CJ quits Eggheads after 13 years to pursue acting career

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CJ de Mooi, the Egghead we have all loved to hate for the past 13 years, has quit to pursue an acting career.

The most arrogant man on telly since the Top Gear axe fell on Jeremy Clarkson will be taking his garish shirts and impressive general knowledge to the sunnier climes of South Africa, where he hopes to carve a career out of more than showing normal people up.

Eggheads fans will surely miss CJ’s smug, unnecessarily long answers to questions said normal people have got wrong, but since he has left and returned once already, this might not be the last we see of him.

The 46-year-old announced he was leaving in 2012, but came back just two years later to replace the much less offensive Daphne Fowler.

De Mooi, who gave himself his surname meaning ‘the beautiful’ in Dutch, is famous for winning game shows including The Weakest Link, Fifteen to One and Beat the Nation. He began acting in 2011 and has starred in several West End plays and pantomimes.

However, he is arguably most well-known for grabbing the headlines in September 2015 with the casual revelation that he might have killed a mugger after punching him and throwing him in an Amsterdam canal.

“He caught me on the wrong day and I just snapped,” he wrote in his autobiography. “I fully suspect I killed him. I’ve no idea what happened to him. This is the one incident of my life I do regret.”

Good luck, Cape Town.