Belgian Chess History

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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De regels van Floor is a still-running Dutch television series. The title means ‘Floor’s rules’ and the concept is that, every episode, Floor comes up with one rule to help her — and, by proxy, the viewer — cope with the intricate and often baffling trappings of life in modern society. In this particular episode, that rule is “don’t be too fanatic”;¹ in fact ‘fanatiek’, the name of the episode, is Dutch for ‘fanatic’. It comes from the fact that Floor’s father gets a little too engrossed in her daughter’s football games. It turns out that the same father also plays chess. Near the end of the episode, he has a tournament that is so important that even his wife comes to watch. We too, of course:

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