The Master Game was the first program to show chess on television in a way that had a chance of connecting with the larger chess-playing public. As producer Robert Toner notes:
I had seen many forms of television chess coverage, but none of them was satisfactory. Pieces would disappear from one square and appear in another, and only experts seemed to be able to follow a game. Also, it was all so remote, I felt no involvement with the game or the players. What we needed was direct access into their thoughts, not the high-speed technical thoughts of a chess-playing mind, but thoughts put in such a way that anyone who knew the rules would be able to follow the most complicated game. (Foreword, The Master Game, 1979)
The system Toner developed had players compete in a knock-out tournament at a BBC studio, where the games themselves were recorded; then, about two days later, the players recreated their thoughts during the game in a sound studio. The games were played under tournament conditions, with forty moves in two-and-a-half hours followed by an hour sudden death. (In the first three series, with absolute knockout format, there were also rules for replaying drawn games, but in later tournaments the rules were changed to avoid replays.) The game play was edited to a 30-minute program, so the audience did not have to endure long and unpredictable delays between moves, and commentary by the players was added.
What made the program so successful was the fiction that the players were commenting on the games as they were happening, with the comments always expressed in present-tense form, thus creating a sense of engagement and immediacy that is not achieved in other formats, except perhaps in the now ubiquitous videos where players comment on their blitz games while in progress. The types of comments offered by the players were also quite effective at communicating the way GMs usually choose a move, relying more on chess reasoning and intuition than the calculation of long variations, except where the position called for that. Though we now have access to a lot of chess on video, no one seems to have invested the time and resources to create a similar product.
Directors: Sandra Wainwright
Hosts: Jeremy James, Bill Hartston
Starring: Robert Byrne, Svetozar Gligorić, Vlastimil Hort, Nigel Short, Jan Hein Donner, Bent Larsen, Tony Miles, Lothar Schmid, Andras Adorjan, Larry Christiansen, Hans-Joachim Hecht, Walter Browne, Raymond Keene, Eric Lobron, Miguel Quinteros