"The Historian" wrote in message
...

Exactly. Explain it to the people who suggest moving into the mass TV
market to bring big bucks into chess.

I recall the BBC aired a series on chess, The Master Game, during the

In his chess biography of Tony Miles, Ray Keene explained the small tragedy
of the final, where Tony beat Anatoly Karpov - but the game was never shown
because of a strike.

Copies of Master Game are very rare - Gm Walter Browne has a set, but Auntie
sold the rights to another outfit, who then went out of business - so
whereabouts of original tape is unknown, as are copyright claims to program.

1970s. I've never seen it, but from descriptions of it, it sounds like
an ideal treatment of chess on television. A tournament among top
players was organized, the games were taped and the tapes edited to a
half-hour broadcast length, and the players asked to provide their
thoughts on the games. The BBC used some simple techniques involving a
glass chessboard and pieces that had their symbols on the bottom to
show the position on the board. IM William Hartson was a host of the
programs.

Yes, Bill Hartston was also somewhat responsible for the executive
production, getting chess onto mainstream tv in the first place, and so was,
I think, Bill Wade [OBE]

Phil Innes

Such an approach seems to keep chess as chess with minimal concessions
to mass audiences. The problem with tinkering with chess for broadcast
is that you don't create an audience for the game, you create an
audience for your tinkered version. So if you drag some rock band into
a chess match, as one failed experiment in chess broadcasting has
shown, your audience has come for the band, and not the game. To quote
one of the Muppets, "if you put enough sugar in [champagne] it tastes
just like ginger ale." Ginger ale outsells champagne; do we want our
chess with sugar?

This discussion reminds me of the hopefully-dead trend of attempting
to market classical music by tarting it up or dumbing it down. It was
a failure; there was no 'string quartet boom' because of Bond
concerts, and I doubt anyone became an opera fan from listening to
Charlotte Church or any of those other 'mockera' singers the big
labels pushed.