After reading about sometimes-controversial New Zealand broadcaster Paul Henry, The Chase UK star Anne Hegerty wasn’t sure what to expect when she met him for dinner last year.
The best way to proceed, she decided, was to make fun of him.
“I realised that I could take the mick out of him and he would let me, basically. He seemed to absolutely love it. He really enjoyed being teased,” Hegerty told RNZ’s Saturday Morning.
The English game show The Chase -in which a team of four contestants compete with a Chaser (professional quizzer) for a cash prize – is wildly popular with New Zealanders, screening on TVNZ at least three times a day.
After getting “practically mobbed” on a 2017 visit to New Zealand, Chaser Anne Hegerty discovered how “fantastically popular” it is here.
After becoming the first female Chaser on the show back in 2010, the 67-year-old based her “no-nonsense” persona of The Governess on a couple of “really quite unpleasant” female relatives and a former headmistress.
“I can channel The Governess when I need her. If I need to scare someone off, I can do that.”
With its “play-along element”, The Chase has a format that “transfers well” all around the world, Hegerty says.
Yelling answers at the TV from their sofas, viewers get to feel like they’re right there in the game.
“It goes at the kind of pace where you can shout out the answer before either the contestant or the chaser has actually locked in their answer.”
Before becoming a professional quizzer on The Chase, Hegerty spent 10 years as a journalist – “then realised I didn’t like being edited” – and 20 years proofreading academic texts – “but was not very good at the admin”.
The Governess’s royal connecton: Watch this story on TVNZ+
What she was always very skilled at was quickfire fact retrieval.
“Sitting in that chair answering questions, I actually relax because I’m like, ‘Well, now I know what I’m doing’ … If I know something, then I know something.”
In the hot seat as a Chaser – who “no one wants to win, really” – Hegerty says she never feels nervous.
“People say to me, ‘Don’t you get terrified doing that job? And I’m like, ‘No, that’s the whole point. I’m the person who doesn’t get terrified of that.'”
For her, the “difficult bit” of being on The Chase isn’t coming up with correct answers – it’s getting herself out of bed, showered, dressed and into the TV studio on time.
At 47, Hegerty was diagnosed with what was then called high-functioning Asperger syndrome. Many other top quizzers are also on the autism spectrum, she says.
“We are very good at focusing on just one thing and going down rabbit holes and being fascinated by that one thing. But not so good at sort of understanding, ‘Okay, it is time to step away from the computer and go upstairs and actually have a shower and get dressed like a normal, civilised person and stop doing online quizzes.”
To people who tell Hegerty that they couldn’t possibly be a Chaser, she asks a question – whether their job involves “having to juggle a lot of things and switch from one thing to another very quickly”.
“They all say yes, and then I say, ‘I couldn’t do what you do’.”
Having an impressive IQ doesn’t necessarily make you an impressive quizzer, Hegerty says. Her father’s IQ was higher than hers, and he wasn’t good at it.
Hegerty reckons her own best asset as a quizzer is a “sticky brain” and also some mastery of memorisation tools like mnemonics.
While there are now app games based on The Chase, she isn’t interested in enlisting AI for any quizzing help.
“I like reading things that have actually been written by people. I just sort of prefer the organic, as it were.
“Whenever I’m writing an email, it says ‘Draft with Copilot?’ and I think ‘Shut up!'”
After filming four episodes of The Chase New Zealand, Hegerty hopes there will be another season. For aspiring Kiwi Chasers or possible future entrants, she has the following advice:
- Go to all the pub quizzes that you can
- Read an enormous amount
- Be curious and look things up – “Every time you think, ‘Hang on a minute, I can’t remember who did such and such’, go and look it up.”
- Play online quiz games (she recommends the “very good” American website Sporcle).
The Chase New Zealand premieres on Monday, November 3, 7.30pm on TVNZ 1, and streaming on TVNZ+.
rnz.co.nz
