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The Guardian
21-04-2025
- General
- The Guardian
Moral Ambition by Rutger Bregman review – don't just stand there, do something
Many years ago there was a BBC children's TV programme called Why Don't You Just Switch Off Your Television Set and Go and Do Something Less Boring Instead?. Its aim was to encourage kids to spending their summer holidays helping grannies across the street or litter-picking rather than lying on the sofa filling their faces with cheese puffs. If I'm anything to go by, it didn't work. Moral Ambition is Why Don't You? for grownups, written by a Dutch historian but deploying psychologically sophisticated nudge techniques, shaming devices and a hectoring imperative mood to encourage clever if spiritually bankrupt people like you (no offence) to do something beyond making mortgage payments by means of a job you hate. Don't you realise that the average worker will spend 80,000 hours at their job and, judging by the look of you (again, no offence), 79,999 of those will involve doing things that are of negligible ethical value – such as helping tech firms avoid tax, cold-calling for loan consolidation companies, or writing Observer book reviews? Rutger Bregman its an upbeat guy. He was described by the Guardian as 'the Dutch wunderkind of new ideas' and is the bestselling author of eight books including can-do tomes such as 2020's Humankind: A Hopeful History and 2017's Utopia for Realists: And How We Can Get There. In this book he is upbeat once more, counselling that we can free ourselves from feelings of career-long uselessness and lack of fulfilment. He makes great use of the bullshit jobs concept devised by David Graeber. 'A world without teachers or dock-workers would soon be in trouble,' wrote the late LSE anthropologist. 'But it's not entirely clear how humanity would suffer were all private equity CEOs, lobbyists, PR researchers, actuaries, telemarketers, bailiffs or legal consultants to similarly vanish.' Or, you might add, anthropologists and historians. But the point remains. Our world is in trouble – from climate catastrophe, manbaby authoritarian leaders, pathogens, pollution, nuclear weapons and other terrible things. Did you get all those degrees and amass all those debts to be a spectator to the end times? Or are you going to make the world better? Bregman quotes a Facebook employee: 'The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads.' In a sense Moral Ambition is the altruistic sequel to Oliver Burkeman's bestseller Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. While Burkeman gave readers tools for constructing a meaningful life, Bregman seeks to inspire us with socially desirable ways of putting new skills of time management to virtuous use. In that respect, his book is a welcome antidote to self-help books that give readers 12 rules for life, seven habits for success, or surefire methods to achieving that most fatuous of goals, personal happiness. That said, I wonder if there is a market for this book: most readers want to sink into the warm bath of a Richard Osman after toiling at the coalface rather than be told over 300 pages that they're doing this life business all wrong. George Monbiot's blurb for the book offers a challenge: 'I defy you to read it and not be motivated to act.' But, with all due respect, the world teems with people who defy Monbiot's imperatives 24/7, even if it would be a better place if they had not. Moreover, several of the heroes (abolitionists, civil rights leaders, virologists, and radical nerds using bureaucratic skills to virtuous ends) here offered to us as role models only serendipitously stumbled into doing good – which suggests that the most morally effective of us may not be catalysed into changing their lives by books like Bregman's. Take Rob Mather. One day in 2003, the thirtysomething executive was watching telly when up popped a news item about a girl called Terri who had lost fingers, toes, one foot, her ears and nose in a house fire started by her mother's cigarette. He organised a million-strong Swimathon for Terri and then, having got a taste for using his powers for good, looked around for another morally ambitious project. He settled on malaria, organising in 2005 a World Swim Against Malaria in which more than 250,000 people from 160 countries took part, and then the Against Malaria Foundation, which has since raised more than $600m and distributed more than 250m mosquito nets. Moral? 'You can catch the moral ambition bug and start to transform your life and career.' In a world where narcissism, spiritual passivity and ethical complacency are not just commonplace but integral to the business model of social media, how lovely to come across such idealism. And such idealism precludes virtue signalling or other self-regarding hand-wringing. Bregman quotes late American psychologist Herbert Simon: 'Sometimes we just want to scream loudly at injustice, or to stand up and be counted. These are noble motives, but any serious revolutionist must often deprive himself of the pleasures of self-expression. He must judge his actions by their ultimate effects.' The last chapter, called Make Future Historians Proud, entertains the naive idea of what he calls 'chronocentrism' – the notion that the times we live in are especially important. 'I'm now convinced that our times are indeed unique and critically important, perhaps determining everything to come,' writes Bregman. 'Of 117 billion people who've ever lived, we're part of the 1% who can make a difference this century. We're at a historic crossroads. The future hinges on what we do next.' How about trying to do for human trafficking, air pollution, nuclear weapons and/or toxic masculinity what Rob Mather did for malaria. In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels wrote: 'Workers of the world, unite. You have nothing to lose but your chains!' Bregman's suggestion is similar. Let the morally ambitious of the world act. We have nothing to lose but our cheese puffs. Moral Ambition by Rutger Bregman is published by Bloomsbury (£20). 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Telegraph
04-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
The chequered history of chess on TV
Around 605 million adults regularly play chess, according to United Nations figures. Add in the legions of younger players who found solace in the game during lockdown and follow it online and you have a huge, sedentary, screen-ready fanbase. All of which makes it more surprising that chess has never really checkmated television. Next week will see the latest attempt, in the form of the BBC's Chess Masters: The Endgame. Sue Perkins hosts what the broadcaster is calling a high-stakes chess contest, following 12 rising stars of the UK's booming chess community as they compete to be crowned Chess Champion. As the players face off over the board, UK Grandmaster and three-time British champion David Howell – a legend already online – provides expert commentary, alongside chess coach and former Traitors contestant Anthony Mathurin. The tone of the new show is very much The Great British Chess-Off: it hurls the viewer headlong into a slightly quirky community of chess nerds full of characters with nicknames you suspect have been invented by the programme makers, such as The Swashbuckler and The Unruly Knight. Whatever you make of it – I liked it – you can see the logic behind it. Chess should be prime factual entertainment grist: show the expertise and passion, the drama, in a way that appeals to both laymen and zealots, do it all with some Sue Perkins wit and a dab of Great British innuendo, and there's no reason why chess on TV shouldn't work as well as baking has. Against that there is the history of chess on television. It's been tried many times before but never really taken off. This viewer in his forties remembers well the school holidays TV litany of Why Don't You?, Battle of the Planets, The Red Hand Gang… and Play Chess. I've just looked up the slightly Stakhanovite Play Chess title sequence with its 'March of the Eccentrics' theme tune and its strutting pawns, and it has sent me into a nostalgic whirl of Trio biscuits, Peter Duncan and the Test Card. Play Chess, which ran from 1980 to 1987 but was then endlessly repeated, was presented by Bill Hartston, a chess champion and polymath who has recently re-emerged as a media star on Gogglebox. 'Play Chess,' he says, 'was on after a programme called, Why Don't You? of which the message was, 'Why don't you turn off your television set and go and do something less boring instead?' And our chess programmes got bigger audiences than they did. I was very happy with that – people ignoring their message and finding that, in fact, it was quite useful watching a chess programme on television.' Play Chess came off the back of The Master Game (1976 to 83), an innovative BBC Two series of chess tournaments. Bill Hartson calls it 'the best thing that's ever been shown on television on chess, by a long way,' but then, he was its presenter. 'The first chess programmes I did for the BBC was coverage of the Fischer-Spassky match in 1972. After that was over, we sat down with the producer and discussed what was wrong with chess on TV, including the series that we had just done. And what was basically wrong was that it was rather like an Open University programme of a person standing in front of a magnetic demonstration board and moving the pieces while lecturing on some game or other.' The problem was something inherent to chess and anathema to television – chess players are static and chess games take ages. TV can be anything but it can't be dull; a 1995 episode of Mr Bean had Rowan Atkinson's character using a televised chess game to try and send himself off to sleep. What TV chess needed was a little tech magic – producer Bob Toner and his team at BBC Bristol devised a technique using magnets to make the pieces on the demo board move by themselves – but it also needed to be competitive. Drama requires conflict. 'Bob Toner came up with this idea of playing the games completely normally, and then getting the players to record [in voiceover] their comments on various crucial passages,' says Hartson. 'And so each programme showed one game with an emphasis on the contest between the two players, what they were thinking at the time. It gave a real feeling of conflict about it. And it really worked.' The Master Game ran for eight series. In a TV Review for The Observer, no less an authority than Julian Barnes described it as the best drama on television. Still, as successful as it was, it was festooned with ageing white men and had limited appeal for a younger audience. Hartson says its demise was down to the inevitable waxing and waning of commissioning editors' interest as well as the rising cost of getting the best players to feature. British focus on chess peaked when our own Nigel Short played Garry Kasparov for the World Championship in 1993 – with Carol Vorderman presenting the coverage on Channel 4. 'That was as high as you could get,' says Hartson. 'There was nowhere to go from there.' But a combination of the launch of the hit Netflix chess drama The Queen's Gambit in 2020 – a lockdown hit – as well as a renewal of interest in the game during lockdown, led to a huge increase in chess's popularity. Google Trends show that searches for the word 'chess' skyrocketed when The Queen's Gambit launched that October, and from October 2020 to April 2022, saw its number of monthly active users double from around eight million to nearly 17 million. Live-streaming Twitch channels also proliferated during and after the pandemic, with the chess community meeting the general gaming audience and both of them finding something in the other's culture (41.2 million hours of chess was watched on Twitch in 2020). The upshot has been that chess has become a huge e-sport – on February 14, Global esports powerhouse Team Liquid announced the signings of not just one, but two superstars of chess, in the form of five-time World Champion and world number-one Magnus Carlsen and the 2018 challenger, world number-two Fabiano Caruana. It was only a matter of time before someone on mainstream broadcast television would see all of this as a seam to be mined, and that someone is Camilla Lewis, Executive Producer of Chess Masters. 'I've got four kids and my third child had a really difficult time during the pandemic,' she says. 'What helped her get through it at the time was she played endlessly on I realised that she wasn't the only gorgeous, nerdy girl in the world and actually, there were quite a lot of people out there playing chess in her age group – I'd always thought it was all about old white men. That was a terrible mistake because chess is cross-cultural, cross-class, cross-gender, cross-everything.' Yet it wasn't across television. 'What I realised fast was that this was a whole community that wasn't really being shown. As a programme maker, you're always looking for what can combine people: where is there a natural place where things happen and people care?' In particular, Lewis wanted to bring in figures from the world of chess commentary, where individuals make content of themselves not playing chess, but talking about other people doing it. She had produced Grand Designs for seven years. She had seen how someone like Kevin McCloud's obvious enthusiasm could bring an audience into a subject they didn't know was fascinating. 'When you do shows like that, you realise all you need to put on television is real passion. Then you can construct around it a format. But the truth is, you have to start with something genuine.' In David Howell, a British Grandmaster, she has her chess McCloud. He is a brilliant communicator with a gift for exegesis and just the man for the job. Still, Lewis concedes that in the end, this latest attempt to bring chess to TV wouldn't exist without TV drama itself. The success of The Queen's Gambit remains modern TV chess's killer first move. 'The wonderful thing about The Queen's Gambit is that it starts with a match and stays with a match for a terribly long time,' Lewis says. 'And yet it engaged a huge amount of viewers who don't play chess. It proved entirely what I thought: if you're passionate and committed to a subject matter and you can bring people into it and not be exclusive about it, then you can engage a hugely wide audience.' And now, like any good chess player, she has to wait and see how that strategy plays out. Will chess on TV pin and win, or will it prove to be a fool's mate once again? Let's play.
