Belgian Chess History

A couple of years ago, I wrote a blog post about The Simpsons. It still remains, and will probably remain forever, one of the most lamentable, lacklustre, lackadaisical things to have ever flown out of my pen. Today, I try to redeem myself. My subject will be Futurama or, in other words, The Simpsons — IN SPACE! It is an animated comedy series which is widely — and rightfully — considered as one of the pinnacles of the genre. The lasting popularity of the series is perhaps evidenced best by the enormous number of memes based on it. In some episodes, there is a futuristic board game which, at first glance, looks a bit like chess, but it is played on a round board with unidentifiable pieces. Luckily, in the fourteenth episode of the third season, doctor Zoidberg can briefly be seen behind an actual chessboard.

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If I had been a little smarter, I would have done this episode in the Halloween season, but I’m not so I haven’t. So yeah, it’s going to be Monsters today. It is a horror anthology show that aired on TV in the USA at the end of the eighties. There is little more to say about the show in general since, it being an anthology show, the actors, actresses, and directors tend to differ from one episode to the next. So let’s just focus on this particular one. The plot is about the father of a missing young lady who is told that a rather disturbing portrait of her daughter has turned up in an art gallery. Together with his friend and informer, he meets some kind of janitor. He looks and talks like a bumbling yokel — but he has a chessboard!¹

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I have sung the praises of Chesterton’s Father Brown stories before, so I will now just suffice by saying that I still stand by those praises. Unfortunately, I cannot be so kind to the television series. The first problem is that Mark Williams, who is cast as the eponymous hero of the show, looks nothing like Chesterton’s description of Father Brown — but that’s excusable. More problematic is that the writers soon decided to ignore the original material and to come up with their own storylines instead — usually a bad sign.

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