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Sabre’s first Listener was waaaaay back in 1970, and this was his 75th solo effort — others were in collaboration, including no. 3000. This year’s puzzle had a slightly odd grid with gaps between a lot of cells and ticks around the perimeter. (And did Sabre have a competition with ‘Eck for the number of steps required to finish!)
As with ‘Eck’s puzzle, no time for any detailed solving notes, except to say that the initial grid took an age. Fitting all those Trapdoor, Spinning and Jumping clues around the Common ones was not for the faint of heart. I must, however, highlight my favourite clue: Common-12ac Gorgeous films of 1968–69 Harleys? for SUPERBIKES [SUPERB + IF + KES minus the extra letter F].
And so, another picture that’s worth a thousand words.
Full clue analysis can be found at the Listener Crossword website.
Way too hard for me. I’m not great at cold solving, and seemed to me that 90% of the clues needed solving cold before much gridfill could take place. Which means it isn’t a crossword in my opinion – next to no information from solving three quarters of the clues!
As a broader question, how on earth do people solve these? Often listener clues involve very obscure words in both definition and wordplay, so even going through synonyms won’t get you to the answer. Are there solvers out there with Chambers more or less memorised? Or am I missing something? I use the Chambers crossword dictionary, which helps a lot, but often need the checked cells to hunt down a word that fits and then confirm the parsing. In this puzzle, with zero new information from solving many of the clues I solved, I just couldn’t progress any further
And it’s a real shame, because I missed out on a fantastic endgame!
Andy. I do these every week and I finish solving the crosswordy bits much more often than not, and solve the endgame rather less often (no statistics), depending on whether the setter wants us to play I Spy or clearly signals the steps to be taken.
I have no problem with esoteric words, but I agree with you about this puzzle and the cold solving business. As you say, the clue is in the name ‘crossword’, solving some to then get others. Not very easy in this one unless you’ve got bags of free time and are bloody-minded enough to stick with it. By the way, have you tried last week’s? Unless I’ve missed something it’s 100% cold solving and then lots of extra twiddling and fiddling during the endgame, if you can be bothered.
Andy – I echo Norman’s comments. There is absolutely no shame in finding this impenetrable. You’d have to have a very large amount of time on your hands to even get close
Ha, thanks both! I am of the opinion that the more cold solving required, the easier the clues should be, or at least involve fewer very obscure words, but the editor’s obviously have a different opinion, which is of course their prerogative. Although it does explicitly say in setters’ guidelines that puzzles should not require more than 50% cold solving…
And NormanJL, I have done last week’s puzzle – thought it was much closer to a crossword. Yes, still more of a jigsaw, but once I had five or six of a set I could fill in that (double) row, and that did give information about other entries. Admittedly less information than in a normal crossword, because those entries had nothing to do with the clues, but there was information there. Looking for words that fit would then help me fill in the clued entries. It admittedly helped that the clues were much easier than Sabre’s!