Time: 19:09. Most of this was pretty standard fair, a mix of well signalled anagrams and a lot of first, last, containing and contents letters, plus a couple of soundalikes. The placenames aren’t too outrageous and anyway are blessed with accessible wordplay, but there are a couple of individual names that might prompt letters to the Editor.
Definitions underlined in bold italics, and I am a prolific user of [] to indicate omitted and unwanted letters.
| Across | |
|---|---|
| 1 | Fool cancelled radical playwright (7) |
| BERKOFF – Stephen Berkoff, whose theatre style has been described as “in-yer-face”. Appropriately, the fool you need is a BERK, derived from cockney rhyming slang even I can’t be induced to repeat here. Just OFF for cancelled. | |
| 5 | Court order briefly introduced to silence chatterbox (6) |
| GASBAG – ASB is short for Anti Social Behaviour, and an ASBO is a court order (still) in Scotland and N. Ireland to curb such excesses. Here it appears without the O (briefly) stuck into GAG for silence. | |
| 8 | Being sixteen, boisterous and extremely carefree (9) |
| EXISTENCE – An anagram (boisterous) of SIXTEEN plus the extremes of C[arefre]E. Probably should be subject to an ASBO. | |
| 9 | Superficially deals with captains (5) |
| SKIPS – A straight double definition. | |
| 11 | Public secret initially suppressed (5) |
| OVERT – Remove the initial letter of [C]OVERT | |
| 12 | First couple from Hungary trapped in rioting Italian republic (9) |
| LITHUANIA – The first two letters of HU[ngary] contained by an anagram of ITALIAN. | |
| 13 | Die in hot water? (8) |
| BATHCUBE – Die as in a six sided object: a cryptic definition. | |
| 15 | Drunken idiots rolling over floor (6) |
| STINKO – Idiots become NITS, are reversed (rolled over) and attached to KO for floor. Very Wodehousian. | |
| 17 | Flier takes part in viva voce tests (6) |
| AVOCET – Hidden (not very well!) in vivA VOCE Tests | |
| 19 | Snake-like, unusually hypnotic (8) |
| PYTHONIC – An anagram (unusually) of HYPNOTIC. | |
| 22 | Goethe upset with man working as a solicitor? (2,3,4) |
| ON THE GAME – An anagram (upset) of GOETHE and MAN. Solicitor in this sense as one who proffers “a good time, sailor”. | |
| 23 | Uncovered disparagements in, say, King’s promotional description (5) |
| BLURB – That’s be [s]LUR[s] for the first couple of words, and the particular King you need for the surroundings is BB, legendary Blues singer. | |
| 24 | Car manufacturer endorses backing Russian agreement (5) |
| SKODA – No longer the butt of so many jokes, since now owned by VW. Endorses gives OKS, to be reversed (backing). I hope you all know that Russian for yes is DA (Да) | |
| 25 | Narrow-minded Jack stops fighting in case (9) |
| SECTARIAN – The sailor is a TAR, which “stops”, fills in an anagram (fighting) of IN CASE. | |
| 26 | Bloom’s colour about to be hidden by grass (6) |
| HEYDAY – After a brief and fruitless foray through Ulysses, I got to this through the wordplay, DYE for colour reversed and hidden by HAY for grass. Think the first bloom of youth, analogous to Salad Days. | |
| 27 | Foretell old Brit will consume wine (7) |
| PREDICT – The old Brit is a PICT, consuming a generic RED wine. | |
| Down | |
|---|---|
| 1 | Raccoon’s been shot south of British national park (6,7) |
| BRECON BEACONS – An anagram (shot) of RACOONS BEEN tacked onto B[ritish]. | |
| 2 | Intend to wear ripped clothing (7) |
| RAIMENT – AIM for intend inside RENT for ripped. | |
| 3 | Group table depleted in a month (5) |
| OCTET – Don’t think I’ve seen depleted as an indication of gutting before, but it is indeed T[abl]E inside OCT[ober] (pick any one from 12). | |
| 4 | At first, factoids and numbers suit organised admirers (3,5) |
| FAN CLUBS – The first letters of F[actoids] A[nd] N[umbers] plus the blackberry shaped card suit. | |
| 5 | Male races in run for lowly quarter? (6) |
| GHETTO – Male is HE, races TT (Tourist Trophy, most notably on the Isle of Man). GO for run provides the outer covering. | |
| 6 | Hairy beast crouching in small out-of-bounds dacha (9) |
| SASQUATCH – AKA Bigfoot. I think you can get away with a crouching for SQUAT, set inside S[mall] and [d]ACH[a], (out of bounds). | |
| 7 | French city soon collects six grand (7) |
| AVIGNON – Soon translates to ANON, and six (in Latin) VI with G[rand] is inserted. | |
| 10 | Selected MPs secretly follow case surrounding TV (6,7) |
| SHADOW CABINET – Secretly follow is SHADOW, and CABINET is the case that used to surround our cathode ray TV if we were fairly posh, a bit like this. | |
| 14 | Old county Conservative getting even afterwards (9) |
| CLEVELAND – Now split between County Durham and North Yorkshire. C[onservative] gets LEVEL for even, AND afterwards… I guess it works. | |
| 16 | Jockey announced “great success” after losing round in sporting event (5,3) |
| RYDER CUP – A biennial event involving a lot of shouting and abuse. Aural wordplay turns jockey into RYDER, and a great success is a COUP, remove the round letter. | |
| 18 | Public company starts to manufacture excellent product (7) |
| OUTCOME – Public: OUT, CO[mpany] and the starts of M[anufacture] and E[xcellent]. | |
| 20 | Report of bad general situation for molluscs (7) |
| NAUTILI – Slightly tricky for me, because I would pronounce it “naughtily”, but apparently it’s more correct if pronounced as suggested in the aural wordplay (report of) as “naughty lie”, the lie being a general situation. | |
| 21 | Radio astronomer’s source of celestial observations early in year? (6) |
| JANSKY – who has “a unit in radio astronomy measuring the power received at the telescope from a cosmic radio source 10−26Wm−2Hz−1″named after him. New to me. But early in the year his source for such stuff would be a JAN SKY. His compatriot, FEBSKY, doesn’t fit the crossers. | |
| 23 | One way to join equid when cycling (5) |
| BRAZE – And for those of you that don’t like cycling clues, this one’s a ZE/BRA | |
37:08
Submitted off leaderboard, as I used aids. NHO BERKOFF, CLEVELAND, BRECON BEACONS, JANSKY, BLAZE, ON THE GAME.
Didn’t enjoy this at all, especially after yesterday’s corker of a cryptic. It felt like it was set by two setters, lots of gimmes with simple wordplay combined with things like JANSKY, BRECON BEACONS and CLEVELAND, all NHOs and don’t like the ‘and/afterwards’ thing. Too good for me at the end of the day.
This had been going very well until I reached the lower part of the grid where I suddenly found myself stuck on a bunch of clues.
I eventually managed to come up with plausible answers to the troublesome ones in the SE although I’d never heard of BRAZE, and couldn’t explain the wordplay of BLURB and NAUTILI. That was because I never heard of BB King and I didn’t manage to translate NAUTILI into “naughty” (bad) “lie” (general situation).
The troublesome two in the SW did for me however and with 40 minutes on the clock I decided throw in the towel and visit Word Wizard. I suspected 21dn would begin with JAN and it turned out I was right about that, but JANSKY was unknown to me and as I was missing the Y-checker I was never going to come up with him. The arrival of that Y could have helped me with the remaining absentee HEYDEY but having already resorted to aids I wasn’t in the mood to begin an alphabet trawl at that late stage.
These problems aside, I really enjoyed the rest of the puzzle.
51 minutes. Very slow, but with so many NHO’s (as mentioned by commenters above), only vaguely knowns and uncertainties (eg a BATHCUBE as a thing, CLEVELAND as an ‘Old county’) I wasn’t too unhappy. Seeing the likely pangram came to the rescue again for the Z in BRAZE, my LOI and one of the NHO’s and as for EPERGNE yesterday, watching low-brow TV helped with SASQUATCH.
Favourite was the misleading botanical surface for HEYDAY.