Anne ‘The Governess’ Hegerty on ITV’s hit quiz ‘The Chase’

If you’ve caught a few episodes of ITV’s teatime quiz The Chase while taking a “personal day” or two off work – hey, we’re not judging – you’ll have come across Anne ‘The Governess’ Hegerty, the show’s mistress of trivia, doyenne of details, full-to-brimming font of general knowledge… Basically, she’s fierce, feisty and really knows her stuff – our kinda girl – so I gave her a call for a chat.

Hi Anne. Obviously there are lots of quiz shows on TV, but The Chase stands out as one of the most popular and certainly prolific. I think you’re on over 500 episodes now?
“Yes, we have shown our 500th episode and I wouldn’t be surprised if we’re now over 600. Mark (aka ‘The Beast’) keeps a lot of statistics so he’s the kind of person that would know. I’m really bad at numbers but I know we’ve made lots and lots of episodes.”

What do you think it is about the show that people love?
“I think they like the sort of triangular nature of it. There’s the host, the contestant and someone else that things are being bounced off – it’s not just the host and the contestant. The host and the contestant are ganging up on these other people. I like that you’ve got Bradley (Walsh) with his cheeky chappy persona and then you’ve got these four snobs up top (the chasers) and it’s his job to make the snobs look stupid.”

Why is your nickname ‘The Governess’?
“Originally the producer wanted to call me ‘The Headmistress’ and I didn’t really like that much, but then during rehearsals Brad started calling me The Governess. I liked that better, it’s more kinky. I suppose a governess is freelance and she doesn’t have Ofsted breathing down her neck, whereas a headmistress is more constrained.”

Your other nickname is ‘Frosty Knickers’, which is a little less flattering…
“Frosty Knickers actually came about in rehearsals. We were playing lots of practice chases, with members of the crew standing in as contestants, and at one point Brad said to the member of the crew in question: ‘She’s cold, this one. We call her Frosty Knickers.’ I looked at the contestant and said, ‘He knows nothing about my knickers.’ That was the point that it was cemented that it was okay to call me that. I like getting called Frosty Knickers. I’ve heard people have been a little bit offended by it on my behalf but I’m not offended by it at all, I think it’s funny.”

My favourite bit about the show, which probably says a lot about me, is the march you do when it’s time for you to come out to face the contestants. How long did it take you to perfect that march?
“Quite some time. The other chasers are all quite tall, whereas I’m 5’6”, which is quite a difference. So you see the boys sort of strolling down the walkway in time to the music, while I’m basically power-walking to the chair. If you look, you’ll see that the jacket I wear has actually got a breastpocket on the left-hand side with a little hanky in it. Well, the thing is, you may also have noticed that I’m not actually under-endowed in the boob department, and when I do the walk, the boobs are coming along too but on their own timetable. They don’t stop when the music stops. I found that when I walked down the walkway the hanky would tend to jump out of the pocket, so we had to stick it down with a bit of sticky tape.”

On the show it’s your job to eliminate every contestant and prevent the team from winning. Have there ever been occasions where you’ve secretly rooted for the contestant to succeed?
“None of the chasers would ever throw a single question, let alone the final chase. That said, if you knock all four of them out, what they do is nominate a player to come back and play the final chase for a nominal £4000, so if that player then beats you all four end up with £1000 each. There have been times when I have knocked the first three out and then looked at the last player and thought ‘this woman is not as smart as the man they would bring back if I knock her out, and she’s actually playing for less money, so in fact if I let her get through I’m making it easier for me in the final chase’. But I still don’t let her through because I’m still always going to try and play as well as I can.”

That’s not the answer I was expecting. I thought that sometimes, maybe the sob stories about how they would use the cash might make you more sympathetic.
“No. I have had to work at my quizzing so they can work at their quizzing too. I don’t mean to sound horrible and evil, but it is their job to out-run us. We are not going to stop chasing them or chase them less passionately – no matter how sad their stories. It doesn’t work like that. We’re working for ITV and we are not in a position to be giving away ITV’s money. So if the contestants want the money, let them win it, because we are not going to just lose it.”

So you’re equally as ruthless on the celebrity versions of the show for charity?
“Well, we certainly try to be. For some reason the celebrities do seem to win more. We sort of have this feeling that they do get asked rather more celebrity-friendly questions than we do. They’ve stopped telling us who the celebs are in advance, so we can’t go and look them up, so actually we tend to be at a disadvantage.”

Ideally which celebrity would you want to take on?
“Oh, I’ve already taken on the celebrity I really wanted to. I can’t tell you who it is because it hasn’t been shown yet, but there is one person that I’ve been asking after for about four years and I finally got given that person. So I can die happy now, I have no more ambitions. In general though they tend to put me up against the mad Tory lady. I played Ann Widdecombe, I played Edwina Currie and I’ve played Nadine Dorries. They were all good fun, good value. I think everyone just likes to see two battleaxes battling it out.”

In a face-off, are you confident that you could beat the other chasers?
“It depends on quite a lot of things. Mark is fast in a buzzer quiz but either he will do brilliantly or he will crash and burn, having misunderstood what the question is going to be. Shaun (aka ‘the Dark Destroyer’) can beat anyone in the world when it comes to football. I remember once, we were in the Daybreak green room and I saw him absolutely taking Robbie Savage apart after Robbie decided to get a bit smart-arse with him. Shaun turned round and asked him really simple questions that he didn’t know, about the Welsh national team that he’s supposed to play for. As for Paul (aka ‘The Sinnerman’), he is the best of us at the moment in the current quiz rankings. He’s at number ten in the UK and I’m at number eleven. There are certain people that I want to beat and one of them is Paul because I want to be the top chaser.”

For a contestant coming on the show, is there a strategy to prepare? I imagine there are certain standard things that you should learn, such as every US president, capital cities and so on.
“I’m not really tempted to tell contestants how to beat us, but yes, have a good basic knowledge. All the best quizzers are extremely strong in either history or geography because with almost any question, you can figure out a plausible answer by knowing one or other of those things. I’m pretty good on history. I’m also good on language, so quite often I can figure out what a word means just simply by knowing by what it looks like it means in Greek or Latin. There’s a wonderful website called Sporcle which I use. I’ve played games on there to try and drill into my head the countries of the world, the capitals, where they are, which is the biggest and the smallest, and American presidents. I already knew all the monarchs of England in order and their dates from 1066 onwards.”

What other revision techniques do you use?
“There’s an American online quiz that I play called Learned League and there’s a British franchise version of that too, so I’m generally doing two or three online quizzes pretty much when I wake up first thing in the morning. What I’ve also started trying to do is read a bunch of magazines and newspapers every week and then sit down and write myself questions based on what I’ve read. I put the questions and the answers on a website called Studystack.com and it will throw up the questions to you as flashcards in a random order. When you’ve seen the question about five times and got it wrong every time, by the sixth time you will actually remember it.”

So is that how sometimes you answer questions quite confidently that, with respect, I never assume you’d know? Things like the name of Jessie J’s Number One single last year.
“Yes! Well, the thing is I was madly into the pop charts until about the early ‘80s, when I thought ‘right, I’m in my mid-twenties now, I’m too old for this stuff’, so I basically stopped paying attention. A few years ago I thought that I ought to catch up, so I started watching the chart shows. Also since I discovered downloading music – what a perfectly brilliant invention that is – my phone basically became like a little record player that people sometimes call me on. I hear about a track and think ‘okay, I don’t know about that one’ so I go and listen to it on YouTube. One song I’ve had jammed in my head for the last few days is The Proclaimers’ Letter From America, which everyone knew about 25 years ago but I’ve only just heard. It’s brilliant. Paul is really the mad keen Jessie J fan though. I don’t mind her but there are people I like more.”

The Chase airs weekdays at 5pm on ITV.