Bradley Walsh has been the famous face of The Chase for 12 years, but he’s finally revealed how he really bagged his job hosting the hit ITV show.
The cheeky host has presented the show since it first aired in 2009, and he’s known for bantering with his players and breaking character when he spots rude names in his questions.
However, it turns out he ‘cheated’ his way into his hosting role – and it involved cutting corners with dirty tricks to ‘outsmart’ the show’s genius Chasers in a quiz.
Bradley, 61, told his tale of trickery when he appeared on Capital Breakfast.
Radio DJ and Dancing on Ice 2021 champ Sonny Jay asked him: “‘I have to ask you, Bradley, obviously you do The Chase, now you must have so much knowledge and have learned so much from doing the show.
(Image: ITV)
“However, do you think that you might be able to outsmart them on something on your subject? Have you got a subject where you think, ‘Actually I don’t think they would know the answer to that’?”
Bradley reckoned his Chasers would be strong in every subject area, but soon confessed to how he won his job on the show.
Bradley said: “I’ve gotta fess up as well. When we first did the job, the only two choices that were first there were actually The Beast and The Dark Destroyer, right?’ he began, referring to quiz masters Mark Labbett and Shaun Wallace.
“And we were doing an office run through, and this is to get the job up and running. And I said, ‘This is ludicrous. These questions are so easy.'”
(Image: ITV/REX/Shutterstock)
A member of the production team asked him if he could be one of the Chasers, to which Bradley replied: ‘If I beat the Chaser, we’ll make a series, let’s do that.’
Walsh went on: “And they went, ‘Yeah, alright, if you can beat the Chaser.’ Because they thought that the general public won’t be able to beat these gurus, right? And I went, ‘Oh I’ll definitely beat them, if I can beat them, we’ll make the series, alright?'”
The thing was, former Corrie star Bradley could see a piece of paper with the answers to the questions written on it lying on his end of the desk.
It meant he could see the answers backwards when facing off against the Chaser, meaning he’d look like a genius.
He continued: “I could see the print through and I could read the answers backwards and I read them. So every time they come in on the head to head as if they were at the table, I’d smash both of them.”
(Image: ITV)
When he walked away, the Breaking Dad star “‘took the piece of paper and put it on the the other table so no one saw it.”
Walsh admitted: “So I’d actually cheated.”
Bradley previously told The Sun that although it looks like he’s working on The Chase all of the time, he only films the show for 86 days in a year.
He said: “We make 210 Chases, 16 Celebrity Chases, 16 Beat The Chasers. It’s only actually 86 days recording.
“So out of 365 days, you’d imagine I have loads of time off. But once you’ve got your bedrock of shows set in, that allows you then to go off and do other things.”
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Source: Celebrities - dailystar.co.uk
