The Chase’s Mr Nice
The quiz show’s white-suited nice guy says he’s famous in some places, unknown in others, writes Steve Kilgallon.
"I am an obsessive quizzer, and to get to do that on television is a thrill." Paul Sinha
Paul Sinha has a theory that he’s a minor celebrity in small towns where the commute home from work is measured in minutes. He’s surprised to discover his geographically limited fame extends as far as Auckland.
Sinha, the white-suited former doctor who plays the nice guy on TV quiz show The Chase, says its timeslot in the UK (5pm, the same as in New Zealand, although we lag two years behind the British broadcasts) keeps him relatively anonymous.
‘‘A lot of people don’t get home from work in time – in London it can take an hour-and-a-half to get home,’’ he explains. ‘‘I live in South London, and I can go a week without being recognised by a single human being. So it’s very different – I don’t get the impression we are as big in Britain as other countries.’’
So famous in Bolton then? ‘‘And Auckland, it seems.’’ He’d rather like a visit now, he says.
But fame will be fleeting, reckons Sinha, who quit work as a doctor in 2007 to pursue a full-time career as a stand-up comedian, but has no intention of making quizzing his permanent occupation. And that doesn’t bother him at all.
When we speak, he’s at home rehearsing for a gig that night at the Comedy Store. While anyone who has seen the travails of Kumail Nanjiani as a standup in his semi-autobiographical movie
The Big Sick, would appreciate it can be a tough gig if you tick any minority box, Sinha says being a gay stand-up of Asian ethnicity has never troubled him. After all, he says, which racist homophobe would choose to come to see his act?
‘‘A lot more people come and see me now: a lot who only know me for The Chase. I am grateful for the impetus it has given to the comedy. People do want to hear stories of what it is like to be a Chaser, and I sort of play the game and give them some of that as well.’’ He’s always done stories about his life, and now many of them are stories that revolve around being on such a popculture phenomenon. ‘‘But there again you have the London difference,’’ he adds. ‘‘I can walk on stage here and nobody knows who I am.’’
When Sinha signed up as the fourth Chaser (there are now five, who rotate through the show, ‘‘chasing down’’ quiz contestants’ targets to deny them prize money), he says it wasn’t a big show at all and he was merely chuffed to be on a televised quiz.
‘‘I don’t think anyone sees quizzing as a long-term profession. It’s very much at the whim of the TV schedules. Nothing good lasts forever,’’ he says.
‘‘Most of all, I am an obsessive quizzer, and to get to do that on television is a thrill. I had no idea the direction the show was going in.
‘‘The turning point came when a video clip of Bradley [Walsh, the show’s host] corpsing over a German skier’s name called Fanny Chmelar went viral - it seemed to introduce the show not just as a quiz show but as an entertainment show.
‘‘That was in 2011, and I think our viewing figures literally doubled, and it became the highest-rating daytime television show. But I had no idea of that going in. You don’t go in with expectations – you ride the rollercoaster. It’s all been quite a surprise – and not the least surprise has been the interest in Australia and New Zealand as well.’’
Why is it so compelling? Sinha reels off the reasons – how it requires teamwork, good advice, and the ability to compromise to build a good score, how every age and social demographic can contribute, how so often the final 15 seconds decides the whole episode (but not so often as to be unrealistically staged), and how it requires coolness under pressure.
‘‘A lot of the drama comes from what might we not know,’’ he says.
Sinha exudes calm on his appearances. ‘‘I tell you, when you sit in that chair, even the easiest questions can feel like absolute hand grenades. You can be asked what six times four is, and you wonder is it 24 or is it a trick question?’’ Questions about kings, queens, prime ministers, mountains and rivers are the bread-and-butter he hopes for as the clock ticks down – anything unusually-phrased can take too long to decipher.
Yes, he says, the white suit is a compulsory part of the act (‘‘I didn’t argue, I just wanted to be on telly’’), but the nice-guy persona is not. ‘‘I am a quizzer, pure and simple: so I empathise with people,’’ he says. ‘‘I feel quite privileged to be in that position.’’ So while the British tabloids, ludicrously, write stories about individual episodes of the show and managed to produce the headline ‘The Sinnerman loses his temper on set’, he says: ‘‘I can’t be bothered with that. At least 95 per cent of the times I’ve lost, it’s because they have deserved to win, what more could I do? And the 5 per cent I felt they haven’t deserved it, I’ve kept that to myself.’’
Sinha says he now stays in good hotels and travels first class and ‘‘I’m not ungrateful for that, but it hasn’t altered my financial status any more than that, to be perfectly honest.’’ What has changed, he says is his social life – he spends time learning, revising, competing, and socialising with fellow quizzers (although, he says, he’s crap at pub quizzes, and doesn’t do them often because other teams are surprisingly hostile when they see a pro in their midst). He’s going to Zagreb, Croatia, for the world quiz championships, or what he calls ‘‘the Oktoberfest’’ of quizzing.
‘‘Everything has changed for the better. There are times when I am sat in the living room at 4pm learning a list of Japanese prime ministers and I think ‘could this time be better spent taking a walk, breathing fresh air? No, I’m alright, I’ll learn this list instead’.’’ ❚ The Chase, weekdays, TVNZ 1, 5pm.