YOU’VE seen him win countless episodes of The Chase, but Chaser Darragh Ennis admits he doesn’t know it all.
In fact, it’s exactly that which makes him a good quizzer, the Dubliner explains, as he reflects on his journey to celebrity status from his life working as a scientist in a laboratory at Oxford University.
The father-of-two, who hails from Rathcoole but lives in Oxford with his wife and children, made history by being the only contestant on The Chase who would go on to become one of the Chasers.
He appeared on the show in 2017, where he defeated his now colleague Paul ‘The Sinnerman’ Sinha.
A few weeks later he got a call from the producers asking if he might like to audition to become their sixth Chaser.
Since then, Ennis, who has appeared as Darragh ‘The Menace’ Ennis on the popular show since 2020, has seen his life change dramatically.
He is now a full time TV personality, as well as an author and the host of his own stage show, The Menace Quiz, which he tours across Britain and Ireland.
He told us how he got to this point…
Darragh 'The Menace' EnnisHow did you make it onto The Chase?
Honestly, the answer is I needed a new back door for my house. I had no money, so I applied to be on some game shows and ended up being a contestant on The Chase.
I won enough money on that episode for a back door which was great.
Then two weeks after we recorded, I got a phone call from the producers asking me did I want to audition to be the next Chaser.
About two years or so after that phone call my first episode was out.
Why do you think you were picked for the Chaser role?
For no particular reason, I have a massive sense of self confidence.
So, I just went in when I got the call to audition and was like ‘of course I am going to be great at this’. I just went with that as my attitude, and it worked out for me.
That is how I approach things in life, I just go ‘I’ll give it a go, sure it will be fine’, and it was.
I think that is part of it, there are a lot of people in the UK and Ireland who would be better quizzers than me, but they would be terrible at the job because they would be camera shy or would freeze up under pressure, things like that.
Whereas things like that do not happen to me at all.
Where were you working before The Chase?
I am a scientist, and I was working as a scientist at the University of Oxford when I first got involved in the show.
County Dublin is home, although I haven’t lived there for years. I moved to Oxford in 2012, as my wife had got a job in the University's chemistry department, and I followed her.
I applied for a lot of science jobs when we got here, and I eventually joined the biochemistry department at the University.
Were you always into quizzing?
I was into quizzes a little when I first arrived here; but I never took it that seriously really until I joined the quiz team at our local GAA club Éire Óg Oxford.
Oxford has a quiz league and the club have had a team in it for years. Now I play every week on a Thursday night with the team, we play in the Oxfordshire quiz league.
And just by sheer coincidence Paul Sinha had also played for the team a few times, before I ever met him. We both played for the same team but years apart.
What makes a good quizzer?
I have always had a very good memory, a good memory for trivia and facts, but I don’t actually know lots about lots of things.
I know a very small amount about lots of things, which is actually the secret to being a good quizzer.
You don’t want to be in-depth about anything, you want to know the facts that will come up in a quiz.
I can sometimes throw out some amazing headline fact about something and people go ‘wow you must know so much about that’, but I am like well actually that is the only thing I know about it.
It’s the efficiency of your memory rather than the expanse of it that is important for quizzing.
Were you surprised to be asked to audition to become a Chaser?
I was a big fan of the show, so when I got the call to audition at first I didn’t believe it.
I thought it was my friends playing a prank, because that is the kind of thing that they do. But once I did realise that it was real I was really excited.
It was a great opportunity, but I still had a real life and a real job, and it was 18 months before I got the actual job offer.
It was a long process; I didn’t get it straight away. There were other people who were up for the role too, but I don’t know how many.
So, it was always just something ticking away in the background and I just lived my normal life while hoping and waiting for it to happen.
What was it like to finally get the job?
It was brilliant to get it; it suddenly became real.
It was a weird situation as it had been such a long process. I had been on so many interviews, and I had talked to the production team for so long, and I did a screen test and everything.
But to get confirmation, to have the contract there was brilliant.
Also, people may not realise this, but scientists are actually really badly paid, so to get this job was great in that respect too - as I was thinking this is another income stream.
This could really improve the family life here, that was a big part of it as well for me.
I never wanted to be famous I just thought it was a cool job to do. The idea of being on TV as such on its own was not what drew me to it.
Who picked your name, Darragh ‘The Menace’ Ennis?
The producers picked the name, and I think it is very much to do with the rhyme with my surname.
I had no impact on that whatsoever; I actually only heard it for the first time when I walked out on set when recoding my first show.
I don’t know why it was a secret, there is no advantage to that, they just never told me.
I was meant to be a bit meaner as a persona, but I am really bad at acting. I try to be a tiny bit mean and superior and stuff, but it is just not in me.
I feel a lot of sympathy for the contestants, I have been one of them and I know what it was like.
What was that like?
It is way more nerve-wracking than people could possibly reaIise.
If you have never been on television, never been in a studio, never been under time pressure to make your brain work and answer a question, well it is a lot harder than it looks.
The thing to remember as well is over its lifetime an episode of The Chase will probably be watched by about 20 million people.
So, if you make a fool of yourself as a contestant, literally the majority of the population of Ireland, is going to see it. That’s a lot of pressure.
It’s way harder to get a question you actually know wrong under the spotlight, and then when you are kicking yourself about it, you are not paying attention to the next question, which comes straight away, you don’t have a second to recover.
So that is problematic, and it is something that we as Chasers are trained on. We get trained on the psychology of throwing away, knowing it doesn’t matter and going to the next thing.
How did your life change once you joined the show?
At the start it was very different. I was still working in my science job, I didn’t give that up for two years, I just did The Chase as my side job.
The really strange part was my first episodes went out in 2020 during lockdown.
So, I came out of lockdown famous and that was kind of bizarre for everybody.
We went from the few months of being locked away and then I walked out in the streets again and suddenly there were no masks anymore and everybody was pointing at me, and millions of people knew who I was.
That was very surreal.
What was the reaction like from the public?
I almost always had a good reaction from the people on the streets. It’s incredibly rare in person that I get a negative reaction.
I think in the six or seven years that I have been doing this I have only had a handful of people be unpleasant in person.
Loads of people are unpleasant online but not in person.
Who is unpleasant online?
There is a subset of people that are obsessed with the idea that the show is fixed.
They are a very small subset, but they are there, they think we have earpieces in, they claim it’s all rigged and that the Chasers get easier questions.
They have this really really obsessive thing that the show is definitely fixed.
Some people just have to feel that they are superior to other people, I guess, and that they know something that no one else does.
Do you enjoy being a Chaser?
I absolutely love going to work, I have a great time.
I love all the people I work with and one of the things that nobody who watches the show can actually appreciate is how great the crew is.
The Chase is so long running and we do so many episodes each year that we have a very stable crew.
The same people by and large are there every time you are in the studio, that makes a huge difference.
We all get along and we are working with Brad (Walsh) too, who is so much fun, so the crew all know each other, the production people all know each other and we just all have a laugh.
I genuinely have a great time.
Do you spend much time with the other Chasers?
There are six of us and we record three episodes a day, so there are three chasers in each day.
The person in the middle sees the other two but only for a couple of minutes, we are like ships in the night.
But we have a WhatsApp group, and we keep that updated and that is very supportive.
If we are doing something like Beat the Chasers or Chase Around The World, where we are together, then we are very supportive of each other.
It is very much us against the rest of the world, that’s the mentality for the Chasers.
Were they welcoming when you joined?
When I joined, I was one of them straight away, absolutely instantly.
I got really really great advice from all the Chasers about how to deal with being on television, being famous, how to get better at the show, things to look out for.
They were very very helpful to me.
And whenever any of us has a bad day, we rally around them we help them out.
It very much is a supportive group, and it was right from day one.
How busy is your filming schedule?
Because of the nature of the job, we film in blocks and there can be huge gaps in between those blocks.
For example, because we have now finished series 19, we don’t need to record any more episodes until probably next year. So we have this really long gap.
There won’t be a gap in the episodes going out on TV, so people won’t know but the recording schedule has a gap.
So you can use the free time to pursue other things, like your live quiz show. Tell us about that?
This is not a quiz where you sit with a pen and paper and whisper to your friends.
It’s all done on an app, its largely multiple choice and you can’t cheat as the quicker you answer the more points you get.
So, it also means you can ask quite hard questions as they are multiple choice, and you can ask silly questions as people can just have a guess.
In between rounds I get the audience to quiz me. When we have a break, I hand the microphone over and people can ask me quiz question or questions about The Chase or TV-land or science, whatever they want really.
It’s completely open and that is really good fun as well.
Where did you come up with the idea for the show?
I’ve done these types of quizzes in the past, where people hired me to do them.
I would have arrived at pubs and clubs where they have it all set up and I just read the questions. After a while I kind of said to myself ‘why don’t I do this myself’.
At one of these events, I stopped for the drinks break and while we were waiting I just said to the audience, ‘why don’t you ask me questions?’.
Every event I do I get asked the same nine or 10 questions by everybody about being a Chaser and the show. It can end up being some of the best parts of the night.
So, I merged something I had been hired to do with something of my own to create this show. I also do meet and greets with everybody at my events. I do photographs at the end, and if people want to come and talk to me at the end I will stick around for that too.
So what does the future hold for you?
In terms of my career, ultimately I would really like to be the science person on TV. There is no science television for adults anymore, and that makes me really sad.
I think we desperately need it. I would also love to host a quiz show on Irish TV as there isn’t really any. Most of the quiz shows are from the UK. I would love to do an Irish quiz show for Irish TV that Irish people could apply for. That would be brilliant.
I would love to host it and I think I would be good at it. But that might be just my boundless self-confidence.
Darragh Ennis’s The Menace Quiz Show returns to Ireland in September - catch him at the following venues:
September 16 - The Moat Theatre, Kildare
September 17 - Whites of Wexford Hotel, Wexford
September 18 - Laughter Lounge, Dublin
September 19 - Siamsa Tíre, Kerry
September 20 - Monroes, Galway
September 21 - TLT Theatre, Drogheda, Co. Louth
September 22 - Dolans, Limerick
For tickets click here.
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