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.

Join with us - Behind the Seen

Seen & Unseen is free for everyone and is made possible through the generosity of our amazing community of supporters.

If you’re enjoying Seen & Unseen, would you consider making a gift towards our work?

Alongside other benefits (book discounts etc.), you’ll receive an extra fortnightly email from me sharing what I’m reading and my reflections on the ideas that are shaping our times.

Graham Tomlin

Editor-in-Chief

Find out more and sign up

Review

Culture

Film & TV

Suffering

17 July 2024

5 min read

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind: 20 years on

Memory and the meaning of suffering.

Beatrice Scudeler

Beatrice writes on literature, religion, the arts, and the family. Her published work can be found here.

A coupe sit on outdoor steps against a blue sky. One holds a plate and the other looks towards them.

Carrey and Winslet as Joel and Clementine.

Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind came out in 2004. Twenty years on, its stubborn insistence that the memory of pain gives meaning to our lives is as relevant as ever.

I first watched Gondry’s cult classic earlier this year, in the midst of recovering from postnatal PTSD. When we are faced with heartbreak, it can be easy to wish that we could retreat from painful memories, hiding them away until the initial pang has seemingly died down. That was my experience, at least. But I quickly learnt that the traumatic memory of my daughter’s birth would continue to resurface until I processed it and accepted it as part of my life. Just so, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind teaches us that being vulnerable to suffering is a gift, that suffering itself is necessary to our moral growth, and that our ability to remember the past is an invaluable faculty of the human mind.

The film begins simply, with a meeting between its protagonists, Joel Barish and Clementine Kruczynski. As Joel and Clementine start making small talk, they seem immediately comfortable, almost familiar with each other, and yet the atmosphere is eerie. Soon enough, we discover that Clementine was a patient at Lacuna, a clinic which erased every memory of Joel from her mind after their two-year relationship ended in a painful breakup. When Joel finds out, he asks Dr. Howard Mierzwiak, the director of Lacuna, to do the same for him. As viewers, we now start to wonder: was that meeting we witnessed their very first, or have they met again after their memories were erased, unaware that they loved each other in a ‘past’ life?

This tone of disorientation continues throughout the film, and that’s what makes it so special. As Joel’s memories of Clementine are erased one by one, he realises that the removal of one’s painful experiences is in itself a kind of trauma; what promises to be a relief, turns out to be nothing more than loss.

We experience this sense of disorientation and loss alongside Joel as we jump through snippets of his and Clementine’s happiest and saddest moments together, trying to piece together in our minds a linear narrative of their relationship. While this is happening, the film’s subplot focuses on Stan, Patrick, and Mary, three young people working for Lacuna. As Stan and Patrick, the ‘technicians’, work on Joel’s memory removal, Mary, Lacuna’s naive receptionist, muses on the beauty of their mission. She begins quoting aloud the passage of poetry which inspires the film’s very title, taken from Alexander Pope’s verse epistle Eloisa to Abelard (1717):

How happy is the blameless vestal’s lot!

The world forgetting, by the world forgot.

Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!

Each pray’r accepted, and each wish resign’d.

Mary has an idealistic vision of her work: she believes she is helping suffering people experience the kind of ‘eternal sunshine’ that only a ‘spotless mind’ can achieve. But the human mind is not so simple. Joel’s desire for forgetfulness quickly turns nightmarish. As he realises he has made a mistake, he starts fighting to retain the memory of his love for Clementine, but his is a hopeless quest. Dr. Mierzwiak’s intervention ensures that the procedure is completed.

Left alone without Stan and Patrick, Mary confesses to the married Dr. Mierzwiak that she is in love with him. It is at this point that her idealism crumbles down. He reveals that they’ve already had an affair in the past and that she agreed to let him erase its memory from her mind. Mary is devastated. She decides that what Lacuna is doing is unethical - even if Mierzwiak technically has the patients’ consent to the procedure - and releases the clinic’s files back to the patients. It is this decision which leads Clementine and Joel, just a few days after they ‘meet’ again, to discover that they’ve already loved each other in the past.

Accepting suffering and holding it in our hearts, not with bitterness, but rather with courage, requires endless patience and infinite hope.

Although the script of the film doesn’t spell it out, Mary’s story emphasises that the absence of painful memories is in itself experienced as a painful loss. What’s more, it shows that, without the memory of the suffering which we have inflicted on others, and which others have inflicted on us, we are incapable of moral growth. Thanks to the knowledge of the past, Mary is able, this time around, to resist having an affair with a married man. Just so, the final scene of the film, which sees Joel and Clementine vow to renew their relationship, is hopeful not in spite of the fact that they have regained the memory of the ways in which they hurt each other in the past, but precisely because of it.

Accepting suffering and holding it in our hearts, not with bitterness, but rather with courage, requires endless patience and infinite hope. But that is what we were made for. Each one of us is called to endure pain in imitation of Christ, and, out of that pain, to discover a greater capacity for sacrificial love. We make meaning out of pain: that’s what human beings do.

The very last lines of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind perfectly express the fruits of this Christ-like acceptance. As Joel reassures Clementine that he can’t see anything he doesn’t like about her, she expresses her doubts and anxieties: ‘But you will! But you will.’, she repeats, ‘You know, you will think of things. And I’ll get bored with you and feel trapped because that’s what happens with me.’ Joel and Clementine look at each other, and, after a pause, they simply say to each other: ‘Okay’. Their ‘okay’ is not an indication that they are doomed to repeat old mistakes. Rather, it signals a new choice: this time, when their relationship becomes difficult, they won’t just run away; this time, they will face discomfort, heartbreak, and disappointment, armed with the knowledge that seeking a sense of permanence by loving another person completely is an inherently valuable pursuit. In accepting the most traumatic parts of our past we grow closer to God; and in bravely deciding to look ahead to the future with hope, we catch a glimpse of the unadulterated joy which we will finally experience in God’s eternity.