Guardian 26,444 by Brummie

by

Enjoyed this, getting through most of it quickly before hitting some new words…

…at 25ac and 26ac and some unknown references at 1dn and 4d, but all of these were very gettable from the rest of the clue. Only realised the extent of the theme while writing up the blog: as well as the link in 1dn, WOODY ALLEN directed/wrote/acted in BANANAS, SLEEPER, INTERIORS, ANNIE HALL, MANHATTAN and MATCH POINT – let me know if I’ve missed more. Favourite clue, after Googling “Orlando”, was 1dn.

Across
1 MASEFIELD
Stupid selfie taken by stupid linesman (9)
John MASEFIELD [wiki] was Poet Laureate, a writer of lines i.e. linesman. (selfie)* in MAD=”stupid”
6 HAITI
Republic‘s salutation interrupted by pause (non-Western) (5)
=”Republic”. HI=”salutation” interupped by [w]AIT=”pause” without W[estern]
9 ANNIE
Musical basket with ends removed (5)
=”Musical”. [p]ANNIE[r]=”basket” with its ends removed
10 APPELLANT
Papal irritation with Lent gets one unhappy with verdict (9)
someone appealing against, and therefore unhappy with a verdict. (papal Lent)*
11 WOODY ALLEN
Director of Ground Hog Day cutting corner in Jersey? (5,5)
=”Director”. “Ground” is an anagram indicator, which would be applied to (Hog Day)* except that Hog=”corner”=monopolise is cut, leaving just (Day)* inside WOOLLEN=”Jersey”
12 STAR
Lead blast rejected (4)
=”Lead”, the main role. RATS=”Blast”=’damn!’, reversed (“rejected”)
14 MAITRE D
Italian wine behind mother superior in restaurant (6,1)
=”superior in restaurant”. IT[alian] plus RED=”wine”, after MA=”mother”
15 SHAMPOO
Drive off, carrying a representative’s carpet cleaner? (7)
=”carpet cleaner?”. SHOO=”Drive off”, around A M[ember of] P[arliament]=”a representative”
17 NEMESIS
Unbeatable rival seems in for a beating (7)
=”Unbeatable rival”. (seems in)*
19 BANANAS
Staple food off one’s trolley (7)
=”Staple food”; also =”off one’s trolley”
20 ARMY
Sadomasochism dropped by unctuous host (4)
=”host”. S&M=”Sadomasochism” dropped by [sm]ARMY=”unctuous”
22 CENSORSHIP
Suppression of cold person and his replacement (10)
=”Suppression”. C[old] plus (person his)*
25 TITTUPPED
Bird acted like a ram with ewes — pranced (9)
=”pranced”. TIT=”Bird” plus TUPPED=”acted like a ram with ewes” – ‘tupping’ is a ram copulating with ewes
26 KAURI
New Zealand conifer polluted UK air (5)
=”New Zealand conifer”. (UK air)*
27 NEHRU
Former premier didn’t get that in retreating vessel (5)
=”Former premier” of India. EH=’excuse me?’=[I] “didn’t get that”, inside URN=”vessel” reversed (“retreating”)
28 RESURGENT
Charter to restrict drugs craving making a comeback (9)
=”making a comeback”. RENT=”Charter”, around all of E’S=”drugs” as e[cstasy]=drug, plus URGE=”craving”
Down
1 MIAOW
Orlando’s cry: “11’s ex rejects far right” (5)
referring to Orlando, the Marmalade Cat from a children’s book series [wiki]. MIA [Farr]OW is Woody Allen’s ex, rejecting far and R[ight]
2 SENSORIUM
Neurosis beaten by miles, which enables one to interpret the world (9)
[the part of] the mind which “enables one to interpret the world”. (Neurosis)* plus M[iles]
3 FIERY CROSS
Racist society’s brand? (5,5)
cryptic definition, referring to the symbol of the Ku Klux Klan, and the meaning of “brand” as a fiery torch.
4 ENABLED
Former soap character was bloody empowered! (7)
=”empowered”. ENA Sharples (from Coronation Street, [wiki]) is the “Former soap character”, plus BLED=”was bloody”
5 DEPRESS
Get down from foreign media sector (7)
=”Get down”. DE=French for ‘from‘, hence “from foreign”, plus PRESS=”media sector”
6 HALL
Auditorium bag, not old (4)
=”Auditorium”. H[old]ALL=”bag”, minus the old
7 INAPT
Unfit, one sleeps, having temperature (5)
=”Unfit”. I NAP=”one sleeps”, plus T[emperature]
8 INTERIORS
Unlikely it’s Renoir’s roomy scenes? (9)
=”roomy scenes”. (it’s Renoir)*
13 PAWNBROKER
Board member, having no money, right, becomes dealer in securities (10)
=”dealer in securities”. PAWN=”[chess]Board member”, plus BROKE=”having no money” plus R[ight]
14 MANHATTAN
Guy Bowler-Brown’s drink? (9)
=”drink”. MAN=”Guy” plus HAT=”Bowler” plus TAN=”Brown”
16 PENTHOUSE
Superior flat mobile phone incorporating time applic­ation (9)
=”Superior [as in higher, at the top] flat”. (phone)* around T[ime], plus USE=”application”
18 SLEEPER
Kipper, which is tracked (7)
=”Kipper”, someone sleeping; also =”which is tracked”, part of a railroad track
19 BESIDES
Other than live teams (7)
=”Other than”. BE=”live” as a verb, plus SIDES=”teams”
21,23 MATCH POINT
Marriage and Dot’s court battle almost over? (5,5)
=[tennis] “court battle almost over”. MATCH=”Marriage” plus POINT=”Dot”
23  
See 21
24 GURU
Wig turned up on head of unfazed leading authority (4)
=”leading authority”. RUG=”Wig” reversed (“turned up”) on top of U[nfazed]

48 comments on “Guardian 26,444 by Brummie”

  1. Does 28 work ? It seems to be either RENT around Es and URG or RENT around S and URGE, neither of which really seem to fit the word play.

  2. Thanks manehi. I had 28A as you did, and the same experience with new words – including 2D and TITTUPPED which seemed hard to believe until checking confirmed it. 15A is a movie, not relevant to the theme. I liked the gory 4D.

  3. I enjoyed the puzzle quite a bit, and picked up on the Woody Allen theme. The movies mentioned are SLEEPER, MANHATTAN, ANNIE [Hall], INTERIORS, and BANANAS. ‘SHAMPOO’, of course, is not a Woody Allen movie, but comes from the right period. The PAWNBROKER is a film edited by Ralph Rosenblum, who also edited early Woody Allen movies.

    Woody Allen lives in a PENTHOUSE at 930 Fifth Avenue, as is fitting for a STAR. His ex, of course is MIA [FAR R]OW, who has turned out to be his NEMESIS.

    Fortunately, he never had anything to do with John Masefield!

  4. Glad I missed the Woody Allen (not my favorite) … but thanks vinyl1.

    For 28 – it is a stretch but you could say that one particular ‘drugs craving’ is the ‘surge’ … looks more like just an error.

  5. … and thanks of course manehi for the blog and first picking up the theme … my bad in not seeing it on first reading … guess I have this Woody Allen avoidance thing going on … .

  6. I have no aversion or blind spot for Woody Allen’s films, but I completely missed the theme.

    MATCH POINT is another WA film. Also, strictly speaking, the film is ANNIE HALL (9 + 6d), not ANNIE (Hall).

  7. Sorry, these were both correctly included in manehi’s analysis. I was just nitpicking in reply to vinyl1’s comments.

  8. Thanks guys. I’m surprised no-one (as yet) has queried the legitimacy of the parsing of Woody Allen. Seems bizarre to me.

  9. Thanks Brummie and manehi

    I liked MATCHPOINT, HALL and ARMY.

    Railway SLEEPERS were made in the past out of KAURI wood (not to be confused with Australian Karri), and often exported, a tree now much depleted.

  10. Than you, manehi.

    All fell in eventually but missed the WA theme.

    I think SHAMPOO starred Warren Beatty and possibly Julie Christie but it’s a long time ago.

    I think there’s a problem with RESURGENT, but on the whole I think Jersey = Woollen is OK in the WA clue. (Slightly sneaky capital on Jersey justified by the ‘?’.

    All in all, an enjoyable puzzle from Brummie, whom I normally find rather less penetrable.

    Thanks all, nice week.

  13. Can’t quite make 28a work unless there’s a drug called S.

    11a works well enough without hitting us in the face with Ground Hog instead of Groundhog, as it should be. We Guardian solvers may not be the suppositories of all wisdom but we’re not completely devoid of stupidity. Pseudo-correctness at its worst, wrecking what would otherwise have been a star clue.

    Otherwise not a bad outing for Brummie. Needless to say I missed the theme – loathing Woody Allen and his self-obsessed works (even before it was the clever and popular thing to do) didn’t help – but that didn’t detract from the enjoyment of quite a few nifty clues.

    COTD 16d.

  14. @SR #12 – that accounts for the E’s – but only by making “restrict” do double duty – which I wouldn’t write off per se – but it’s hard to make it do that here even if you allow it.

  18. Fine work from Brummie, and thanks manehi. I too think that 28a is an error, and that if “restricted” is doing double-duty, it’s a tad unfair.

    Took me a while to get started, but it finally capitulated, at least up to the NW corner. Originally, I had ARROW instead of MIAOW, correctly assuming something to do with Farrow but not being able to parse it in my favour. Furthermore, my FIERY CROSS was originally a FLORY CROSS (albeit, more properly a cross flory in heraldry-speak), assuming that was what appears on the EDL badge (actually a cross moline, cheers Wiki). Got there in the end, though.

    Can we actualy consider BANANAS a staple food (which I normally think of as rice, pasta, wheat, or something central to the diet of a given culture)?

    Plenty of nice new words for me, though.

  19. Enjoy early/mid Allen but completely missed the theme, as is my wont. MIAOW is indeed a great clue, but it would have been improved in my opinion by citing something/someone better known than the book series. Unless I’m wrong and the average (dare I suggest there is such a thing?) Guardian reader knows this stuff.

  20. Thanks Brummie, tricky one but enjoyable.

    Thanks manehi, especially for the parsing of WOODY ALLEN. Small point, but shouldn’t ‘one sleeps’ be ‘naps?’ RESURGENT just looks like a setter’s error to me.

    I liked the ‘Board member’ which fooled me for a while. I chuckled at the MAITRE D.

  22. Well, at least some of the clues work, if only in a structural way. The surfaces struggle for me to make sense in a number of cases however, and this is not a puzzle of any real quality in its cluemanship.

    For 28A I can see no excuse – it is a careless piece of writing in a presentation that’s truly on the dull side.

  23. Of course, I missed the theme, and had I looked a bit harder I am sure it would have helped with my last two (1d and 11a – I had to cheat on 11a to get it). I was pretty sure there is usually one with Brummie. I wonder if it would be worth while adding to the Setters tab above the characteristic of each ones crossword, as a reminder for us who forget such things?

    Thanks manehi.

  24. Thanks manehi for explaining the wordplay of 11a. It was too clever (or too contrived) for me. Thanks also for the definition of 1d. As ulaca @19 suspects, for this average (?) Guardian reader “Orlando” is either a crossword setter or Gibbons the composer.

  25. 1ac is surely wrong as MAD never means STUPID; it means mentally deranged in the UK and angry in North America but stupid nowhere.

  26. Dear Rest of the World and all people too young to be be pensioners (or almost so), did you know ENA? I’m also a little surprised that the Ivory Tower Dwellers on here would lower their standards to actually watch a soap. That’s what us common b*****s do, allegedly.

  27. Thanks manehi and Brummie
    How old do you have to be to do the Guardian crossword? I remember “Orlando the marmalade cat” from when I was a child (last one published in 1972, apparently) and also Ena Sharples (last appeared in 1980), but surely younger solvers would struggle?
    I agree about RESURGENT – I think it’s just an oversight.
    I didn’t understand the parsing of WOODY ALLEN, and the explanation seems a bit Byzantine for a daily crossword. I hadn’t heard of TITTUPPED, but it was clearly clued. I have, however, visited a couple of the remaining Kauri forests in New Zealand.

  28. I missed the theme as well and WOODY ALLEN was the LOI as I finally trigger that ORLANDO was a cat. I thought this was enjoyable and, now I see the theme,rather clever. I loved TITTUPPED which was my FOI.
    Thanks Brummie

  29. Thanks manehi.

    This was entertaining enough. Penultimate entry for me was the rather nice MIAOW, which gave as LOI the (unparsed) WOODY ALLEN – after which I finally saw the theme. I missed the error in 28a.

    I have seen the magnificent KAURI growing in NZ but TITTUPPED was new to me; however, the clue and the crossers led there inexorably (pity about the surface).

    I did like some of the misdirections: ‘mother superior’ in 14a, ‘board member’ in 13d, ‘superior flat mobile phone’ in 16d.

  30. Thanks Brummie and manehi

    I really enjoyed that and thought it was excellent.

    Crossbencher @25: surely “you’d be competely mad to do that” means neither mentally deranged nor angry. But what it does mean is stupid…

  32. Re #27: I assumed that there was some soap opera somewhere with a character named Ena, and that some British something has a cat named Orlando. I am 40 and American, and that corner of the puzzle was definitely my toughest nut to crack here. Glad to know I’m not only on the wrong side of the Atlantic but also too young.

    British cats miaow rather than meow? Even your cats spell the language differently, I guess. We also spell “woolen” with just the one L.

    Favorite clues here included “Manhattan” and “Army.”

    Add me to the list of those who didn’t pick up on the Woody Allen theme. Allen is a mixed bag for me; some of his movies I love (Hannah and Her Sisters, Purple Rose of Cairo, Crimes and Misdemeanors, Broadway Danny Rose), while many others have always struck me as pretentious navel-gazing (Interiors and Annie Hall among them).

  33. While we’re on differences in American and British English, I can’t help but notice that manehi’s blog refers to a SLEEPER as ‘part of a railroad track’.

    Quick start, slow finish, held up by MIAOW and WOODY ALLEN, so yes I did fail to spot the theme despite having seen most of the films. The fact that the former’s clue refers to the latter’s solution didn’t help.

  34. John Appleton @18, BANANAS certainly are a staple food in many parts of East Africa (despite not being endemic) and other parts of the world. In Angole, Uganda, where I lived for three years it was the main food, and if people did not have it for a meal they would say that they had not been fed. The variety grown produces vary large fruit that are cooked unripe, it is called ‘matoke’, and takes the place of our potatoes, rice, pasta…

  36. Due to an office Christmas do I had no time at lunch today, and I’ve only just finished it. Found it difficult and educational – the least unfamiliar being KAURI, TITTUPPED (I’m sure I’d have remembered that if I’d seen it before) and my last in FIERY CROSS. SENSORIUM took a bit of dredging up too, and MASEFIELD took longer than it should have, so the NW corner was quite a challenge. Only saw a small part of the theme, but I’m always useless at film questions. Favourite was MIAOW.

    Thanks to manehi and Brummie.

  39. Enjoyable, if quite tricky puzzle. Last in was NW corner.
    But, can I endorse Crossbencher’s grumble that “mad” is not a synonym of “stupid.” As someone who works for a charity providing services to people affected by mental illness, I find several Guardian setters using quite offensive terms for this large group of people. “Nuts,” “nutter,””bananas,” “off your trolley” and many more have featured in the very recent past. This does really jar. In a redtop tabloid, you might expect this and, there, you find terms like this in headlines too. But, surely, we can expect better of The Guardian.
    This has been annoying me for several months. Some editorial intervention is called for, I think. I can’t lay my hands on my Guardian Style Guide at the moment but I am 100% sure that no such terms would be allowed in journalistic content.
    DavidS

  40. DavidS @ 39
    I’m with SimonS @ 30 on this – I think that “mad” = “stupid” in this context. In all other contexts it wouldn’t even be close, and would also be grossly insensitive, so I’m confident that Brummie intended Simon’s interpretation.

  44. I thought this was going to be more difficult than it turned out to be.

    Only about 7 across clues in on the first pass but after the downs the bottom half was almost complete and I literally filled all the answers in from the bottom to the top in one pass! Very easy for a Brummie!

    I also think 28A is in error as are the comments of DavidS @39. Of course mad = stupid. I don’t mind people being “PC” but I do object to being told how to use my own language. If I actually wanted to be offensive to mentally ill people there are a million more effective ways of doing this than a perceived misuse of the word “mad”. (Get a life 😉 )

    Thanks to manehi and Brummie

  45. In my 6.5 crossword years I never came across MAITRE D’ (14ac).
    So what a coincidence to have the same word in today’s Indy puzzle by Scorpion ……
    Spooky.

    We missed the theme but solved the puzzle faultlessly.
    What’s more important?
    Don’t know actually.

    Thanks manehi and Brummie.

  47. This is idiotic.

    Yes of course we should take care not to offend, although in The Guardian that hasn’t seemed to be a prime concern for a while, and for anyone to say that ‘mad’ is not, in the language we use today, directly synonymous with ‘stupid’ is, well, crazy.

    Some people should have their heads examined.

  48. Thanks Brummie and manehi

    Actually did this one on the day and only now checked it off. Found it a tad easier than his usual standard, but not by too much. WOODY ALLEN was the last in and seeing MANHATTAN and ANNIE HALL, suspected that there might be something going on, but didn’t know any of the other movies listed.

    Didn’t parse RESURGENT and now understand why I didn’t. Also had not accounted for the HOG in 11a. Thought that MIAOW was very clever when I got what was going on there.

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