Listener 4856: If You Say So by Tuds

“Tuds” we say. “Is this really a debut or a combination of experienced setters? Surely no-one begins their setting career with a Listener?”

We have a carte blanche too and a couple of devices, misprints where the corrected letters will give a message and five extra words in the down clues. Then we will have to change eight letters in the filled grid to produce an instruction. There’s a lot going on and Tuds gets away with ‘one answer is an abbreviation’ and some fairly unusual clues. Can we really admit him to the elite Listener setter oenophiles? Well, he’s made a fairly effective (or drunken) application! ‘Freud foolishly attended orgy bar at ten (7)’ That gave us DODGERY and a misprint of FrAud for FrEud. ‘Finishes off the ouzo, gin and Pernod (3)’ gave us last letters EON and perIod for PerNod. Tuds followed that with ‘Fake rum prepared in county institute (7)’  DID I’ CO I gave us a ‘fake rOm. Then he was onto the cider, ‘Made a glamour model cider (5)’ With Clamour for Glamour, we anagrammed the cider to give CRIED. Could he really be ‘Lacking drink, mostly, it’s frightening! (6, two words). We decided that had to be TOS[s] for the drink and TO SEEK as ‘lacking’. “Cheers, Tuds, and welcome!”

GAG, ALTERNATE, COLUMN CENTRAL and PRIDE appeared as those five extra words and we soon saw a rather surprising message emerging with the corrected misprints: VACATE ALL BUT THIRTY-TWO CELLS. Now there was plenty of head-scratching. To one of the Dash team (the Numpty) this seemed rather like a GWIT. Were we to ‘alternate the central column’ and how did GAG and PRIDE give us the letters of a word that needed replacing? Vagans by sheer good luck went for alternate letters in the central column, and then seeing THIS in the top row kept on reading downwards and saw the rest without too much headscratching, but agreed that it was more intuition than deduction. Discussion point dear fellow-solvers: does that matter? And where does the boundary line lie between a juicy PDM and a frustrating GWIT. (One related rule of thumb many of us use for the Listener is that if it doesn’t feel completely right, it probably isn’t right.) Anyway: here’s the Numpty’s grid:

Yes, those letters to be ‘vacated’ are still there but that’s for the sake of other solvers. And do we have an ambiguity here? That instruction ‘that must be followed after making the letter changes’ says that the grid is ‘left blank’ so do we leave it entirely blank or do we send those letters? This solution will appear on the date of this year’s Listener Setters’ Dinner in Southport. A blank grid would be easy to mark for our new marker wouldn’t it – on that busy day?

This crossword must have been sent to the Listener team when JEG was still the marker and would certainly have been a welcome rest for him after all those years of coping with complex grids. Thanks, Tuds.