The Chase star Anne Hegerty has revealed she and her fellow Chasers have had their pay slashed following the latest addition to their quizzing line-up.
Last week, the ITV game show welcomed a sixth Chaser to the ranks, with former contestant Darragh Ennis making his debut appearance as an expert.
In an interview on the YouTube series The Lewis Nicholls Show, Anne – known to fans of The Chase as The Governess – revealed that the team gaining a new member was something of a double-edged sword.
Asked whether she was happy at the prospect of a new Chaser, Anne explained: “This is a tricky one, because a lot of the public imagine that we are on the same sort of deal that Hollywood stars are in the 1930s.
“They got paid a salary per month, per year, and they were salaried employees at the studio and the studio would find them things to do for that salary. That isn’t actually how that works.
“We, The Chasers and Bradley [Walsh], we get paid a flat fee for every [show] that we do. So, any show that I’m doing, is a show for which I’m being paid and the other Chasers aren’t. And that applies to all of us.”
She added: “If you’re going to divide the shows by six rather than five, then, you know, do the maths.”
Anne added that Darragh’s arrival comes at a time when fewer episodes of The Chase were already being filmed, due to presenter Bradley Walsh’s packed schedule.
“Because he’s so in demand and so good, so superb at everything he does and can do so many different things... and so of course he’s massively in demand, and there’s about ten other things he’s doing besides the daytime Chase. A lot of the time we’ll find, ‘you know that filming block that was booked in, we are not filming that week after all’,” she said.
“It turns out, Bradley was doing another gameshow or something like that. And that’s a period of time where we aren’t working.
“Then obviously you add in a global pandemic and last year, because Bradley was still doing Doctor Who, we only recorded 93 shows. And we should’ve recorded twice that already.
“This year we were hoping to make up for it and do 150, 160, and then well that didn’t happen. So we hoped we will catch up in the spring but then again it all depends on whether Bradley’s available, it depends on a lot on whether one of these vaccines work out.”
Anne joined The Chase in 2010, and more recently appeared on I’m A Celebrity... Get Me Out Of Here! and hosted the quiz show Britain’s Brightest Family.
Watch her full interview in the video above.