Guardian 24,403 (Sat 31 May)/Araucaria - Drama police
Posted by rightback on 6th June 2008
[Note: I'm posting this on Friday afternoon as I'm away for the weekend (off to Dublin to watch Radiohead on Saturday night). I hope this is ok, as the deadline for entries was Friday morning, but if anyone knows differently then please say and I won't post early again.]
I kept getting side-tracked while solving this so didn’t take a time. I think it would have been around 15 minutes for most of it, and probably the same again on 22ac, 15ac and 16dn (starred below).
The theme was DRAMATISTS (14dn), of which several appeared in the grid, otherwise undefined. ‘Terence’ in 29/9ac does double duty as the Roman playwright. A more theatrically-minded solver would probably have found this puzzle easier than I did.
* = anagram, “X” = sounds like ‘X’.
| Across | |
|---|---|
| 1 | HI + P(B)ATH |
| * 10/16dn | ARNOLD WESKER; (RAN)* + OLD + WES(K)ER - ‘Arnold’ came fairly easily but I couldn’t think of the surname Wesker or the River Weser, and this was my last, uncertain, entry. |
| 12 | LADY WILLIAMS; LAD, + (I WILL) in YAMS |
| * 15 | HE + RIOT + WATT - a Scottish university. For some reason I didn’t consider ‘University’ as the definition and this took me ages. |
| 20 | E + S(CRI + TO)IRE - ‘cri’ is French for ’shout’. |
| * 22 | LITTLE ENDIAN - from the nursery rhyme ‘Ten Little Indians’, also one title for a very ingenious Agatha Christie novel. I’ve read that, but not Gulliver’s Travels, which I think I really should. Little-endians appear in that book - something to do with which end they crack their eggs, apparently. |
| 26 | VI + SITS - ‘is in Parliament’ is clever for ’sits’. |
| 27 | SINGULAR - I quite liked this. I suppose it’s half-way between a double definition and a cryptic definition. |
| 29/9 | TERENCE RATTIGAN; (CIGARETTE TANNER)* |
| Down | |
|---|---|
| 1 | H + ARE - the reference in 14dn may be to Sir David Hare, but please correct me if I’m wrong. |
| 2 | PIT + Y (= ‘your head’) - ‘ruth’ = PITY as in ‘ruthless’, PIT = ‘contend’ as in ‘pit one’s wits’. |
| 3 | A + GIT + A + TOR - I’ve seen this wordplay before (’A fool on a hill’) but it’s still very good. |
| 4 | HEAVY (double definition) |
| 6/11 | HAR(OLD + PINT)E + R |
| 7 | S(HOP + A + HOL)IC - ‘hop’ being the plant from which hops are made. |
| 8 | S + ID EST + REET - ‘reet’ being Geordie-speak for ‘right’. |
| 13 | SHORT LIVED; (REVOLTS HID)* |
| 14 | DRAMATISTS; DRAM + (SIT SAT)* |
| 18 | ST + RANGER |
| 23 | D[oo]R + 1 FT |
| 24/21 | ALAN PLATER; (A PLAN)* + LATER - another of the playwrights that I didn’t know, but I got there from the wordplay. Wikipedia informs me that he used to write scripts for Z Cars. |
| 25 | T + RUE - the referenced Hamlet quotation, “That he is mad, ’tis true: ’tis true ’tis pity”, isn’t in the ODQ, so this is pretty difficult, but luckily for me the wordplay was easy. |
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