The first Listener I attempted was Listener 4642 – Music Box by tnap. I had been aware of the series through reading the Listen With Others blog, and marvelled at the ingenuity of the setters, and the pandemic having given me rather more free time than I had anticipated, I decided to have a crack at one.
Judge at my delight when, armed only with several crosswording pieces of software, the Chambers App and a lot of persistence I managed to overcome my distinctly average solving ability and complete that puzzle, enjoying en route the rather addictive penny-drop moment when suddenly you realise where the setter has gently been leading you.
I don’t know exactly why, when I decided to see if I could set one, the theme of Utopia Limited came to mind; it is comfortably my least favourite Gilbert and Sullivan (of whom I am a huge fan); Gilbert created a great set-up for satire and completely forgot to put anything approaching a coherent plot around it, and Sullivan’s mind by then was on his grand opera Ivanhoe, and is in full “will this do” for his project with Gilbert.
From recollection, the initial kernel was the idea of Tarara replacing Paramount as making for a Listener-like endgame. From there, the fact Tarara has fewer letters led to the idea of using clashes to get Paramount and dynamite in the grid into a 6×2 space, which would with an indication in the preamble that the final grid had a maximum of 1 letter per cell give solvers a hint of what was required of them. My favourite Listeners to solve were ones where grid alterations led to real words, so I knew I wanted this as a feature (the discovery of the word “arar” in Chambers was a great help here). And I knew I wanted to get “Gilbert” and “Sullivan” into the grid, in an appropriately topsy-turvy fashion. The earliest grid I have saved dates from 2021, and shows all these factors already in place; the main difference aside from some of the words used to create the clashes was my vain attempt to keep symmetry in the grid, which rapidly led to horrific clusters of letters.
Abandoning symmetry was easy; coming up with a grid which worked was another matter altogether, and probably the longest part of the puzzle’s construction. Eventually I lucked into one which was adequate and which could be filled.
The idea of a limited Utopia suggested the gimmick of wordplay with a missing letter, and the serendipitous discovery that “backwash” could go in at 1ac, giving me the “w” I needed for the message early on, was another fortunate find.
There were a couple of differences with the puzzle as submitted in December 2022. I had tried to create a red herring with the fact most people associate “Wise Men” with the Nativity story; there were therefore originally six extra words, with solvers told to “limit their liability” by discarding two. Depending on which two were discarded would lead either to “The Gospel of Matthew” or “The Flowers of Progress”. Despite my efforts of linking this to the concept of limited liability present in Utopia, Limited, the editors felt there was not sufficient thematic justification for this. I also tried to make double use of the fact the message from omitted letters included the word “order” to disguise the fact the word “regicide” was jumbled (deliberately to delay the penny-drop moment and to make grid fill easier); the preamble therefore referred to an instruction from the across clues to apply to the letters in the down clues. This led to having to use an abbreviation of “ord.” in the across clues; again, the editors removed this element, adding in the full word of “order” and adding any necessary clarification to the preamble.
Judging by feedback, both of these changes greatly improved the puzzle and people’s enjoyment of it, and I would like to thank both of them for their work in making these improvements, making the preamble more concise and accurate, and their amendments to any clues which needed changing as a result.
It is also probably just as well that after Elgin’s magnificent (and far superior) puzzle the week previously solvers were not faced with another Bible/Gilbert and Sullivan/Wizard of Oz puzzle quite so soon.
The title was a very late addition – the puzzle was called “Utopigs” for a long time (vaguely justified as a cryptic rendition of “Utopia Limited, by G&S”); the puzzle was complete when I looked up the derivation of Utopia in Chambers, and discovered the “no place” derivation displayed prominently from which the actual title came readily.
Finally, it only remains for me to say a huge thank you to everyone who tried the puzzle; I can only hope in solving you felt a scintilla of the pleasure I did in seeing my puzzle in print.
Jonathan Broad
“Bungo”