1,984 words, 10 minutes read time.
Between the ages of fourteen and twenty-one, 1976 -83, I was a ‘serious’ chess player, meaning that I competed for a club and played in small tournaments, such as weekend chess ‘Congresses’. My club was Immingham, after discovering this new club through an advertisement on a notice board at his Conoco oil refinery workplace.
I was a proud member, alongside my elder brother, of a team that won the Grimsby League championship the first time we competed. We also came within one match of lifting the still more prestigious Lincolnshire League, though the pressure proved too much and we slumped to a seven-one defeat away to Appleby Frodingham in the season decider.
‘Serious chess players’ read books full of notation incomprehensible to ‘normies,’ and if chess is on television we will do our best to watch it. My chess ‘career’ happily coincided with the Golden Age of the game on British TV.
I’d first learned the rules, like so many, in response to seeing late-night coverage of the legendary Fischer v Spassky World championship match in Reykjavik, 1972. Veteran Soviet defector Victor Korchnoi’s heroic, though ultimately unsuccessful, attempt to wrest the crown from loyal Party man Anatoly Karpov in Manila in 1978 got huge television coverage, as did their shorter, less dramatic rematch in Merano, Italy, three years later.
Popular television magician David Nixon also had a late-night television program devoted to chess, which was excellent for beginners and those starting out on their competitive chess ‘journey.’
Best of all was BBC‘s The Master Game, which was shown annually from 1976 to 82.
The format was simple, but effective. Eight players competed against each other in a knock-out format consisting of single-game ‘matches’ shown on a week-by-week basis, culminating in the final, perhaps influenced by snooker’s Pot Black, which did a lot to promote that game away from smoky ‘billiard halls’ towards a mass television audience. On the screen, we would see the now familiar, but then innovative, diagrammatic representation of a game in progress and the two players filmed from the neck up. Their voices, dubbed after their game had been played away from the cameras, could be heard talking through their thought processes when it was their turn to move, in truncated form to fit the show’s half-hour format, so it appeared as though we could see them thinking.
The series was presented originally by Leonard Barden, a respected chess author and British international who became the chess columnist for the Guardian in 1955 and, seven decades later, is still the chess columnist for the Guardian.
The first series, an all-British affair, was won by International Master Bill Harston, as was the second series. From the third series, 1977-78, with the winner’s prize increased from £250 to a whopping £12500, the tournament shedding its parochialism and becoming international, and attracting some of the best players in the world for the remainder of its run, Harston took over from Barden as presenter.
Harston, who was also the main presenter for BBC coverage of the Karpov v Korchnoi and later Kasparov v Karpov and Kasparov v Britain’s Nigel Short championship matches, was a great presenter. Anyone remembering TV chess from this period will likely visualise Bill presenting it. Rather bizarrely, forty-years after The Master Game disappeared from our screens, he turned up on Channel 4’s Gogglebox, talking about shite on television, with no indication ever given that he wasn’t just some random member of the public, but an International Chess Master and former TV presenter in his own right.
I was quite excited to learn from my brother earlier this year that a new version of The Master Game, now called Chess Masters: The Endgame was now showing on the BBC.
The time had been ripe for a revival since the first appearance of the time-limited drama series The Queen’s Gambit on Netflix five years ago.
I’d read the novel this was based on by Walter Trevis (also author of The Hustler, The Colour of Money and The Man Who Fell To Earth all making the transition to successful movies) back in the nineties. I’d liked it a lot and was always going to watch a TV dramatisation. But its success as a massive global success was a welcome surprise.
It earned its success by working on a purely dramatic level as a great human-interest story (which is faithful to the novel) with a charismatic, attractive female lead (Anna Taylor-Joy as Beth Harmon), which could be enjoyed by those who didn’t even know the rules of chess. The chess itself, unlike a lot of TV and movie chess, was spot on, adapted from real-world top level games, with Gary Kasparov on board as the technical chess advisor (Breaking Bad, also on Netflix, had a technical methamphetamine advisor, to ensure that viewers at home with a working knowledge of methamphetamine production couldn’t sit at home tutting and mumbling ‘That’s not how it’s done!’ to themselves).
The Queen’s Gambit led to a big increase in the sales of chess sets, in people scouring work’s noticeboards (or their modern online equivalents) for the whereabouts of their nearest chess club and registering online to play against like-minded people around the world in semi-competitive, usually fast time-control games on sites like Chess.Com.
So, to the new kid on the block.
If a work colleague, or random person in McDonalds was to ask me to sum up Chess Masters: Endgame in one sentence, I’d say ‘The contrast between this show and it’s forerunner on BBC television The Master Game can perhaps best be understood as being emblematic of a general decline in western cultural and intellectual standards, as reflected through the lens of popular entertainment, over the last four decades.’ I’d then sit back with a self-satisfied smile, and that would be that.
Instead of International Master Bill Harston expressing surprise to Grandmaster Walter Browne that ‘Speelman should risk such a dubious line of the Dutch against a player of the calibre of Larson’, we get ‘TV personality’ Sue Perkins inviting the winners of this week’s first game to go up to the ‘Balcony of Dreams’ to wait to find out who would be joining them in the next round.
And instead of hearing Nigel Short ‘thinking’, ‘Yes, Timann is following the game we played at the Rotterdam Invitational a few years ago. I played ND2 in this position, and he came out on top in the endgame because of his Queenside pawn majority. But I have an idea to generate King’s side counterplay with h5, which should be enough compensation, so, yeah, h5 it is,’ we have ‘average club players’ telling us their ‘interesting’ backstory: ‘In recovery from cancer,’ ‘Went to prison when I was younger,’ ‘Accidentally murdered the sister who taught me how to play, and so I’m hoping to win in her honour,’ etc, the usual gameshow/talent show contestant stuff.
They’ve also been given ‘interesting’ nicknames, like ‘The Viper’ or ‘The Chess Queen.’ I’ve forgotten the others, though, as far as I remember, the only contestant not given a nickname is the one who looks as though he (or could be ‘she’) was the most likely to have arrived with several of them already.
The players compete against each other in an overcomplicated series of eliminators which incorporate not only plain old ‘ordinary’ chess, but also variants like Fischerandum/Chess960 (which is quite interesting, to be fair) and in solving puzzles of varying degrees of difficulty, the low point being one called ‘Bashing the Bishop’.
Annoyingly, the players sometimes talk to each other during games; play on to the bitter end in positions where any player with an ounce of respect for the game, their opponent or themselves would resign, obviously having been told to do this, so the editors could have the satisfaction of inserting double-action replay’s of the climatic checkmate; and utter the sort of inanities that nobody who’s ever played the game to a reasonable level would ever say, unless they were handed a script and told to read it at gunpoint, like ‘I love it when I’m in a losing position, because that’s when I start to fight back.’
Worst of all, we are never allowed the opportunity to dwell on a position in a game, or on a puzzle, for a few seconds, working out what we would do, though we can watch the ‘final eliminator’ in full in a separate program on the iPlayer straight after the episode has aired.
Sue does have assistance from people who actually know about the game. These take the form of somebody called Anthony Mothurin, who’s billed as a ‘chess expert and/or ‘chess teacher’, and Grandmaster David Howell.
Anthony manages to be more even more annoying than Sue, excitedly attempting to shout us into a frenzy of enthusiasm over an early check or to ramp up the human drama to the max’ with comments like ‘Given her opponents chequered history, the Chess Queen will be concerned about the weight of that chess clock. One of those would do considerable damage to a fragile female skull, if misused, David.’
Poor Grandmaster David Howell. I remember his name from Chess magazine (‘Chess, Sutton Chess Coldfield’ was where everybody sent postal orders for their clocks and score pads before the internet existed) as a prodigy of roughly the same generation as Short. He does his best to retain a degree of decorum in the face of an unending avalanche of low-brow hyperbole. He even tries to sneak in a bit of proper chess analysis when Sue and Anthony aren’t looking, but he knows it’s a lost cause. How can he ever face his Grandmaster mates again? I imagine him shrugging apologetically at the Margate Open or somewhere and pointing out that he got paid more for this than he’s earned in prize money in the last decade, an attempt to deploy what’s now known in chess circles as the ‘Harston Defence.’ But at least Gogglebox was funny, occasionally.
Chess Masters: Endgame is also funny if you know a bit about chess and watch it ironically, as I have.
But I’m not sure who else it’s for. It’s being shown in the BBC’s Quizzical slot, so it’s presumably aimed at people who like game shows. But I can understand how even somebody whose general knowledge is close to zero can find drama and excitement in The Chase (my knowledge of TV gameshows ends in about 1995, apart from this one). But even that requires some prior explanation of the rules. With Chess Masters, if you don’t know how to play chess, then no number of fascinating backstories or nicknames could ever make it work.
Anyway, it’s the Big Final tomorrow night (28th April) and I’ll be watching. Two series worth of The Master Game are to be found on YouTube.
I already had one of these on DVD, and no others are to be found online, so it’s possible that these are all that survive. By the mid-seventies, The BBC (and ITV weren’t much better) had been shamed into ceasing their pointless erasure of our cultural history by destroying episodes of Doctor Who, television appearances by the Beatles and much else, but they might have thought, even then, that nobody could ever be interested in rewatching something as niche as this. It’s a shame, if that’s the case, but at least we have something by which we can measure our devolution from civilisation to barbarism.
Incidentally, the 1983 The Master Game tournament was won by Britain’s first Grandmaster, the tragic Tony Miles, who beat Karpov in the final. It has become known to devotees as The Missing Link because it was never broadcast due to industrial action. It was dubbed into German and shown there, so there is hope.
Anthony C Green, April 2025
Chess Masters: The Endgame – BBC iPlayer
(5141) BBC – The Master Game [Season 6 & 7] – YouTube
