Appropriately enough, I suppose, what Chess Masters: The Endgame is doing in the television schedules is a bit of a puzzle. The Queen’s Gambit, the adaptation of Walter Tevis’s 1983 novel about a chess prodigy that became an unexpected hit for Netflix, made a star out of Anya Taylor-Joy and brought the game to wider public attention. But that was five years ago. The flurry of interest it roused in the subject has long since fallen back to normal levels. Chess Masters has no moment to capitalise on, except for what it assures us is “Britain’s booming chess community”, 12 of whose “rising stars” compete over eight episodes to, well, beat the other 11 at chess.
This has clearly presented the producers of the show with a number of problems, none of which has been successfully solved. There is the question of how you make an essentially silent, cerebral game telegenic and accessible. They have hired a presenter with glasses to acknowledge the intellectualism of the pursuit, but made it Sue Perkins to try to give warm, Bake Off vibes too. But it is still inescapably people frowning over an abstract strategy board game, not constructing model cities out of profiteroles or coaxing clouds of pistachio and rose-flavoured cakes out of the oven like culinary gods.
