ITV’s hit spin-off of quiz show The Chase, Beat the Chasers, will not include new star Darragh Ennis when it starts a second season in early Janmuary.
Irish research neuroscientist Ennis has been a popular addition to the long-running teatime show, with his debut watched by 4.9 million viewers, and Beat the Chasers has been a welcome variation on The Chase format. So why isn’t he featuring in the second season?
RadioTimes.com understands that his absence from the series is due to scheduling.
A source close to the show said that the pandemic and changing schedules meant it wasn’t certain that Ennis would have made his debut on The Chase when Beat the Chasers screened. It would have been peculiar to feature him on the spin-off if he hadn’t yet appeared on the parent show.
Ennis first appeared on The Chase on Thursday 19th November.
Nicknamed “The Menace”, Ennis is yet to be beaten by the contestants and made history by last week offering one player £120,000 if she went high, which she did only to lose her chase.
Proving he has an edge to him, Ennis tweeted: “120k? Lose more running for the bus.”
Beat the Chasers spins The Chase concept on its head: instead of four contestants taking on a single chaser, one contestant can compete against between two and five chasers. The more they take on the bigger the pot of money they can win.
Chaser Anne Hegerty was upbeat about the new programme.
“We’re definitely looking to do more as soon as we can,” Anne told RadioTimes.com after series one screened. “We knew when we were filming it that this was a really good show, we were saying to each other, ‘This is really exciting, we are having such close finishes’.”
Season two of Beat the Chasers screens on ITV on Sunday 3rd January and runs each night at 9pm for seven episodes, apart from 9th January.
Check out what else is on with our TV Guide, or take a look at our new TV shows 2020 page to find out what’s airing this autumn and beyond.
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