A LUCKY Blunsdon woman had the chance to take part in popular game show The Chase and walked away with £6,500.

Dorinda Balchin, a self-published author, came up against Jenny ‘The Vixen’ Ryan on the ITV show this week and is now planning to spend her winnings on a trip to Africa.

She said: “I was quite glad we got Jenny Ryan. She wasn’t as intimidating as I thought she was going to be because when you’re standing at the bottom of the table and looking up at them then there’s a distance between us – but I was still nervous!

“In the first round, the cash builder, I got music and sport questions, which aren’t my strong topics. But I did well and managed to add £5,000 to the team pot.

“I wish I’d done better, I can normally get about seven questions when watching from home.

“But it is so different when you are in the studio playing for real, it is a different ball game!”

In the final round, the team got 23 questions right while The Chaser only got 16. Dorinda said the hardest part was not telling her family she had won.

“I told my husband that we’d won but my children and parents had no idea of the result until the show aired this week – the had to wait six months,” she said.

“The first month I was dying to tell to tell somebody. It was a nerve-racking wait.”

Dorinda made it through to the show ahead of thousands of other hopefuls.

She explained: “I enjoy watching game shows and The Chase is one of my favourites.

“My husband said to me ‘you’re always answering the questions, why don’t you give it a go?’, so I put the application in and about probably about eight months later I got a phone call.

“It seems that they put all the applications together then just do a big blitz of people. “They said they’d got over 60,000 applicants this year so it is a big pool to be in.

She added: “There were eight in my audition group and you get four sets of 20-question quizzes, a chat to camera and a practice at doing the final Chase round.

“In my group only two went though to the shortlist, so it gets down to about one per cent of applicants.

“It is quite amazing really, when I got the final phone call to say I was going to be on the show I was so nervous.

“I kept thinking ‘is this the right thing, do I really want to do this?’ but I was very excited as well.”

Dorinda said the studio is rather different to how it appears on our screens.

“It was incredibly small, that was my first impression,” she said. “Small and dark, obviously the bit where we sat was well lit but it was tiny compared to how it looks on the television.

Asked what she thought of host Bradley Walsh, she said: “He is exactly like he is on TV, no difference.

“He is incredibly friendly and supportive, he came and had a chat with us before it started to help reassure us.”

She added: “I had a great time on the show and I plan to go on a photo safari in Africa.”