Thursdays from 16th July, 9pm
ITV1 and ITVX
Paris, Zurich, Lisbon, Athens, Barcelona, Rome. When The Chase says it’s going around the world, boy do they mean it.
The Chase Around The World sees six pairs of contestants with pre-existing relationships race around these worldwide cities searching for a pair of Chasers who have set up these treasure hunts. There will be cryptic clues to solve to find locations and questions to answer at each point, but the last pair to arrive must take part in a 10-step Final Chase against the two Chasers in order to stay in the game. There are six teams and six episodes which suggests there will definitely be at least two episodes where people save themselves, or there won’t be much of a Final episode where there’s £100,000 up for grabs. How they work that will I’m sure be up for discussion. Winning a leg also means handing a time penalty for an opposing team in the following one.
So it’s basically The Amazing Race with the challenges replaced by quizzing… The Amazing Chase if you will, which is definitely a good joke nobody has made before. I like The Amazing Race but have always maintained that its editing style which sets it apart from other shows of its ilk would prove quite irritating to UK viewers (TSSCH-sound, probably) so it’s interesting to see how much this does or does not lean into that, but I have always thought The Amazing Race would be better if its clues were a bit more cryptic, a bit less “go here do this,”so maybe this might work. I’m sure it was a lovely jolly for Brad and the Chasers for a week or two anyway, although I do think it’s a pity that in a show that’s such a worldwide success they haven’t thought about getting some local Chasers, although looking at the locations I’m not sure The Chase is on on any of them at the moment although it was certainly big in Spain for a bit.
Interesting they seem to have decided on weekly for this. Feels like they’ve been bitten by trying to ape The Traitors scheduling in the last year, we’ll see if it works out for them. Let us know what you think in the comments.
Ep 1 on ITVX now if you can’t wait.
I couldn’t wait…
6 pairs of contestants rock up in Rome to meet Brad (you would think they would have received billions of contestant applications but it turns out they ended up with one pair who were part of a team on the Family Chase spinoff that nobody remembers)
A round of questions to determine the race order, just be the first to buzz in and get the question right and you’re off! Buzz in and get it wrong and you’re frozen out for the next question…although no penalty if you happen to break the buzzer in the process
Round 1 all 6 teams get the same question with 3 possible answers/destinations – once they select an answer they have to head off to the destination where if they’re correct they can move on and if not they have to choose again until they do end up at the right destination
Round 2 is a picture round (which of these 5 logos is from a famous Italian fashion brand) – there is perhaps a slight advantage in your race order here as there are 6 different categories and they get taken off as each team picks – after giving an answer they get given some GPS coordinates to drive to and again if they’re right they can move on, if not that evil Beasty Boy laughs and makes them drive around the block before having another go at getting the correct answer to the same question
Round 3 is 3 questions about naming famous Italians – if you don’t know off the top of your head there are TWO HUNDRED AND TWENTY NINE statues around the area to somehow help you work it out – I’m going to be honest this round probably made the least sense even after watching it back
Round 4 the contestants are given 2 locations with a ‘cryptic’ clue attached to each – in this episode a pizza place (food clue) and a gift shop (pop culture clue) – they can visit both or if they’re confident enough just visiting one may be enough to work out the location (in fact this location being the final one where Brad is waiting), they must not have been very hungry as not one of them took a bite of the various pizzas being cooked but I suppose bringing out the exact same pizza once worked the puzzle out it would have been a bit cold, everyone seemed to get a Mark Le Bear to keep though!
Whichever pair arrives at Brad last comes head to head with the 2 chasers and have to answer 8 (stupidly easy) questions to set a time for the Chasers to beat answering 10 (stupidly easy) questions, if they fail to beat the time the pair just move on to the next episode
Overall it all looks very nice but it isn’t like Rome and the other locations haven’t been on TV a million times already, there isn’t that much quizzing or puzzling in the end (and it suffers the same problem as Secret Genius at points in that you have to watch the same process being carried out 6 times) and the race was just…there? In fact it felt like it could have worked better in reverse as a standalone format with different contestants/pairs each episode and first to finish gets to duel with the Chasers for £10,000 or something
Paul Farrer adds some nice touches as usual with his creative musical genius although adding the usual bings and bongs and contestant name announcer voice from the normal show in post production felt slightly odd
6.5/10 is where I would roughly put it
They should definitely have had to eat the pizza after each wrong guess.
Can we have a moratorium on lengthy pre-titles format explanations please? I am quite sure we could have figured out the format ourselves which would give you three minutes you could have put some actual content in.
A contestant crying after getting the first question wrong. Alright then.
Bradley is great in a live setting, but a voiceover artist he isn’t, in fact he’s so bad at reading his lines I wondered if he was AI’ed – there were a couple of good gags in his script were somehow given no delivery whatsoever. I’m intrigued to see how the other Chasers come across, Anne’s a bit more believable in her line delivery than Mark is.
How do you guarantee teams don’t get eliminated sometimes? Being appreciatively slower asking the questions to The Chasers, leaving extra pauses in between name and asking the question, leaving extra pauses in the questions sometimes even. It should be an exciting end, it isn’t.
In fact I think that sums the show up really, certainly after episode one – you can see the ideas, you can see why it might have got a commission based on the pitch, but the execution leaves a bit to be desired – never has a race felt so low octane. Some of the quiz elements were quite fun – the brands question, the Spanish/Steps element, others felt like the sort of thing you’d get on a school trip. If it was someone/thing a bit larger than life setting the tasks, if there were elements that felt a bit dangerous it might be a go-er. As it is it’s not a show that feels like it has aspirations other than to fill six hours of TV with a name you might recognise.
It does feel like there’s something there, series 2 could be great, I’d say at the moment this feels a bit less than ‘good’. It feels like a very cheap version of 007 Road To a Million actually. It is unfortunate that whenever a pair runs through the city immediately makes you think of Race Across The World, and you’re watching a much slower version of it. But there’s probably no avoiding that. The shots of Chasers across the city leaning out and hiding again etc looked really weak and cringe I thought. Having picture questions just because they can probably wasn’t as interesting as they thought it would be. The graphics looked cheap compared to the main show.