The Chase's lost episode which ITV bosses 'refuse to broadcast' years later

ITV never airs one particular episode of The Chase, an expert has revealed. The 52-year-old from Kent has watched more than 2,000 episodes of the show, hosted by Bradley Walsh since 2009.

Keeping an eagle-eye on the programme for well over a decade, the expert has detailed accounts of each episode, from the contestant and Chaser's answering accuracy, the overall prize pots and speed in the final chase.

However, there is one episode he cannot find the stats on. In 2013, as part of a charity special, ITV news presenters Matt Barbet, Charlene White, Romilly Weeks and Alastair Stewart were invited on to the programme.

"But the episode has never been repeated," according to the expert.

He said: "Occasionally they have an episode which isn't part of the regular production. Most of the episodes fall into the daytime series or the celebrity series, but the Text Santa episode was a standalone and that's why it's never been repeated."

"It had all the Text Santa logos and phone numbers all over it telling you how you could text in. So they would need to do a bit of work to pixelate various parts of that.

The expert added to Mail Online: "There was a previous Text Santa episode, but I think that one was just part of the regular series, so that one has been repeated on Challenge and so on."

The superfan only started collecting data from the programme in 2016, two years after he first started watching it.

"It's possibly over 1000 episodes that I hadn't documented that I then had to go back and watch. So that was obviously quite a time consuming thing to do," he explained. "But at that stage, I was into the project, and I was quite happy to watch them all."

A renowned expert on The Chase, the superfan has managed to sit in the studio audience on three occasions to watch filming.

He explained how the 48-minute programme that viewers see on screen is cut down from more than three hours of footage.

"There's little things. When Bradley first chats to the contestant, that's a lot longer than they ever edit for TV," he revealed. "When he's asking the questions, he's at a podium, but when you do the next bit at the table, the podium is not in the shot anymore. So there's little things they have to do to rearrange the set."

He also shared that both contestants or audience members can challenge an answer if they believe it is incorrect and take it to an independent adjudicator.

The expert said: "Sometimes it'll happen in a cash builder, and sometimes it'll happen at the end, there'll be a slight pause where Brad is waiting for the adjudicator to verify whether an answer came in time or not."