JOHN GRIMSHAW celebrates the 3,000th Listener crossword.
THE LISTENER Crossword has reached 3000. For close on 60 years this fiendish form of mental masochism has baffled, bemused, bewildered and beguiled the minds of whole generations of its solvers in a way so insidiously compulsive that it has attained an undisputed reputation among followers of the cryptic muse. What other crossword series has been parodied both by Punch and the Not the Nine O'Clock News team?
The series began in the same year as the Times unveiled its equally renowned puzzle, in January 1930. This was still the era of crossword mania, which had crossed the Atlantic and which rapidly affected most of the daily papers and weeklies. From the very beginning there was no pretence that this was a puzzle for the same solver for which the dailies catered. Even now this puzzle is not considered fare for those with the currently talked about three-minute attention span. As befits a weekly magazine, the crossword has always been designed to be attacked at leisure over a few days, rather than at breakfast while waiting for an egg to boil - as a former Provost of Eton was said to do with the Times crossword (before salmonella precautions made this somewhat easier!).
In those formidable early years, puzzles might be completely in Greek or Latin, the setter being able to count on his solvers having at least a nodding acquaintance with the original classics, while others demanded a knowledge of British literature almost unknown in the TV era.
The puzzles of the very early years were difficult for the very good reason that, for a time, a prize was offered for every correct entry. On occasion, there were no correct entries at all. Perhaps there was the occasional week when the standard had been clearly misjudged and the Editor found him self giving away a large number of books, which led to fixed number of prizes being offered. Nowadays, the numbers of correct entries can range from below a hundred to over 400.
Over the years the emphasis has moved from literature more to the worth them selves though with not infrequent recourse to quotations of an appropriate nature gleaned from the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations. The crossword has maintained an obvious delight in words as objects to be manipulated and admired in their own right. Words carry with them aver tones of meaning long lost or transmuted by a dynamic language. For the cruciverbal logophile discovering new and unusual words or unsuspected meanings for familiar words is one attraction of solving this crossword.
Solvers are often able to derive pleasure from the thematic element behind the puzzle long after mere solution is complete. The wide range of thematic treatments arises from the extremely large numbers of setters who submit work - some 50 setters have appeared, for instance, in the last two years. This also means that it is rarely possible to get used to a particular setter's clueing style in the way one might with a daily paper.
A recognisable camaraderie existed between the first setters and solvers for sharing a passion which many had decried as a trivial waste of time. In earlier days this was evident from the tone of short reports on the entry which would appear with the solution. Nowadays this fellow feeling manifests itself in a series of annual dinners to which the setters invite their most successful solvers. This is a modem reworking of a practice begun in 1941 when consolation prizes were introduced by THE LISTENER for those solvers with the most correct puzzles in a six-month period who had not won a weekly prize. This lasted for only ten years but the keeping of statistics was revived in the Seventies in its current form. Every entry to each LISTENER puzzle is rigorously checked by one of the setters and any solver successfully completing the whole year, which runs from October to September, will receive an invitation to the next dinner. It is not easily achieved, and often a carelessly miswritten letter will spell disaster for another year so that only one or two solvers will complete the Herculean feat. Since last year the victor has also received a trophy, neatly titled the 'Solver Silver Salver', and is asked to present a corresponding prize to the setter of his favourite puzzle of the year, both prizes provided by the setter 'Ascot,' in whose honour the latter has been named the 'Ascot Gold Cup' despite its being in reality a silver rosebowl (straightforwardness in definitions never has been a LISTENER crossword hallmark!).
As regular readers of the crossword page will be aware, many solvers and setters will be gathering on 29 April in Birmingham to celebrate 3000 LISTENER puzzles. If you plan to be there, I look forward to seeing you but if not, and if you value this weekly mental workout, then join us anyway in spirit for a long-distance toast halfway through the evening. The subject? 'The Next Three Thousand'. Cheers!
20 April 1989