A welcome return by Brockwell – a treat in store
No need to wonder whether there’s a theme: it’s Brockwell, with a theme helpfully signalled at the clues for 11ac and 22ac and highlighted at 18ac in the centre of the grid – RED. As always, the theme is exploited to the full, throughout the puzzle, in definitions (BOLSHIE, SCARLET, RIOJA, EMBARRASSED …) as well as in parts of words and phrases (necks, starts, head …). I have not attempted to highlight them all – I’m almost certain to have missed one or two – but I’m sure that, between you, you will come up with the full complement.
As always, there are some beautifully constructed clues, with witty surfaces – I smiled at ABSEILED and BOLSHIE and also particularly liked TOTEM, LIONHEART, ENACTOR, IAMBUS, PLANETARIA, MESS UP and AUDITORY. Top of the tree was REBELLED.
I don’t usually have trouble parsing Brockwell’s clues but I need some help today at 14 and 21dn. I got up in the early hours to tackle this and, for the first time ever, seemed to be having a rather unpleasant reaction to a ‘flu jab. It’s a lame excuse but the best I have, I’m afraid. I would have very much preferred this to have been a Prize puzzle, with more time to do it justice.
Many thanks, as ever, to Brockwell, for an absorbing and enjoyable puzzle.
Definitions are underlined in the clues.
Across
9 Notice a WAG following the face of Premier League (7)
PLACARD
Premier League + A CARD (a wag)
10 Bloody-minded husband that is next to good-for-nothing in retirement (7)
BOLSHIE
A reversal (in retirement) of SLOB (good-for-nothing) + H (husband) + IE (that is)
11 Dog belonging to us has brief thing for 18ac (9)
LABOURITE
LAB (dog) + OUR (belonging to us) + ITE[m] (brief thing)
12 Kisses the ultimate in frogs after drink (5)
NECKS
NECK (drink) + [frog]S
13 Slim actress playing TV detective (4,7)
MISS SCARLET
An anagram (playing) of SLIM ACTRESS
15 Father Brown finally going back to sleep (3)
NAP
A reversal (going back) of PA (father) + [brow]N
16 Animal found in Mexico at intervals (5)
COATI
Hidden in mexiCO AT Intervals
18 Revolutionary article in Bild is retracted (3)
RED
A reversal (retracted) of DER (article in Bild)
19 Drink in Kai Havertz’s agreement to join City (5)
RIOJA
RIO (city) + JA (Kai Havertz’s agreement)
21 Make out with date (3)
SEE
Double definition
22 18ac drunk beers with madras (11)
EMBARRASSED
An anagram (drunk) of BEERS and MADRAS
25 Time of the month initially cramping the belly of sex symbol (5)
TOTEM
Initial letters of Time Of The Month round [s]E[x] – a great surface!
26 Brave warrior injured Latin hero (9)
LIONHEART
An anagram (injured) of LATIN HERO
28 Got out of bed with energy to tackle Times Prize (7)
ROSETTE
ROSE (got out of bed) + E (energy) round TT (times)
29 One performing rhubarb stick twirls (7)
ENACTOR
A reversal (twirls) of ROT (rhubarb) + CANE (stick)
Down
1 Computer program upset animal (5,3)
APPLE MAC
APP (program) + a reversal (upset) of CAMEL (animal)
2 Coach supporting Brockwell’s foot (6)
IAMBUS
I AM (Brockwell’s) + BUS (coach)
3 Served up posh fish sauce (4)
RAGU
A reversal (served up) of U (posh) + GAR (fish)
4 Woman laid out case for new idea (6)
EDWINA
An anagram (laid out?) of N[e]W IDEA
5 Got sick catching mad cow disease, headed for rock bottom (8)
ABSEILED
AILED (got sick) round BSE (mad cow disease)
6 Smooth tenor’s song for Universal Studios? (10)
PLANETARIA
PLANE (smooth) + T (tenor) + ARIA (song)
7 African runner’s high-tech leg work (3,5)
THE CONGO
An anagram (high) of TECH + ON (leg – cricket) + GO (work)
8 Author’s cat regurgitated fluff (4,2)
MESS UP
ME (author) + a reversal (regurgitated) of PUSS (cat)
14 Layer of skin almost eaten by venom-producing pest (6,4)
SPIDER MITE
[e]PIDERMI[s] (layer of skin, almost) – but I can’t make anything of the rest
17 Rishton’s opener in beer match is most watchful (8)
ALERTEST
R[ishton] in ALE (beer) TEST (match) – I can’t see the significance of Rishton (a town in Lancashire)
18 On Beauty by Zadie essentially resisted authority (8)
REBELLED
RE (on) + BELLE (beauty) + [za]D[ie] – a beautiful clue: ‘On beauty’
is a book by Zadie Smith – and the clue was an instant evocation of Sandy Balfour’s book ‘Pretty Girl in Crimson Rose’ – a must-read for all lovers of crosswords
20 Acoustic from Oasis’s No.1 track under scrutiny (8)
AUDITORY
AUDIT (scrutiny) + O[asis’s] + RY (railway track)
21 World In Motion saving department in hospital (6)
SATURN
I’m afraid I can’t see how this works: a part of the football mini-theme? – see here for ‘World in Motion’
23 Footballer’s single covered by Keane? (6)
ROONEY
ONE (single) in ROY (Keane? – dbe)
24 Tense after sailor on board kicks off (6)
STARTS
TAR (sailor) + T (tense) in SS (‘on board’)
27 Commander of the Admiralty (4)
HEAD
Hidden in tHE ADmiralty
Beautifully summed up by Eileen, it’s always a pleasure to solve this setter and the theme was most enjoyable. I also struggled to parse the two mentioned but was on the same lines with EPIDERMIS. ROONEY and KEANE of course both played for the REDs, Man U, and LABOURITE and ROSETTE are also probably linked. AUDITORY was my favourite.
Ta Brockwell & Eileen.
14d is DERMI[S] in SPITE, but I can’t make sense of SATURN either
Thanks Brockwell and Eileen
I was hoping for help on those two too! Apart from that, fairly straightforward, with some lovely clues. I think I’ll pick FOI PLACARD as favourite.
Roy Keane keeps turning up on adverts recently – can’t remember for what!
[A story. I have watched cricket at Rishton. Michael Holding was their pro; Andy Roberts on the other side. Holding didn’t do much with the ball, but scored a rapid 70-odd, whcih included nearly killing my daughter, a babe-in-arms at the time. He hit a six straight at us. Fortunately I had the sense to move out of the way rather than go for the catch!]
Many thanks to setter & Eileen.
I too struggled with 14, but I think it’s DERMI(S) in SPITE.
And 21 could be TUR(D) in SAN?
I can SEE RED pretty much everywhere. ROSE, COAT, RAG, PLANET, CARD, (RED)ACTOR, BUS, and that very common pub, the RED LION. Oh, and ALERT.
Comment #6
14a venom = spite I think
Why is Miss Scarlett a ‘TV’ detective? She’s best known as a board game character
LIONHEART wore a RED Cross I suppose.
robinparker @8: Eileen has kindly added a link to explain that one.
robinparker55 @8
There is a long-running TV detective series called Miss Scarlet and the Duke.
Pretty sure 21d is TUR(D) in SAN
Comment #12
Thanks all!
Of course, venom = spite: I was being too clever with ‘epidermis’!
Me @10
Sorry, I didn’t notice Eileen’s link.
William @11
That works!
I parsed SATURN as William @11. Bit of a cheeky one but we’ve seen far worse.
I got as far as SAN = hospital! 😉
EDWINA unfortunately made me think of Currie who was certainly not of a RED hue, (nor was Lady Mountbatten, I suspect). There is RED Curry though.
I think that jkb_ing will be feeling a bit miffed, because William @11 seems ti be getting the credit for the parsing o/f SATURN that s/he proposed @4.
[Balfour @18
Quite right. That post must have appeared while I was writing @3.]
Quite tough. I needed a few presses of the Check Word button to keep on track with the solution. Baffled by some parsings but it seems all resolved now. Thanks Eileen et al.
Favourites TOTEM, PLANETARIA and AUDITORY.
Thanks Brockwell
Balfour @18 – in case you’re getting miffed, I did see all your contributions @5. Many thanks – I had them all except SEE!
It’s das Bild, not der Bild. Or am I missing something?
Had to reveal a couple – but otherwise a lovely puzzle.
Did not know IAMBUS meaning foot, but got it from the clear wordplay. And not sure why THE CONGO is an African runner?
A few too many football references for my non-footballing brain!
IC @23
“Runner” is quite common crosswordese for river – also “banker”.
Comment #25
R@22 – DER is an article (the) that could appear in the Bild newspaper
Lovely crossword. My top task today is making a RAGU so that was a freebie
Cheers E&C
bodycheetah @26 weeeeeell…it just discombobulates this language nerd and German speaker because a word and its correct article simply go together. It would have been better to say Spiegel, which also contains articles and is a masculine word.
Yes, there were some obscure references. Did anyone not have to Google Kai Havertz?
When the very first one I solved was MISS SCARLET I imagined very briefly that the clues might lead to a game of Cluedo. But of course not, and I believe that character in the board game has a double T at the end. Something else entirely, which theme I was blind to as usual. Enjoyed the journey today, however.
muffin @28, anyone who follows football at all will know Kai Havertz!
Lord Jim @30
My Googling only got as far as finding that he’s German (all that was needed to solve the clue). I didn’t find that he plays in England!
Agree about Havertz – he has played for Chelsea and is currently at Arsenal. Also a regular starter with Germany having well in excess of 50 caps by now I should think.
Hope yiour reaction to the ‘flu jab doesn’t last too long Eileen and thanks for the excellent blog.
RA @23 – The clue is to be read as “article that might be found when reading a German magazine”. So could be der, die, das.
Lots of good clues, but I confess I really don’t think ALERTEST should be a word, and high is a new anagrind for me.
A lovely puzzle. A joy to solve.
As Eileen says, the theme is helpfully (red) flagged twice before the many variations (highlighted by Balfour@5) surface like a rash.
I liked all of it but especially the good-for-nothing, the frog kissing and rock bottom.
Thanks to Brockwell & Eileen
Comment #36
This was indeed a very entertaining puzzle, a little reminiscent of Brendan with its overlapping themes.
Eileen, 18d immediately made me think of Sandy Balfour’s book too. For anyone not familiar with it, the title, Pretty Girl in Crimson Rose, is the clue, explained to the author by his girlfriend, that first got him into cryptic crosswords. He also used to write the much-missed X-Philes column in the Guardian.
I didn’t have a clue about SATURN either — thanks jkb_ing @4. And of course many thanks Brockwell and Eileen.
Eileen, if it’s any comfort I’m also feeling under the weather after a flu jab. This year’s batch must pack more of a punch than usual…
Perhaps that’s why I made such heavy weather of this one: lots of lucky guesses followed by semi-parsings.
I’m certainly telling myself the flujab-fog is the reason I missed the theme (though I did notice a high number of football references) and it’s presumably also why I still can’t see the connection between rhubarb and rot, and PLANETARIA and Universal Studios. (I do know the latter uses the earth as its on-screen ident, but that doesn’t feel sufficient.)
So, thank you Brockwell and Eileen and all who helped explain this – and I’m now off to down a lemsip…
There really are an extraordinary number of red references. I don’t think anyone has yet mentioned RED (kanga)ROO or RED SPIDER MITE.
Thanks to Brockwell and Eileen
I took ROT=rhubarb for what actors are supposed to mutter when talking in the background. Any better offers?
Eileen @41
And flower, of course
RogerB @33 – thanks for that. I didn’t want to stick my neck out: German is not one of my languages but we see DER as a German article quite frequently in crosswords. I had to google BILD – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bild and it seems that that (not Das Bild) is the name of the newspaper and so the clue is perfectly sound.
muffin @24 – what about ‘flower’? I agree with you re ROT = rhubarb
Lord Jim @37 – I thought of you at 18dn: I really miss the Friday X-Philes still.
Commiserations, Wellbeck @38 – I think you must be right about the strength of the vaccine. I’ve always been quite sceptical about so-called ‘reactions’ – serves me right. Paracetamol has perked me up considerably. (Thanks to DadsLad @32, too.)
[Mmm – I’ve a flu jab booked for tomorrow, then a couple of busy days. Fingers crossed! Good stock of paracetamol in, though.]
Perhaps I’m being overly pedantic, but I find PLENATARIA=’universal studios’ pretty unconvincing. The primary purpose of a planetarium is education and entertainment, not work or study.
Nice puzzle, thanks Brockwell and Eileen.
Did anyone else plump for ALDINA FOR 4 down? LAID * plus case of ‘new idea’? The problem is that if anyone can string a few letters together and pronounce it, then it’s a name, esp in SE Asia!
21d World In Motion saving department in hospital.
Definition = world. Motion = TURD lacking D(epartment) in SAN (hospital)
Wellbeck@38 I parsed ROT = [a load of old] rhubarb = nonsense. The phrase is apparently derived from the babble of actors mentioned by muffin.
Great puzzle – very enjoyable. Thanks Brockwell & Eileen.
For 17: Andrew Rishton perhaps?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Rishton?wprov=sfti1#
…though hardly a household name.
Nicely done by Brockwell. I managed to parse SATURN but failed miserably on parsin SPIDER MITE other than seeing it contained some of the letters of epidermis. Kind of along the right lines.
Liked ROSETTE which sums up my Saturday mornings although Inof course always start with the Guardian.
Thanks Brockwell and Eileen
Prospector @48 – thanks for that: my googling didn’t get me that far. Brockwell’s use of proper nouns usually means something, so it was bothering me.
Another lovely puzzle in a lovely week for the Grauniad so far! I wasn’t sure about ROT for rhubarb and I wasn’t scatologically-minded enough to parse 21d, so I’m grateful as ever for the existence of 225.
Thanks Eileen and Brockwell.
poc@44 I’m not suggesting a question mark cures all ills, but I think it’s there in this case to signal that we have a cheeky definition. I felt this one was fair given the fairly simple wordplay and crossers.
Poc@44 a planetarium is for looking at the universe
Tx for the blog Eileen and tx to those in this thread for the parsing help with SATURN and PLANETARIA. Was lost on those and ended up revealing EDWINA. So quite the struggle today.
I wasn’t quite so wowed by Brockwell’s offering today as many other commenters here. Some of the surfaces just screamed “I’m a cryptic crossword clue!” despite the setter’s clear attempts to force the vocabulary selection (10a, 12a, 16a, 2d, 17d, 20d, 21d — and the bizarre 29a). In MESS UP, we reverse puss(=’cat’) and add me(=’author’) — but the clue says “author’s cat”, with an extraneous S which we have to simply ignore. A clue (SATURN) which cannot readily be understood even after its solution has been revealed is, in my view, a poor clue. As we all know, ALERTEST isn’t really a word. If the setter doesn’t provide any hidden indicator for a hidden solution (HEAD) then cryptic clue writing is blown wide open: like, say, “Mutt saves a cookie in your current browser” (3) = CUR. ‘Universal Studios’=PLANETARIA is a stretch too far for me, as is ‘rhubarb’=ROT. Sorry to be a wet blanket.
Huge thanks to Eileen for yet another wonderful blog and to everyone else for the comments. I’m so pleased to see that so many of you enjoyed the puzzle. My choice of Rishton was purely based on this wonderful story, involving my ultimate sporting hero: https://www.thecricketmonthly.com/story/1115974/rishton-s-summer-of-viv
Special thanks to my lovely editor for spotting that I had the wrong spelling of the Cluedo character. Luckily, the TV series (which I’d not heard of) avoided the need for a complete rewrite.
Finally, with apologies to the football haters, nobody has yet mentioned Harry RED NAP 😉. All the best, B 🟥
Always pleased to find Brockwell in charge, and I enjoyed all the RED references.
I only knew MISS SCARLET as a Cluedo suspect. Didn’t know Kai Havertz either, but like Bild he obviously must be German (RabTh3Cat@22: it’s an article that might appear in Das Bild: it doesn’t have to be the correct one for Bild, though it’s a pity it wasn’t). ROT=rhubarb? If Brockwell says so – and why does Universal Studios=PLANETARIA?
My flu jab is tomorrow afternoon, so I’m hoping for a nice easy Prize!
Good puzzlle with some fine constructions and surfaces. I also failed to parse the two which seem to have given problems for many of us. Skilled use of double theme, but this didn’t help me in the solving. Nice that AUDITORY didn’t require a blue reference for once.
Many RED references have already been listed, but can I add that CONGO Red is a dye once commonly used on cotton textiles but now discontinued because it requires a carcinogenic starting material. However it is still employed as a histological stain and occasionally as a pH indicator – the colour change is the opposite to litmus.
Thanks to Brockwell and Eileen
Many thanks for dropping in, Grecian / Brockwell @56 – it’s always good to see you – and thanks for the story.
Ha! – I did have a little grin to myself at the thought of Harry Redknapp but didn’t mention it, because I thought I was being extra-whimsical. 🙂
Comment #60
pserve_p2@55 I was wondering what was wrong with MESSUP, because it bugged me after I wrote it in but I couldn’t put my finger on it. Thanks for pointing it out!
I do agree about the ugliness of ALERTEST, for what it’s worth, but I’m fine with ‘in’ as a hidden word indicator and I don’t understand the problem with SATURN.
Someone did mention RED NAP but I can’t see it now — maybe it was in the deleted comment @36. And possibly the commenter deleted it because the spelling is in fact Redknapp as pointed out by Eileen 🙂
pserve_p2 @55: in the cryptic reading of MESS UP, “Author’s” has to be read as “author has”. I know this can be controversial and some people will object that it leads to the ungrammatical “ME has”. But if you read it as “the word ME has” it works fine.
Lord Jim@62 colour me unconvinced, I’m afraid. If that’s the parsing, it requires too many mental backflips for my liking!
In the spirit of being constructive, I’ll offer “author stands on regurgitated cat fluff (4, 2)” as an alternative suggestion for 8d.
After a few days of being told how easy were some puzzles that I had found (extra) puzzling, I’m back on form this morning, five days after my flu vaccination. Only ENACTOR really held me up (‘rhubarb’ =ROT?), plus making sure I was using the right fodder for EDWINA.
I almost fell into Eileen’s trap with (e)PIDERMI(s) but dug myself out, and was pleased to spot TUR(d)!
Hope you manage to recover your full powers, Eileen, and thanks for your effort while feeling less than top notch.
And thanks to Brockwell/Grecian for the puzzle and for dropping in, which is always appreciated.
Tom@63&64. I used to feel like that about the construction explained by Lord Jim@62, and I think I only fully embraced it by explaining it to someone else. 🤔
I like your alternative though. Very good.
Even after the explanations on this blog, it took me a while to understand saturn; I would never have though of turd for motion. I was pleased to have been able to parse the red spider mite (I googled it after guessing the answer, and found it is indeed red). I was first worried the theme may be football, but then I noticed more red than football references (but only found a handful; thanks to Eileen and this blog for enlightening me to the others).
Grecian @56: yes, I did notice REDNAP but felt you’d earned so much credit for all the correctly spelled RED items you could probably live without that one! But it is a nice nod.
Tom@61: re. the problem with SATURN: Yes, now that someone has explained it, I can understand SAN with TUR(d) inside. But what I meant was that on those occasions when the solution is bunged in from the definition (rather than arrived at by deduction from the components of the wordplay — a retro-parse, in other words), the wordplay should become clear to the solver. But in the SATURN example, many solvers report that the wordplay could not be disentangled even after the solution was known; so my feeling is that in this case the wordplay is so obscurely linked to the solution that it hardly counts as a “clue” at all. It’s a matter of the degree of obscurity.
66 comments by lunchtime?! Not much left to say then. I didn’t parse SATURN so well done jkb_ing @4. I would never have thought of SAN for hospital, but I’ll log that today. My LOI was IAMBUS. I liked APPLE MAC, SPIDER MITE, ABSEILED and PLANETARIA.
Thanks Brockwell and Eileen.
Nobody so far has objected to EDWINA, but I’m never very happy with answers that are simply a first name, rather than the name of a specific person: there are just so many of them (female names in particular).
I don’t get the problem with rhubarb – Chambers gives ‘nonsense’ as one of its definitions. (ROT is German for RED, by the way.)
I wasn’t sure about PL being ‘the face of Premier League’ – faces, surely? It can’t refer to the branding, as that is EPL.
Thanks to Brockwell for the entertaining puzzle and it’s always a pleasure to read Eileen’s blogs.
Martin@70. SAN for hospital is seen from time to time. I’m sure I can remember Eileen advising relatively new solvers to tuck it away in the memory.
Maybe ‘motion’ =TUR(d) is a little tricky – it’s probably an English upper middle class euphemism. And in this clue it was camouflaged by sharing italics with ‘world’, so perhaps doubly tricky.
Judge@72. L for ‘league’ is a standard abbreviation, so ‘face of’ applies to ‘premier’ only.
sheffield hatter@73 Thanks, of course it is!
No one appears to have noted that SAN is short for SANATORIUM, a rather archaic but well known term for a hospital, particularly an isolation hospital.
I had ADLINA for 4D – an anagram of DIAL suggested by “out” followed by NA which is the case of “new idea” – admittedly ADLINA isn’t common but it does seem to be a woman’s name. EDWINA needs “laid out” to be the anagram indicator – I know that pretty much anything is used to indicate an anagram these days – but in my mind “laid out” doesn’t suggest any kind of rearrangement…
Perhaps the definition for 4d is ‘Woman laid’ (in reference to Ms Currie’s dalliance with Mr Major), then ‘out’ is the anagram indicator?
I also had ADLINA for 4d. I think PauliW @77 has the best defense for the anagram (made me chuckle anyway) though I doubt Ms Currie has been in that position often enough to qualify 😉
Tractorboy@75. This was mentioned by Eileen@16! 🙂
AstralPotato@76. An alternative to your (and the appropriately named Latecomer@78’s) ADLINA, another anagram of those letters was ALDINA, mentioned by Dreadnought@45. And I knew a lass from Preston called ALINDA, about 50 years ago. I also knew an EDWINA back then, and I very briefly met Mrs Currie outside a country pub near Chinley, in more recent years, when she wound down her car window and encouraged us to go in, before driving off.
For 4d I had ‘laid out’ as the probable indicator as per Eileen, but PauliW’s idea @77 is more fun (and who knows how often they …)
It’s das Bild, sure, but der is an article you might see in Bild magazine.