Chess Masters

 Anything and everything will get its turn at being a 'Reality' TV show if it waits long enough. There was the increasingly horrible Big Brother, 'business' in The Apprentice, then cookery, dancing, needlework, Traitors. It took a while for the brainstorming sessions to find chess but they will try anything once and see if it flies.

I didn't have high hopes of it but gave it a go. Sue Perkins is brought in as somebody vaguely 'highbrow', perhaps having won Maestro on which she was judged to have waved her arms most stylishly conducting an orchestra but I don't think Claudio Abbado lost any sleep over it. It also had David Howells- someone who genuinely can play- selling himself for the money on offer like Lang Lang surprisingly did in The Piano. Or perhaps they both did it through dedication to their art, for the legacy benefit of others.

 

It wasn't as bad as it might have been. The players all have to have epithet nicknames like Killer Queen and, as is customary, a 'back story' if at all possible. It's never allowed to appear dull for a moment. Even though Round 1 was only with 10 minutes each on the clock there was no way we'd be shown a game in real time. It was just an opening position, a crucial position and the end with players apparently engaging in friendly conversation during such a quick-play discipline. I've never played in such an atmosphere even with 90 minutes on the clock and Fischer and Spassky didn't in Rekjavik either. It was more about personality than positional analysis and yet one got an idea of what had happened, could take sides and it served as entertainment.

Six players started out in programme 1 and only one was eliminated. Another goes next week after which I think another six turn up to provide eight 1/4 finalists. Of this first batch of six I'm expecting the most successful of them to be female.

You won't learn any more about how to play chess watching this than watching Match of the Day would make you a better footballer. I can't see it gathering great audience figures beyond the likes of me and I'm not part of any obvious demographic that any marketer would aim at.

It would be interesting to know what ratings the participants have or could achieve at LiChess, officially with FIDE or anywhere else because I'm not convinced they're that good. Maybe I could have been a contender except I don't have a personality to sell.

Reality TV hasn't done poetry yet. I'd be even worse at that-

What is it you like about poetry? 

I never said I did like it.

And how often do you write poems?

Hardly ever.

 

But chess is on the telly for the first time since Kasparov-Short in 1993 as best as the telly can by now accommodate it. It's marginally a good thing but in the end it matters little whether it's chess, origami, composing an opera or making a scientific discovery that such shows are themed around. You get largely the same show whatever it is.