group. Diverse though we were we found shared interests, common bonds, and we grew from a collection of individuals to be a team with a common purpose slowly moving through stages of wardrobe and makeup towards the big moment of entering the studio. That bond extended to the crew looking after us who for that time were friends, supporters and guides leading us through what was to us was the exotic mystery of filming, but I am sure to them was just another day. Through them we learnt the etiquette, the time to talk, the direction to look, how to move and when we can relax and sip water from personalised Chase water bottles

We realised how each of us has different reasons for being there, different desires, different backgrounds and different approaches. But we are coming together with one purpose. To best the Chaser winning the panto styled quiz.

That bonding is important if we are to work together, to give each other advice and support. And I believe the nature of the show has changed over time. My memory was that when it was first aired contestants would be more in it for themselves and almost scorn those taking lower offers and diminishing from the overall prize pot. Now it is about team, it is about the knowledge that only together do we stand a chance of winning, only through mutual support will the cash by ours.

The filming is live but broken up so camera positions can be moved to get the shots needed. We were even interrupted by an incident that ended up in their blooper reel. Everyone, especially Bradley, is professional, kind, and friendly but it is clear they have a job to do and do well. So do it they must for their first duty is to produce watchable television.

And watchable television in the context of a daytime quiz is about telling a story. It’s almost a pantomime story we willingly enter involving heroes and villains. We four were the little people fighting a good and wholesome battle against an almighty foe. That foe was the Chaser, The Beast, scornful, patronising, goading and tempting us to mistake. But on our side is the ringmaster, Mr Bradley Walsh, our guide and mentor shepherding us through the emotional ups and downs of our journey to the final. The viewer is hopefully identifying with us having heard our stories rooting for us to win the day.

So, it’s not about quizzing, it’s a story of uniting, belonging, competing while being welcomed into a world that has its own rules and rituals that needs someone to guide the new person through.

We had a great day, we finished our time and were back out onto the street parting company and leaving, as we began, as strangers.

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Article

America

Conspiracy theory

Culture

Politics

18 September 2024

5 min read

US election: the primal stories trumping facts

Projections and polls cannot capture the power of stories shaping identity.

Jared Stacy

Jared holds a Theological Ethics PhD from the University of Aberdeen. His research focuses conspiracy theory, politics, and evangelicalism.

a map depicts US states coloured red and blue.

538 election prediction map.

ABC News.

Washington D.C. — Election throes in America are intensifying while citizens prepare to cast their votes. The last week alone has been something like a whirlwind, not to mention the entire campaign itself.

Last week, Americans tuned into the first and possibly final Presidential debate between Trump and Harris. On the heels of the debate came a flurry of propaganda leveled by JD Vance (and promoted by Trump) against Haitian migrant communities in Ohio. These claims resulted in bomb threats and school closures.

And to wrap up the week, a second assassination attempt on Donald Trump in nearly as many months. Trump and his campaign, quicker and more direct that the first attempt, quickly cast the blame towards Democrats, specifically for what they see as violent rhetoric in describing Trump as a “threat to democracy.” Trump meanwhile continues to campaign on threats and claims of election fraud, refusing to signal he’d accept the certified results of the election in the event he loses.

That’s just another week in an unpredictable American presidential election.

Americans are besieged, all of us, by a throng of pollsters, partisans, and pundits. Each trying to ride the raging bull of the election cycle.

And life goes on. For now, in this time, in my small corner of American life, I find there is this mixture of exhausted apathy and existential rage. In view of the spectacle, there’s a general exasperation of “what will happen next?” But more personally, dispersed on social media, is the existential zeal and dread—“we” have to defeat “them!”

The danger of this mixture is twofold. Just as odd as it is potent. It is also combustible. And just as it can lay dormant; it can also be summoned by a mere spark.

Americans are besieged, all of us, by a throng of pollsters, partisans, and pundits. Each trying to ride the raging bull of the election cycle with predictions and projections. Some offer prayer.

I listen in on conservative Christian talk radio. Prayers offered on air for God to intervene. What follows is a litany of slogans— “secure our borders” and “defend life” and “the economy” — and of course prayers for the salvation of those who think differently.

Then, there’s more daring outrage merchants with deep pockets. Those who try to shift the election through nefarious means. Like the case of Tenet Media, a media network of right-wing American podcasters who were recently indicted by the Justice Department for receiving Russian funds through fronted companies.

It seems to me that the heart of the matter in the midst of this election, deeper than policy and beyond the spectacle, is that none of us are entirely sure what reality another person inhabits.

A new study published last week found that most registered Republicans (at 67 per cent) trust the Trump campaign as their primary source for election information. Trump’s word, for nearly three quarters of his party, is given more authority than government certification, media-based news, or local news.

This raises the possibility that, in 50-some-odd days, if Trump refuses to concede, if he repeats claims of election fraud, his base seems ready and willing to believe it.

Our social and political worlds have been set on fire not for want of facts but by stories which overpower fact with meaning.

Alongside the debates about policy, the propaganda that stokes division and dehumanizes migrant communities, is a deeper crisis of source authority. Of not just “facts” but truth, of meaning, of reality.

The study revealed that most Americans signal they tend to trust information that comes from “data” and “facts.” But oddly enough, nothing about that statement seems to accord with the on the ground reality of America’s social fabric.

We should know by now: facts have never been enough.

100 years ago, as novelist Rebecca West reflected on the chaotic series of events that sparked World War I, she admitted, “I shall never be able to understand how it happened. It is not that there are too few facts available, but that there are too many.”

What seems “real” for many Americans is not (and perhaps has never been) rooted entirely in the all-powerful “fact.” Our social and political worlds have been set on fire not for want of facts but by stories which overpower fact with meaning. These stories are primal. They’re the kind which create identities and bind communities. They are rich in meaning and so prove entirely immune to fact-checking operations. Source authority has no power apart from primal stories. And though projections and polls tend to focus on the data, they cannot capture the power of stories which create identity and contain community. This is the stuff the vote is made of, too.

This past week, JD Vance defended his propaganda in the form of conspiracy theories of Haitian migrants eating pets by telling CNN, “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that's what I'm going to do.”

Ends-justifies-means has always been ascendant in politics. Nobody is arguing that MAGA invented political expediency. But this election is careening towards deep waters which we would do well to avoid.

“Propaganda is a means to an end,” said Reich Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels in 1934 before an audience at Nuremberg, “…it provides the background music...[it] miraculously makes the unpopular popular, enabling even a government’s most difficult decisions to secure the resolute support of the people.”

I do not know what the next 50 days will hold. I remain deeply concerned that the word of Trump aspires to assume an authority which sees democracy as a meddling imposition in one man’s destiny. But I do know that none of this is fated. As Augustine observed during the throes of Rome’s collapse: “Bad times! Hard times!” this is what they are saying. But let us live well and the times shall be well. We are the times. Such as we are, such are the times.

May it be so.