The Queen’s Gambit makes decisive move from big screen to small.

Anya Taylor-Joy as Beth Harmon in The Queen’s Gambit.

Allan Scott, screenwriter, acquired the rights to the 1983 novel by Walter Tevis, The Queen’s Gambit, with the intention of getting it made into a movie. Scott, whose screenwriting credits include co-writing the 1973 psychological thriller, Don’t Look Now, subsequently found, though, that interest was thin on the ground. “I can tell you eight studios that turned Queen’s Gambit down on the grounds that chess doesn’t sell tickets.”

Fast forward to 2020, and the Netflix version of The Queen’s Gambit, co-created by Allan Scott and US writer-director Scott Frank, is the streaming service’s most watched mini-series ever. 28 days after its release it had been watched by 62 million households and also ranked No. 1 in 63 countries. The Google search phrase ‘How to play chess’ has hit a nine-year high. Just today, via Google, I watched a six-minute video explaining in detail the set up for the series’ eponymous chess move.

Allan Scott had to be patient to bring this story to life, but it wasn’t as if he was twiddling his thumbs in the meantime. He’s your quintessential renaissance man: screenwriter, film producer, author, radio presenter, television compere, whisky company chairman, former head of the Scottish Film Production Fund and the Scottish Film Council. More recently, just before The Queen’s Gambit premiered, Scott contracted the coronavirus not once, but twice, within months.

The runaway success has raised the prospect of a second series, problematic, some say, because the author, Walter Tevis, died in 1984 without having written a sequel. Allan Scott, however, doesn’t see the lack of a sequel as an impediment to continuing the story, should that prospect be raised: “You know, when people say that (something can’t be done) you always turn out to be a liar. Yes, of course it can. Because it’s fiction. I can do six episodes of what happens to her right after Russia. I could do you six episodes of ten years later when she tries to make a comeback. I can do you ten episodes of what happens when she gives up chess. Do you know what happens to most great chess players when they give up chess? They take up bridge. I could give you a whole series about bridge!”

– Allan Scott, Co-Creator of The Queen’s Gambit.

Whether or not a sequel ever happens can’t diminish the quality of the writing and impeccable production of this sumptuous seven-part series. The art direction captures in vivid detail the Cold War era of the mid-1950’s to the late 1960’s. Chess, that seemingly mundane board game, provides the playing field for some electrifying and highly entertaining encounters. The authenticity of the games themselves guaranteed by the enlisting of former world chess champion, Garry Kasparov, as one of the consultants on the series. And, while Allan Scott never managed to get The Queen’s Gambit to the cinema screen, this fabulous story doesn’t feel the lesser for its home screen run.

Words against pandemics

The Flaggy Shore, County Clare, Ireland

In Seamus Heaney’s 1996 poem, Postscript, he invites the reader to visit the Flaggy Shore in County Clare, Ireland. In 2018, on a flat, lilac-grey morning, some five years to the day after the death of the poet, I took him up on the invitation. Standing in quiet contemplation, I listened to a recital of Postscript by the man himself. Heaney won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995 “for works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past.” His poetry makes me think of Robert Frost, I’ve since discovered Heaney cites the American as an influence. Newsweek reviewer, Malcolm Jones, of Heaney’s work said: “Heaney’s own poetic vernacular – muscular language so rich with tones and smell of earth that you almost expect to find a few crumbs of dirt clinging to the lines.”

It’s now 2020, and the world is seized in the grip of the Covid-19 pandemic. Through these times we all, perhaps, are given to moments of uncertainty and despair. Heaney was once asked about the value of poetry in times of crisis. His answer offers some hope we might be able to fight external forces from within. “If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness.”

Thinking back on that morning standing on the Flaggy Shore with Seamus Heaney’s sweet lilting voice, I offer that we, all of us, might seek out the small and precious moments in life and allow them to “catch the heart off guard and blow it open”.

Postscript

By Seamus Heaney

And some time make the time to drive out west

Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,

In September or October, when the wind

And the light are working off each other

So that the ocean on one side is wild

With foam and glitter, and inland among stones

The surface of a slate-grey lake is lit

By the earthed lightning of a flock of swans,

Their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white,

Their fully grown headstrong-looking heads

Tucked or cresting or busy underwater.

Useless to think you’ll park and capture it

More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there,

A hurry through which known and strange things pass

As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways

And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.

Link to Seamus Heaney reading ‘Postscript’:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OhSUj7ixYTk

I’ve forgotten what day it is

Thirteenth Beach, Barwon Heads, Australia.

Today marked Day#44 of the Covid-19 imposed lockdown here in Victoria, Australia. The photograph is Thirteenth Beach, standing on which, one looks south to Bass Strait. Apart from the island of Tasmania, next stop from here is Antarctica. A remote part of the planet, then, and a splendid place to find oneself in relative isolation. I’ve begun each morning, religiously, with a stroll along the shore. Check the tide on my clever app before leaving the house so I know whether I’ll be walking at low tide, over a wide plain of hardened sand or picking through the rocks and splashing waves when the water’s high.

I read that it’s the gravitational pulls of the moon and sun that cause our seas to bulge and thereby create the high seas. I have time to check up on such things these days. These very different days, these endlessly-the-same days. Life has taken an unexpected turn for us all. How suddenly we’ve had to re-consider every aspect of our lives. Who could have expected the world would experience a pandemic that would shut down the very concept of human society? Something we’d taken for granted; a given. A right. The impact has been devastating for certain parts of the planet – for those people I grieve and hope for the speedy flattening of the curve. ‘Flattening of the curve’ – a new, insidious expression that has crept, virus-like, into our collective vernacular.

I am blessed to be here in this place through this time. It’s appropriate, then, that I not squander; but ponder. Breathe deeply and wonder at all things. Things like the tide. The sucking sound the sea makes as it retreats down the bank of the shore. The world of life left behind in a sea pool. The Sooty Oystercatcher picking away at the exposed reef with its long letterbox red beak. The Hooded Plovers scurrying on their rapid stilts at the water’s edge. The line of pale sodium light marking the coming dawn of another wondrous day. A day to be wholeheartedly and vigorously seized.