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Honouring the Times Listener Crossword, so hard that some think it’s MI5 code
Plus: the strangest clues from its 90-year history
Over the past three weeks hundreds of otherwise sensible people have, after solving all the clues in a crossword puzzle, erased all the solutions, drawn a self-portrait in the grid and posted it to an address in St Albans.
Welcome to the world of the Listener Crossword, the thematic puzzle even many cryptic fans find baffling. This evening some of the faces behind those self-portraits will mingle with diehard enthusiasts and puzzle compilers in Bristol for its 50th annual dinner.
Over the years Listener themes have covered anything from Wittgenstein to the Wombles. Not only are the answers esoteric in the extreme, but before tackling the clues you have to make sense of the preamble. This may tell you that some answers won’t fit — so you have to work out what to enter instead — or that extra letters in clues spell out a message telling you to change half your answers. The theme of Listener 4750, I Want You by Twin, whose solution is published on Saturday, was Bob Dylan’s tenth album, Self Portrait. Those who solved the puzzle received an instruction to cut out the grid and submit a framed self-portrait.
This Saturday’s puzzle instructs solvers: “Every clue apart from 11 is a 19, giving two answers (in either order) for opposite entries, with an extra word between the two parts”. This tendency to bewilder was lampooned in a parody magazine produced by the Not the Nine O’Clock News comedy programme in 1980, whose crossword featured a preamble advising that one of the solutions “may be found in the Dictionary of Ashanti Hen-Tending Terms”.
The Listener Crossword was first published in 1930, the same year as the Times Crossword, and moved to this paper when The Listener magazine folded in 1991. It established a fanatical following in Britain and beyond. Stephen Sondheim, a long-term aficionado, confessed that when he and Leonard Bernstein were creating West Side Story in the mid-1950s, no work got done until they had cracked that week’s puzzle.
Most remained baffled. Lynne Truss wrote in her Listener column in 1989 that “nobody on the Listener staff has the first idea how to do the Listener Crossword. For years, we have been convinced that the clues are actually coded messages from MI5”.
John Grimshaw, editor of the puzzle at the time of The Listener’s demise, recalls a conversation with the magazine’s editor, Alan Coren, at its closing-down party in 1991. “He said: ‘I always knew that if anything survived it would be the crossword.’ Apparently it often generated more correspondence than the rest of the magazine put together.”
In 1997, rumours that The Times planned to drop the puzzle prompted an early day motion in the House of Commons, put forward by the DUP’s Peter Robinson, recognising that it was “the most challenging and imaginatively devised cryptic crossword currently published in a national newspaper and gives much pleasure to thousands of devoted solvers”.
The dinner brings together hundreds of solvers and setters, the latter identified by name badges with pseudonyms such as Charybdis, Chalicea, Sabre and Xanthippe. (It’s an open submission process, with setters rarely appearing more than twice a year.) Prizes are awarded for the puzzle of the year and for solvers who have gone the whole year without making a mistake. The record for the longest streak is held by Simon Long, who completed 411 puzzles over almost eight years without slipping up. Sadly in 2012 he entered “tayras” instead of “tairas”, the wrong choice out of two alternative spellings of the South American animal related to the weasel.
We know all this because of the sterling efforts of John Green, 74, a retired logistics and distribution manager who goes through postal entries from as far afield as Thailand and Canada, checking them for mistakes. He keeps handwritten individual performance records, available to anyone who sends a stamped, addressed envelope. It’s a bit like your Wordle streak record, but with a personal touch.