The Listener Crossword

Letters, 07 MAY 1987

Crossword Cry

SIR: I note from your advertisement that ‘186,000 well-educated and articulate people read THE LISTENER every week’. However, I wonder how many of the 186,000 attempt the regular cryptic crossword? Having made yet another unsuccessful attempt to answer one clue in one by Amicus, I am left feeling decidedly uneducated and mildly inarticulate!
To put this in perspective, I am in fact a cryptic crossword enthusiast, regularly attempting and completing the normal type of cryptic crosswords found in the ‘quality’ press. Each week I make a serious attempt at the puzzle in THE LISTENER, ending usually with total failure. I did once answer two clues and felt I had scaled the heights of Annapurna such was the effort expended.
There are undoubtedly some among the 186,000 who are sufficiently well educated and articulate to complete the puzzle, but I wonder what percentage? Never one to bear a grudge, I would not dream of depriving this minority of their weekly ‘buzz’, but, as a democrat (in this case, a self-interested democrat), I wish to argue for the inclusion of a normal weekly cryptic crossword of the type and standard found in the Daily Telegraph, Times, Observer and others, for those among the 186,000 who, like me, consider themselves reasonably well educated, articulate and who would relish a ‘buzz’ of our own.
In an election year, the democratic process is high on the national agenda. Might I suggest a straw poll through the ‘Letters to the Editor’. If, like me, you enjoy the challenge of a normal cryptic crossword and the pleasure of being so absorbed for a couple of hours each week, please add your voice to mine.
K. Malone
Cambridgeshire

Letters, 14 MAY 1987

Crossword Cry

SIR: My father-in-law will soon be 80 years old, and some of his faculties are fading. In recent years he has suffered a number of mortal blows to his self-esteem. These include being blown off the Snowdon Horseshoe, falling out of the apple-tree he had climbed, driving his car straight through the back of a garage, and getting lost in the last movement of Mendelssohn’s Octet (second cello part).
Despite this alarming evidence of senile decay, he completes the LISTENER crossword almost every week, and sends it in. Nobody among his offspring and relations has been known to solve a single clue, and we hold his achievement in great awe. A crossword for lesser mortals would devalue his weekly triumph and drive him to carry out his threat of last week to stand for village idiot in the local elections. For his sake, please keep your crossword solitary and supreme.
George Lang
Bristol

SIR: Mr Malone’s plea (Letters, 7 May) for a less daunting crossword in your paper seems reasonable enough, since he does not seek to deprive the minority of regular solvers of their weekly ‘buzz’. But I fear his plea, for space is always at a premium, and sooner or later I believe his preferred puzzle would supplant the masterpieces of invention which have distinguished THE LISTENER for nearly 3,000 issues now. The type of puzzle favoured by Mr Malone is indeed a very excellent diversion, but surely abundantly available in the daily and Sunday quality newspapers. But I know of no daily or weekly which has anything to match the challenge, or the inventiveness of composition of the LISTENER crossword. I hope that the Corporation which gave us Radio 3 as well as Radios 1, 2 and 4, will not jettison this great puzzle on the basis of a straw poll.
I know how Mr Malone feels. I am now 58, and it was only five years ago that I first seriously tried to solve Azed in the Observer, and I shared Mr Malone’s ecstasy if I could solve even one or two of the clues. But pennies gradually began to drop, and I now find I can solve both Azed and the LISTENER crossword almost invariably. But they still take effort, and their solving still gives correspondingly greater pleasure.
R. F. Naish
Worcester

SIR: In response to your correspondent Mr K. Malone, may I say that not only am I unable to solve any clues in your cryptic crossword but, what is worse, I cannot understand the majority of them even after checking the subsequent solution when they appear.
William Bourne
Oakthorpe, Staffs.

Letters, 21 MAY 1987

Crossword Cry

SIR: Mr Malone’s crossword cri de coeur (Letters, 7 May) is clearly also an exercise in running up the flag and seeing who salutes.
My own vote would be against his proposal. As Mr Malone says, there are ‘normal’ (is any cryptic crossword a truly normal use of language?) cryptics in the Times, Observer, Guardian, etc., where several setters from THE LISTENER also ply their trade, incidentally. The LISTENER Crossword’s pre-eminence is due to its individuality. The number of 186,000 (oddly enough, the speed in miles per second of a radio wave) is no great amount in the comparison of circulations—but perhaps one should not attempt so invidious a comparison and be grateful that the only things up front on page three are the contents.
Paul Henderson
Darlington, Co. Durham

SIR: If K. Malone regularly completes the normal type of cryptic crossword found in the quality press, he should surely be able to do as we did and graduate to THE LISTENER puzzles. This does entail becoming accustomed to such things as hidden themes, codes, etc., but he will find that in practically all cases there are at least some clues similar to those in other cryptic crosswords. His declaration of total failure to solve any clues is therefore hard to understand.
We now regularly complete and send in your puzzle, and judging from last year’s statistics, so do quite a few other readers. The highest number of entries for any puzzle was 445, and the lowest 69. (Mr Malone may be comforted to know that the 69 was for a puzzle set by Amicus.) The average was 209.
If you should decide to introduce a ‘normal’ cryptic puzzle, please do not let it be at the expense of the present variety, which provides pleasure and satisfaction to those addicts who have taken the time to come to terms with it.
K. and G. Fowler
Manchester

SIR: I heartily endorse all K. Malone says, and second a plea for a less cryptic puzzle. I enjoy the normally somewhat difficult ones, but I gave up yours years ago!
Elizabeth Hamilton
Edinburgh

SIR: I hope I am not alone in feeling a little disappointed that a fellow crossword enthusiast like your correspondent K. Malone should be discouraged by the apparent difficulty of LISTENER crossword puzzles, and should wish merely for another Times/Telegraph type of puzzle.
What the ingenuity of the human brain has constructed, the human brain can surely decipher. I am convinced from my own experience that solving crossword puzzles for pleasure is an activity at which one can improve with practice, provided one is always prepared to set one’s sights higher than whatever level one might have attained. I can remember when I was unable to complete the small crossword in the Daily Express; through continued perseverance and practice I gradually came to tackle successfully Times, Mephisto and Azed puzzles. The fact that one can never be sure of being able to solve a LISTENER puzzle (because of the tremendous diversity of themes and setters) is for me a delight; but to tilt successfully with the setters opens the way to a feeling of affinity with the peculiar and idiosyncratic polymathy which informs their compositions. A recent example I would cite is the amazing and brilliant ‘Theme and Variations’ by Jago (No 2,882), in which the solver, after divining an unusually abstruse theme, is apparently betrayed by the fact that seven of the answers are one letter too short for their spaces. Incredibly, it is revealed that the seven vacant squares, when each filled with a star, form the exact pattern of the Plough, which is the puzzle’s theme.
It sounds difficult, I know. When I first sent in a LISTENER puzzle without winning a prize, I felt scarcely able to believe that at least three other people besides myself had solved it. But in fact anything from 200 to 400 people will have correct solutions in any week, and maybe many more if we assume that some are just too blasé to send in their answers.
M. A. Macdonald-Cooper
Inchture, Perthshire

SIR: Regarding crossword, please keep status quo.
D. R. Piercy (Mrs)
Wareham, Dorset
P.S. I can’t do it either!

SIR: May I add a plea to that of K. Malone, if only for a slight relaxation of the standard required for solvers of the LISTENER Crossword. For over 50 years it has, beyond paradventure, been the most demanding of the crossword puzzles in any periodical. But in the last year, compilers seem to have vied with each other in a degree of esotericism which sometimes vergers on the incomprehensible.
I speak as one who started solving your puzzles 40 years ago, and up to the last year had a completion rate of about three-quarters, but who, during the last 12 months, has been lucky to solve more than a handful—not, I would add, because of decreasing mental agility.
S. S. Townsend
Westward Ho, Devon

SIR: It’s difficult to see what Mr Malone has to gain by adding just one more cryptic crossword per week to the seven or eight he can find in the newspapers he mentions. I write as one who struggles, usually with some and occasionally with complete success, to solve these tortuous compositions, and this costs me many hours of research, rarely completed within the week Thursday to Wednesday. This is, of course, an appalling waste of time, and classifies me—and several hundred others—as crazy. I quite like the normal daily crosswords, but rarely have time for more than one a week. But if we, the struggling solvers, are crazy, what of the setters? Their devilish misused ingenuity, wasted on what is no more than a time-filling game, surely qualifies them as suffering from an acute form of certifiable mania. My thanks to them!
E. T. Moore
Cambridge

SIR: As a total cure is too much to hope for, perhaps therapy would be a good beginning. Perhaps a leaflet could be compiled so that, week by week, the sufferer could gradually be guided and helped in understanding the intricacy of the problem.
Although it is fully understood that a complete cure may not be possible in all cases, perhaps, with special care and attention many people will be able once again to lead as normal a life as could be expected under the circumstances.
K. Carter (Mrs)
Formby, Merseyside

SIR: I, too, am baffled by the crossword (though considering myself a whizz at the cryptic crosswords in the quality papers) and would dearly love a weekly puzzle in THE LISTENER. I, too, make desperate efforts to beat this annoying barrier; what kind of brain does it take? I end up gazing in respectful awe at the names of the winners, wondering if therein is a clue; like Old William’s son, I ask: ‘What made you so awfully clever?’
F. Ledgard
Hull

SIR: The letter of your futile reader, K. Malone of Cambridge, calls for some comment.
I have been taking THE LISTENER for over 40 years, chiefly for the crossword, winning prizes for nos 1,496 and 1,533 in 1959, to begin a fitful success saga. If it were not for the crossword in its present form, I would give your dreadful little journal the wide berth its contents so often deserve.
John Coleby
Buckley, Clwyd

SIR: I endorse every word of K. Malone’s letter.
     A bas these complex verbal twists
     Enjoyed by mental masochists!
     Let him who would embroil his brain
     In puzzles that give only pain.
     I prefer to spend my leisure
     On crosswords that give simple pleasure.
Andrew Weir
Leeds

Letters, 28 MAY 1987

Crossword Cry

SIR: As an expatriate subscriber of some years standing, I would like to add my support to Mr Malone (Letters, 7 May). My other links with UK are provided by the BBC World Service, Guardian Weekly and Spectator. The last two have excellent crosswords and there is definitely room for a third of similar quality and rather less arcane than the very daunting item regularly provided by THE LISTENER.
I hope Mr Malone’s straw poll may prod you (if you are not already convinced) in the right direction, and so benefit the expatriate subscribers who do not have access to the regular daily crosswords available in the UK.
Professor P. Done
Trinidad

SIR: I believe a similar correspondence took place in the Times in the 1930s to that in your columns over the past three weeks. Somebody wrote complaining that the crossword had become far too easy, and that he now habitually timed the running of his morning bath by the time it took him to complete it. A few days later, another letter supporting this view appeared. This correspondent used the solving of the crossword to time the boiling of his egg.
After a pause of a week or so, P. G. Wodehouse wrote in: he had tried both the methods suggested, and now had a severe flooding problem and dozens of very hard-boiled eggs; but he still hadn’t finished the Times crossword.
Tim Fell
Alresford, Hants.

Letters, 04 JUNE 1987

Crossword Cry

SIR: I want to add my voice to Mr Malone’s as one of the so far too silent majority of LISTENER readers. I, too, admire the compilers of the LISTENER Crossword as well as those who are able, and who have the time, to complete it. But just as I do not begrudge space in THE LISTENER for book reviews and transcripts of television programmes, in a magazine whose roots are so obviously founded in radio, so, too, I feel the vociferous minority should show some unselfishness and not object to the inclusion of a non-thematic crossword for readers like me who do not have the spare time to battle against the compilers of THE LISTENER Crossword.
     No doubt I have the intellectual capacity to solve the LISTENER Crossword eventually, should I wish to. I expect I could hike around the coastline of Britain if I wanted to, or learn Sanskrit. The point is, I don’t particularly want to do any of these things.
     There seems to be a large dose of elitism in this issue, a snobbery that is fairly distasteful. Supporters have not yet put forward one decent argument as to why those readers who want a taxing but not mind-wrangling crossword puzzle should not be catered for, especially as we must be in the majority among the readership.
     It has never been suggested that LISTENER Crossword be devalued in any way. It can and should remain one of the supreme tests of mental agility in the British press. I cannot see how having a second crossword operating at a different level can possibly affect those avid supporters of the LISTENER Crossword for whom the puzzle is a sacred cow. Maybe it could be called something other than a crossword, so that the rather selfish and elitist supporters of the present crossword can reign supreme in their little worlds.
P. J. McGiveney
Strathclyde

SIR: Personally, I don’t understand the chess or bridge problems, but I do accept that some of your readers find them interesting and would not dream of asking you to deprive them of their pleasure.
     Perhaps you could follow the example of those periodicals which include an easy crossword and a difficult one in every issue, but I suspect this might not satisfy the Malonites. Their real problem is that they cannot bear the thought that other people can solve a puzzle which they cannot.
     To reassure them, perhaps the addicts should point out that an hour or two is not enough. I often take 12 hours or more, and I agree with Mr E. T. Moore (Letters, 21 May) that it is an ‘appalling waste of time’. But if, like myself, the solver is retired and has time to spare, why should we not be allowed to spend it in this way?
     I have never written to the editor of any periodical before, except to send my weekly offering of the crossword solution—well, most weeks, anyway—but I really am upset at the possibility of being deprived of the unique LISTENER Crossword.
Mary R. Mason
Bolton, Lancs.

SIR: You are wrong about how many people read THE LISTENER every week. There are 186,002 of us since, sparing no expense (and unbeknownst to you), it gets posted to us over here. Unlike K. Malone (Letters, 7 May), I have never achieved the genius level of solving two clues in the crossword, although on one occasion I did start to get a vague idea of what it was all about.
But, whenever I am called upon to defend the individualistic character of our island race, I just show our Belgian friends the LISTENER Crossword. It never fails to impress, though most of them think it’s a put-up job—the cryptosetter’s equivalent of ‘Mornington Crescent’. Just for the record—is it?
Rod Andrew
Mons, Belgium

This was the end of the correspondence, but on June 25, the Editor (Russell Twisk) announced that there would be no change to the crossword. He had, however, commissioned John Grimshaw, one of the co-editors, to write a series of articles to help prospective solvers. These appeared for four consecutive weeks commencing July 23, with the title “How to solve THE LISTENER crossword”.