Independent 8136 by Tyrus (Saturday Prize Puzzle 10 November 2012)

It took me a while to get through the layers (strata?) of this puzzle, not helped by a school-boy error on 6D and a couple of holes in my 1970s TV-watching CV…

Given that the first three across entries were all linked to elsewhere, it made sense to abandon the traditionalist linear solving approach (which I don’t always adhere to anyway) and follow those links. The anagram at 24A/1A/4A yielded fairly early on – ROCK, PAPER, SCISSORS. And 24A – ROCK – was a lead-in to several other clues/entries, in a variety of interesting ways.

17A 8A proved more difficult – until I had a few more crossing entries and I guessed at GERARD BUTLER – an actor I had never heard of, but Wiki-oogling soon confirmed.

Sofa, so good – except that I had lazily seen the word ‘convertible’ in 6D and put SOFT TOP to fill S?F? ??? – which halted progress in the top right sector for a while. The four short words – LAM, RAS, OIL and SUP helped to move things along, by being fairly quick gets.

But enough waffle – the linkages all dropped out – ROCK leading to HUDSON, CLENCHED FIST, LURCH and half of BAS(ALT), as well as a choice between itself and A HARD PLACE.

BUTLER led to LURCH again, this time from ‘The Addams Family’ – and who also gets an oblique but unrelated reference in 15D – and HUDSON, again, this time as the butler from ‘Upstairs Downstairs’. I managed to miss both of these series due to a peripatetic/nomadic childhood in the 70s and 80s, which also meant that programmes like Thunderbirds, Bagpuss and Grange Hill mean virtually nothing to me, although I do have some pleasant memories of the Clangers…and Mr Benn.

I found myself a bit disturbed by 1D on both the clue front and the entry. Using ‘die’ as a homophone for Di (Princess Diana) seemed a bit distasteful, to say the least. And giving Paul Burrell the distinction of a mention in an (ex-)broadsheet crossword like the Indy seems unnecessary, when rather than being Diana’s ‘rock’, as he claimed, he was really just a money-grubbing weasel (in my opinion, and not necessarily that of the 15×15 website!) who has traded on and cashed in on his association with her in a way that no true friend, or ‘rock’ would ever do. I’m no royalist, or Diana sympathist – I just feel he should be left to lie under whichever ‘rock’ he has crawled. Indeed one of the attractions of the Independent when it started was its refusal to cover anything royal, unless absolutely necessary. Whereas nowadays it seems to cover any bit of royal tittle-tattle as closely as the Daily Mail or the Hello-graph. Andreas Whittam-Smith must be turning in his highly-paid executive directorships and consultant-editorships.

But enough sermonising – 1D apart, this was an interesting puzzle from Tyrus, with hidden depths and wonderful clueing – lots of interaction between clues, even if a bit distracting at times – which is the whole point, I know! I particularly liked the use of ‘retroussé’ (turned up, of a nose) as an indicator for a reversed word, when the word being reversed, or turned up, was clued by ‘noses’.

Last in was DARYL at 23D – once I realised that ‘ladyboy’ had to be ‘split’ to give part of the anagram, as well as the definition.