Harder than usual for Phi – especially because of the title above.

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Solving time 13:40

Overseas or younger solvers will have struggled with this, but for fans of 50s/60s British comedy, it was a very good solve and full of nostalgia as you’ll see. There are effectively two themes – Hancock’s Half Hour and the Carry On films. These are linked by Sid James and Kenneth Williams, who appeared in both. I can’t remember now exactly how the theme emerged – probably from the fairly easy clues to the film titles. “H-H-H-H-Hancock’s Half Hour” ended when I was about one year old and we still didn’t have a TV in the house (our first one was apparently bought for the Tokyo Olympics), but bits of it have seeped into Brit culture and when they do recaps of comedy history on the telly you can rely on seeing a few bits of Hancock. Hancock himself was allegedly the inspiration for the grumpiness of Dougal in the Magic Roundabout. The Carry On films were lowbrow entertainment but can still raise plenty of giggles. Much wordplay worked out while I write this, as many answers were obvious once the theme was known. Read the rest of this entry »

A pretty fiendish puzzle. Trying circumstances for me, 10 minutes on a crowded tube followed by 20 over lunch approx, but I found this one very tough going, with a lot of quite advanced tricks. Vocab reasonably familiar, although some phrases seem a little contrived, but some very clever references in definition and subsidiary indications.

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Solving time: an hour or so

Approached with trepidation, having downed a convivial pint or two with Ploy at Sloggers and Betters 2, but also having missed the final step in his “Travelling Light” Listener. But this was easy once the penny had dropped. The preamble said: “Each across answer must be modified before grid entry. Definitions of the entries are given by extra words or phrases in each down clue. Across answer/entry pairs might be loosly said to exhibit 5 down.” Well, it quite soon became apparent that each across clue had at least one L or R in it, and that if you swapped all Ls and Rs (i.e. the hands in “Handiwork”) in each one, you got another “Lear Wold”, as we might say. 5D turned out to be ENANTIOMORPHY – a characteristic whereby shapes or objects (like crystals or molecules) are mirror images of each other, with left and right swapped but everything else the same.

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