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EXCLUSIVE: The BBC‘s upcoming Chess Masters: The Endgame competition format was inspired by so much more than The Queen’s Gambit, its producer has revealed.
For Camilla Lewis, who runs Chess Masters producer Curve Media, this one is a personal tale. Chess Masters stems from the darkest days of the pandemic, when Lewis’ daughter was struggling with her mental health.
“The thing which really helped her and gave her an avenue was chess.com,” Lewis told Deadline. “It was taken up by a whole new epoch and generation of people.”
On the chess side, things developed quickly for Lewis’ daughter, who had a knack for the 1,500-year-old game. Swiftly, she was winning tournaments, tutoring chess and was in a relationship with a fellow fanatic. “She had such a passion for it and was telling me about the anthropology, all the different cultures,” Lewis explained. “I realized this wasn’t past tense, it was present tense. For me, this is a love letter to my daughter and has a deep personal connection that comes from somewhere very genuine.”
Lewis said it took “some persuading” to get the BBC on board – coming nearly 50 years after BBC chess gameshow The Master Game – but she pitched Chess Masters to BBC content boss Charlotte Moore at the Edinburgh TV Festival and Moore said: “I think we should do it.”
There are an estimated six million people regularly playing chess in the UK, with celebrity fans around the world including Will Smith, Madonna, Leonardo DiCaprio and Lily Cole. In Chess Masters, which launches next month, passionate and highly-skilled players from all backgrounds battle it out across a series of rapid chess games before one is crowned the title of Chess Master. The show will tell the story of its diverse contestants and brings presenting firepower with Sue Perkins alongside expert contributors in chess grandmaster David Howell and a serious coup in Traitors Season 2 contestant Anthony Mathurin, who is a chess coach by trade.
“It pulls you in because these people are not doing it for the camera, they are aficionados,” said Lewis. “So even if you don’t understand it you have these people playing and commentators who are totally passionate. And then you’ve got Sue Perkins.”
‘Queen’s Gambit’ “made my job a bit easier”
While Lewis believes Chess Masters would have got off the ground without the existence of The Queen’s Gambit, she is in no doubt that the huge hit starring Anya Taylor-Joy has helped get the format to screen.
“Before The Queen’s Gambit people didn’t realize you could watch chess and find it engaging,” said Lewis. “The Queen’s Gambit starts with a chess match and goes on for quite a long time. That is quite a powerful and brave thing to do in TV terms. It made my job a bit easier but [Chess Masters] would have existed without it.”
As All3Media International takes Chess Masters to market at this week’s London TV Screenings, Lewis is confident there will be plenty international interest in a format that she says can be made on a “tight budget” and could easily stretch beyond its initial run of eight episodes.
Rather than having one exclusive deal with a sales house in place, Night Train-owned Curve Media chooses its distributor on a show-by-show basis and Lewis said this paid off on Chess Masters, over which there was a bidding war fought by “every big player.”
“From day one it felt like quite a special project,” she added. “We’ve made some mistakes in the past and allowed people to distribute things which we shouldn’t have done but have learned a hell of a lot about the process. I deeply believe that many distributors can work on many different formats.”
Chess Masters was commissioned by Catherine Catton, BBC Head of Commissioning, Factual Entertainment and Events. EPs are Lewis, Charlie Bunce and Katy Fryer. The Commissioning Editor is Cal Turner.
