Sue Perkins the face of televised chess (Image: Getty)
For years broadcasting executives have insisted that televised chess doesn’t work, and now Chess Masters: The Endgame is here to prove it. bigwigs had their heads turned by the success of ’s hit chess-based mini-drama The Queen’s Gambit. You can see the problem immediately. That had a screenplay, chess does not. added glamour by casting Anna Taylor-Joy as the lead, the Beeb booked host Sue Perkins who subtracts it. To compensate for the lack of thrills, BBC2 inflicted daft nicknames on the contestants. Caitlin became ‘The Smiling Assassin’, nice Claire from south Wales was ‘The Killer Queen’ etc. None of them were any match for The Unimpressed Viewer.
Games were speeded up and there were slo-mo replays as commentators desperately tried to inject energy. The producers booked characters. Well one character. Nick ‘The Swashbuckler’ had learnt chess in prison, but not well enough. Facing Lula ‘The Chess Queen’ his swash buckled entirely. The result was a fudge, too trite to hook viewers who play chess well, too dull for those who don’t.
Better options were to take chess seriously, as BBC2’s The Master Game did for eight years, from 1976 to 1983, or turn it into a full-on entertainment show. How about Celebrity Human Chess, played on a giant board (like the one seen on The Prisoner’s 1967 episode Checkmate) with the athletic frontline pawns tackling physical challenges and brainy backrow players taking on a variety of taxing mental ones? It would be like The Krypton Factor reborn.
The ’s Perkins obsession defies logic. Her track record includes flop game-show Don’t Scare The Hare, sitcom Heading Out – which is exactly where viewers headed – and a pitiful attempt to revive The Generation Game. Here, Sue can’t even play to her Bake-Off strengths by employing double meanings. The nearest she got was “We call this game Bashing Bishops”. Hmm. She must live in hope of a knight taking a queen from behind.
Like real chess, Sky Atlantic’s The White Lotus is building leisurely as the tension grows. Everything has come on top for troubled Tim Ratliff (Jason Isaacs) in Thailand. The FBI are onto Tim’s crooked embezzlement scheme back home; scandal and jail loom, and he’s stolen a gun. So either he’ll shoot himself or become the next US president.
Tim is drinking heavily and gobbling wife Victoria’s tranquillisers. He’s so out of it, his dressing gown fell apart at breakfast treating his cringing family to a “Wo! Who ordered salami?” moment. In a nice touch, Victoria looked down her nose at fellow guests on Gary’s yacht, dismissing them as conmen and tax cheats…
Elsewhere in the Mike White’s luxury spa saga, Rick flew to Bangkok to confront the man he thinks killed his father, and the three shallow, 40-something female friends – TV star Jaclyn and pals – were blasted with super-soakers by children celebrating the Songkran festival. Odds on they’ll look back at that as a holiday highpoint. If they survive…
They were last seen in a cheesy bar with Russian masseur Valentin and his dubious chums, who could well be the armed robbers from episode two. Karma is coming for someone. Hopefully Gary – aka dodgy Greg, who conned poor doomed Tanya McQuoid last season and is lavishing her fortune on new love Chloe. Belinda (the spa manager from season one) is on to him. But you can never second guess White’s twists. We know this series ends with gunshots, we just don’t who is shooting and at whom. Surely Tim’s cocky son Saxon (Patrick Schwarzenegger) is riding for a fall? He and his soppy brother are sailing to the Full Moon Festival with Chloe and Rick’s neglected girlfriend Chelsea…what fate awaits them? A different mating game perhaps.
Or maybe they’ll meet Michael Portillo.
It used to be said that all political careers end in failure. Now they end in podcasts and TV travel shows. But at least Portillo seems to genuinely enjoy his globe-trotting. The former defence secretary immerses himself fully in local customs on Channel 5’s Portugal with Michael Portillo. Not to mention the food and drink. In Porto, he munched his way through tripe, pigs’ ears, and deep-fried intestine. This week he swapped port for Vinho Verde and sampled mouthwatering stews and soups slow-cooked al fresco over wood fires in large copper pots. In Brago “the Rome of Portugal”, Michael marvelled at the Imaculada Chapel, and in Ponte de Lima, he revelled in their three-day festival of folklore and indigenous local customs – things our broadcasters have little interest in at home.
Portaloo, as he was once known, also revealed that Porto’s former Stock Exchange ballroom has more than 18kg of gold on its walls. How long would that last in Camberwell or Canning Town?
Spotted on the latest The Wheeltappers & Shunters Club (Talking Pictures TV) – a poster warning ‘No obscene language on Ladies Night’. How times have changed. Are there any comedies on TV now which don’t rely on obscenities? Twerps identifying as comedians who get cheap laughs from the lazy shock of a four-letter-word punchline are one of the many blights of modern television, a subject to which I shall return in due course.