Despite the whiff of ‘that’ll have to do’ coming from every other element of Chess Masters, the casting team have done an excellent job. They’ve found Nick (“The Swashbuckler”), a former bouncer who discovered chess in prison and who now runs clubs and uses the game to teach the power of strategizing and staying out of what he calls “shenanigans” to those serving at His Majesty’s Pleasure. Nick is pure TV – confident, made of soundbites, and with a genuinely compelling backstory.
Nick plays a game against Navi (“The Unrelenting Warrior”), a father who played chess with his young children when he was too unwell to kick a ball around with them due to having stage four cancer. Facing his diagnosis, Navi wanted to “put chess in his children’s hearts”, and is here to make them and the chess club members who helped him through his illness, proud. Job done.
There’s Welsh Claire (“The Killer Queen”) and Scottish Caitlin (“The Smiling Assassin”), both of whom were taught chess by their dads and both of whom have stories about being outnumbered by boys in the game as young girls and triumphing. Claire teaches English as a foreign language to young people from Ukraine, and says chess has helped her to cope with menopausal anxiety and depression. Caitlin says she can sense when a checkmate is within reach because the top of her head gets warm. These people are clearly magnificent and deserve better than this inconsequential, fake-stakes nothing of a show. We all do.
Had Chess Masters been a documentary series following stand-out stories from the nation’s chess clubs, it could have been something of value that opened doors to the game. Instead, we get a man in a waistcoat giving insights including: “The Swashbuckler’s been swashbuckled!,” and “Claire might well sigh, she’s just made what’s known in chess as a blunder.” It’s also known as a blunder everywhere else.
Some of the contestants have either been stitched up in the edit to look a fool (“classically trained” actor Cai, who thinks he’ll succeed because the plebs will be knocked off their game due to unfamiliarity with being near a camera) or are simply putting on the kind of front that they think fame at this level demands. It’s not their fault, but all of ours, for watching this make-a-contest-of-it nonsense, for accepting it when these no-doubt talented TV creatives could instead be making something of worth.
The whole thing feels inadvertently comic when, commissioned differently, it could have been poignant and revelatory. Try as Grand Master David Howell might (and he does) to inject excitement and tension into proceedings, it’s hard to shake the sense that this is the TV equivalent of adults making exaggerated silly faces to try to raise a smile from an impassive baby. “Some very very nail-biting moments there, I hope you’re all incredibly proud of yourself,” says Perkins. I hope they are, too. I’d be proud of them, if I knew anything about chess, which, after watching two episodes, remains to a non-player like me, mysterious and dull. Perhaps this is just one for the experts.
