With the range of games available across channels today, it seems extraordinary that sporting authorities were initially so resistant to cameras. Competition: 1955-1974, Asa Briggs’s fifth volume in the history of British broad- casting, records that a parliamentary restriction meant that, from 1955-57, the result of the Derby could be broadcast only over a still picture of the finish. In 1958 and 1959, BBC cameras were allowed to film the event – but only for use in news bulletins. Even when the whole race was recorded, it was at first not permitted to be screened in full until 21 days after the winner passed the post.

With horse racing, there is likely to have been a vestigial Victorian fear about encouraging gambling, but the broader concern that shaped the early decades of broadcast sport was that, if people could watch at home, they wouldn’t turn out in the cold. For a long time after its launch in 1964, Match of the Day was not allowed to print in TV listings the match (or, later, matches) to be covered. Growing up in Leeds, I remember the excited rumour on the school playground that BBC vans had been seen at Elland Road.

This fear of TV stealing fans had the effect of making sports with smaller followings more willing to take the risk. But the fact that they were initially more likely to be seen on ITV resulted from another development in the rights fights. When the big players – football, cricket, rugby, tennis, horse racing, golf – became more willing to deal with television, the BBC, as a deliberate strategy, bought up every available contest.

These prestige events were not always suited to broadcast. In cricket, the ball is in play for only a few minutes each hour, especially if fast bowlers are operating. TV filled the gaps initially with punditry and then, as technology allowed, slow-motion replays. BBC Radio’s Test Match Special made the absence of action an advantage by foregrounding listeners’ letters and the detailed tasting of cakes sent in by the audience.

The progress of televised sport was also restricted by technology, with the ambition to broadcast or record events initially running ahead of available cameras and video recorders.

Briggs’s history notes that the BBC Sports division had to “fight hard” for the teleprinters that made possible the desired quick results service; older generations remember learning of football results – and, for many in those days, the possible profitability of their pools coupon – from a device that resembled a cross between a giant typewriter and a player piano.

However, whatever the problems, the BBC took all the sport it could get. There was a joke in the 1970s that the reason ITV showed so much wrestling was that the BBC was buying up events in alphabetical order.

It was certainly true that ITV had a very short list to choose from. Whereas Grandstand (BBC, 1958-2007) cut between various finals, tests and opens, its rival, World of Sport (ITV, 1965- 85), led on wrestling (making Big Daddy and Giant Haystacks famous) and almost anything vaguely athletic for which pictures were on sale.

“World” in the title reflected the areas the Beeb chequebook was unlikely to have reached. Having to scrape the barrel, World of Sport did indeed broadcast the World Barrel Jumping Championships, as well as Nascar racing and US-led varieties of bowling (such as tenpin), while the BBC inevitably had the lawn variety tied up in its series Top Crown.

That show had started in 1968 at a time when the manicured turf was seen as telegenic for colour television, introduced the year before in Britain. The first colour transmission boasted another game played on grass – tennis from Wimbledon.

As David Attenborough, then controller of BBC Two, acknowledges in his memoirs, one now popular sport initially regarded as eccentric viewing was also launched as a showcase for the new spectrum: snooker’s palette incorporated not just deep green but also multi-coloured balls – perfect for the 1969 debut of Pot Black.

Darts, a further early-70s addition to the broadcast sports roster, was also partly driven by its suitability for cameras: an early effective use of split- screen was the sharing of the shot between the thrower and a close-up of the board. But there was also a demographic motive. Throughout its history, television has sought to attract resistant audiences, and darts was a predominantly male working-class hobby.

So it also featured in one of the most bizarre TV sports shows, The Indoor League (ITV, 1973-78), in which former England fast-bowler Fred Trueman, pint and pipe in hand, presided over a feast of Northern proletarian games, including cribbage, shove ha’penny and bar billiards, as well as darts.

A further advantage for ITV was that, even at its most imperial, the BBC never coveted pub games – apart from darts, in which it did take an increasing interest.

Chess Masters represents a reversal of the trend that first drove TV sport. The BBC has progressively lost prize events – live cricket and football, motor racing, rugby, boxing – to Sky, ITV and, now, Amazon Prime.

The Hundred, a short-form cricket competition that began in England in 2021, has the distinction (or, for cricket traditionalists, disgrace) of having been created specifically for the BBC to buy: a match of 200 balls (40 shorter than the existing Twenty20 format, shown by Sky), it is brief enough not to disrupt too much a general-purpose network such as BBC Two.

So the BBC can play with that (for as long as it lasts, having been accused of destroying the long-form county game) – and also with Chess Masters – using a sport in the public domain. Just don’t tell Sue Perkins that a grandmaster was recently accused of cheating by means of wireless vibrating anal beads!