Mondays, 8pm,
BBC2
This is a big swing (they’ve put it in the Only Connect slot, BBC2’s highest rating slot of the week) and I’m here for it, but they’re already doing things that on paper seem more amateur than Grandmaster. I mean look at that subtitle! Is this the first or last series?
Sue Perkins invites 12 players from across the nation to compete in this tournament of sorts involving chess puzzles, with the worst/best (we don’t know the format yet) players competing in a speed chess game at the end with the loser getting eliminated (presumably). Also lots of chess games end in draws, so how are they going to model that here? In a move that feels like an absolutely crazy compromise, we’ll be getting the highlights of these speed chess games and you’ll be able to watch the games in full on iPlayer afterwards although how many casuals are going to bother to do this knowing the result is certainly a question mark. Experts David Howell and Anthony Mathurin (who you may recognise from series one of The Traitors) are on hand to commentate and guide us through it.
On paper it really feels like they’re trying to cram in a lot in 28 minutes – if there’s a show that could fill a 60 minute slot without a great deal of extra expense this feels like it. I was always a bit rubbish at chess, but I used to enjoy the Short vs Kasperov series on Channel 4 about 30 years ago so it’s not like this can’t work. Watched it? Let us know what you think in the comments.
Dismal Masterchef type format, analysis too fast – replaces Only Connect, which was accessible to all, with something that is only interpretable by the geeks of the board. Lovely try, but in the end hopeless.
I know how to play chess and play it every now and then but I didn’t get this. I couldn’t tell who was winning as the camera angles were really bad and I just felt bored throughout.
I wasn’t really sure what I was expecting with this, but I’m not sure this is it really. Mainly it’s not really about chess, it’s about people playing chess and I’m not really sure what the point of that is really. It can’t quite decide where it’s pitching itself in terms of viewer knowledge – here’s some really basic stuff, AND NOW WE’RE GOING TO GET EXCITED BY A MOVE OUT OF CONTEXT and you can’t really follow it anyway. Who is this show really for? It’s not for anyone who watched Only Connect previously.
However I’m going to say some vaguely nice things about the full match you can watch on iPlayer – David and Anthony are enthusiastic and engaging commentators when they’re not relegated to soundbites (or at the very least we’re allowed a bit more context) and I really enjoyed the soundtrack. I think the board graphics could do with kinetic slidey pieces rather than Powerpoint frame advance style technology so we can more easily follow when something has happened. Being able to follow is not this production’s strong point, there’s a really great shot on the Discord of the board all lit from one side so you can’t make out the colours very well.
Overall brave, but more no mates than checkmate.
What a profoundly unserious show. By comparison, poker and, indeed, Only Connect itself demonstrate it’s perfectly possible for a game to be played totally seriously while everyone is having a laugh, and it creates a really good atmosphere when you get the balance right.
Weirdly, I think it would have worked better if the contestants had been (probably very) minor celebrities who are known for something different but liking chess a bit as well – yer Steve Davises, sundry politicians, probably former Radio 2 DJs, humorists, that sort of thing. The players seem perfectly pleasant but they can’t be made into characters in the little time available to them on the show. The show got better as it went on, and the full game on iPlayer was considerably better than the rest of the show, because, you know, it showed people playing a game. Ah well. You’ll find what you’re looking for online, even if it’s not going to work – at least, done this way – on TV.
If you thought you might like this, spend five or six minutes watching what it might have been, or what it might have been sold as having the potential to be; David Howell is genuinely good at this, but not here.
887k for episode 1! Only Connect was over 2m last week, for comparison.
This week on Chess Masters: something that was a three minute game on Crystal Maze about thirty years ago.
However there was potentially quite an interesting thing in the full eliminator replay, a written caption acknowledging that if the players moved into the same situation three turns in a row, a draw could be accepted. However it doesn’t go into any details here, just that “in the next move, X broke the loop”. No real explanation of what might have happened, nothing from the commentators, very weird.
710k for episode two. Only Connect did over 2m in the slot a fortnight ago.