ITV Recommissions “The Chase” Into 2014
We’ve got some good news this afternoon for fans of ITV’s daytime game show The Chase. The Bradley Walsh hosted quiz has been recommissioned through 2014. ITV has ordered 324 episodes. This consists of 300 daytime episodes split between series seven and eight along with 24 primetime celebrity editions. This will bring the entire series library to over 600 episodes. The Chase has boosted the time slot’s average by 1.1 million viewers, a year-to-year increase of 39%. It also regularly beats its rival, BBC’s Pointless.
Director of factual and daytime Alison Sharman told BroadcastNow, “The Chase has been a consistent star performer for ITV Daytime. Now in its sixth series it continues to grow in popularity and we are thrilled to secure it into 2014 for our ITV Daytime viewers.” ITV Studios creative director and The Chase executive producer Michael Kelpie added, “The Chase continues to go from strength to strength. I am thrilled that our success has been reflected in such a confident commission for ITV.”
Congratulations to the best quiz show on television. The massive renewal is well deserved. We look forward to the years of new episodes.
Video courtesy ITV.
Source : BroadcastNow
Great news, Alex. Thanks for the report. I wish episodes would come out on DVD; I’d buy them in a heartbeat, but I don’t think that ever happens with game shows, does it?
OK, now someone PLEASE greenlight this for the US!
Here in the States, if a current game show appears on DVD, it’s usually an action or comedy-based show, such as “Most Extreme Elimination Challenge” (the American dubbing of the Japanese “Takeshi’s Castle”). Otherwise, most game show DVDs are of vintage shows, often from black-and-white kinescopes (films taken off a TV monitor and shipped to stations for broadcast at “a more convenient hour”, or given to stars and/or staff so that they can see how they did).
If anybody wanted to market a DVD package of selected episodes of “The Chase”, they’d have a tremendous selection of good episodes from which to select. These would include both celebrity and daytime episodes.
I’d think yu’d want to include examples of each of the Chasers at work (and at play!), and at least one of Bradley Walsh’s breakdowns. There are a multitude of memorable moments in the years that the series has been seen, and I only hope that more episodes get uploaded onto YouTube, so that we outside of ITV’s coverage area can enjoy this series.
What ever happened to the US pilot?