Do quiz shows like The Chase favour London contestants?

5 comments

1. Everything else favours London, why not The Chase too?

   Source: Live in Yorkshire.

2. About 2 in every 15 people who live in the UK live in London. A lot of stuff happens there because a lot of people and things are there. So naturally if you create a bunch of quiz questions about things that have happened in the UK, London is going to feature fairly favourably.

   That doesn’t necessarily mean Londoners are are an advantage though. I doubt many people on my street could tell you the Olympic athletes who grew up in the Borough we lived in.

3. I think the pro-England bias is bigger than the pro-London one. London is such a big centre in our country that people become familiar through it from film, telly, visits, even if they live a long way away. Whereas there’s no reason a Scottish or Welsh person should have a more detailed knowledge of English counties than an English person would of Scottish or Welsh ones.

   The impact is pretty small though; there’s not that many questions that this covers.

4. UK media is hugely London-centric. Has there ever been a quiz show question about Glasgow underground stations?

5. The questions aren’t just for the contestants – they’re for everyone playing along at home. If you did ‘regional’ questions to match where the contestants were from then I think the audience wouldn’t find it as fun.