Check’s previous Listener (4728 ‘Bream’) wasn’t about fish but beer (amber* nectar). He was also the Radix Auditorum claret jug winner in 2020. Will he keep his place in the Oenophile Club?
The preamble was pretty straightforward but daunting: there’s a lot going on this puzzle. One across clue per line needs a word removing before solving and these will generate two names linked by a work. All other clues have wordplay giving an extra letter, and these produce a location and an instruction. And two completed rows must be rearranged to show a person’s achievement at the location and what the person later became.
The down clues were the way in, and without crossers this was effectively cold solving but we got enough in to give patterns which helped with those crossers so it was a slow fill though not technically too difficult. STEINS appeared at 14d so that sorted out continuing Club membership (Prost, Check!). The emerging message from the extra letters had some very plausible grid instruction words in it so we were able to surmise OF ACROSS CLUES GRID ORDER.
To make more progress we needed to work harder at the acrosses, and those without extra words in them produced the first part of the message BOTH ENDS OF.
Now we were confused. The preamble said the first and last letters of the EXTRA WORDS in the clues were giving a message. Was this new instruction shorthand for that, or was a further message to be found? The bit about grid order had become obvious as neither the outer letters of the extra words nor the clues were giving anything that made sense.
After making sure we had a full set of extra-word clues we were able to tabulate them into grid order and see what emerged. The extra words helpfully produced RICHARD BACHMAN SCHWARZENEGGER. The whole set of across clues rather less helpfully produced MOIXGFHOLRIDGSHITFPFELRESYORNOAANDWROANRKK. Reading all the firsts then all the lasts, however, revealed HIGHLIGHT PERSON AND WORK OXFORD’S IFFLEY ROAD TRACK.
At this point some might have gone to their memory bank or the web and found out that Richard Bachman was the pseudonym used by Stephen King for his 1982 dystopian novel The Running Man about a deadly running game, later made into a film starring Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Your blogger, however, once hobbled down weekly to Iffley Road not to run on the track but bat a shuttlecock around, and had been reminded of that and Roger Bannister (rather before his time) when his name appeared in the Friday Times Crossword the same weekend. Co-incidence? Or has there been a time-warp at Times Crossword HQ? RB’s famous four-minute mile was run on May 6th 1954 … All that was left was to remember (just) to highlight THE RUNNING MAN and BANNISTER and press ‘send’.
Many thanks to Check for pacing us round the track: not the easiest of Listeners by some way, but a good and fair challenge. And perhaps there’s now time to round it off with a pint in The Swan opposite, now (of course) renamed to the Oxford Blue.