Good puzzle, less tricky than the past couple of days.
I had a bit of a slow start, drawing a blank on the first four acrosses, although 1ac and 8ac certainly look quite gettable in hindsight. But things picked up and I crossed the line (after quite a lot of biffing) in a snappy enough (for me) 5:23.
Quite a lot of anagrams (eight) and double definitions (seven), but all good fun – many thanks to Mara!
| Across | |
| 1 | PR created fancy VIP treatment (3,6) |
| RED CARPET – anagram (fancy) of PR CREATED. The OED says the practice of rolling out the red carpet is of great antiquity. And I see a red carpet is also a moth, hopefully never clued as such. | |
| 6 | Mark confined to bed, otherwise (3) |
| DOT – “confined” to beD OTherwise – well hidden! | |
| 8 | New record, free (7) |
| RELEASE – double definition | |
| 9 | Musical bloomer (5) |
| POPPY – double definition. I had never heard of the musical, of which there seem to be at least a couple so named – while solving I half-thought it might be “like pop (music)” = poppy = musical. | |
| 10 | Sometimes forty-one and seven not entirely wrong (5,2,5) |
| EVERY SO OFTEN – anagram (wrong) of FORTY ONE and SEVE |
|
| 12 | Network generating revenue in dictatorships, primarily (4) |
| GRID – “primary” letters of the previous four words | |
| 13 | Penned by Melville, a flawless page (4) |
| LEAF – “penned” by melvilLE A Flawless | |
| 17 | After refit, car presented in prominent position in magazine (6,6) |
| CENTRE SPREAD – anagram (after spread) of CAR PRESENTED | |
| 20 | Board expressing agreement from two countries? (5) |
| OUIJA – YES in French and German. Wiki informs me that I was incorrect in thinking that OUI and JA was the origin of the name: in fact, the name was given from a word spelled out on the board when a medium asked the board to name itself. When asked what the word meant, it responded “Good Luck”. | |
| 21 | Use polite moves, stealing kiss (7) |
| EXPLOIT – anagram (moves) of POLITE stealing/taking X (kiss) | |
| 23 | Open your mouth, for instance (3) |
| SAY – sort of a double definition &lit | |
| 24 | With a lack of enthusiasm, you listed works (9) |
| TEDIOUSLY – anagram (works) of YOU LISTED | |
| Down | |
| 1 | Unusual how steak is sometimes served? (4) |
| RARE – double definition | |
| 2 | Bring half of deer meat? (7) |
| DELIVER – DE |
|
| 3 | Muslim commander found in tea garden (3) |
| AGA – “found in” teA GArden | |
| 4 | Delight in magic word? (6) |
| PLEASE – double definition, the second as in “what’s the magic word?” | |
| 5 | First model, a rarity originally, very high price (3,6) |
| TOP DOLLAR – TOP (first) DOLL (model) A R (Rarity “originally”) | |
| 6 | Bus station opted out (5) |
| DEPOT – anagram (out) of OPTED | |
| 7 | Tiresome doing magistrate’s job (6) |
| TRYING – double definition | |
| 11 | Visitor to garden arrested, sneakily pocketing first of bulbs (9) |
| REDBREAST – anagram (sneakily) of ARRESTED, pocketing B (“first” of Bulbs | |
| 14 | Baffled when it comes to defeat? (2,1,4) |
| AT A LOSS – double-ish definition | |
| 15 | Type of clue, a hybrid (6) |
| ACROSS – A, CROSS (hybrid) | |
| 16 | Go up like climber, initially with purpose (6) |
| ASCEND – AS (like) C (Climber “initially”) with END (purpose) | |
| 18 | Loud comic is on telly, finally (5) |
| NOISY – anagram (comic) of IS ON, Y (tellY “finally”) | |
| 19 | Remain in street, annually drained (4) |
| STAY – ST(reet) A |
|
| 22 | Person regularly seen, expert (3) |
| PRO – P e R s O n (regularly seen”) | |
15.40 with no errors. I always enjoy Mara’s puzzles and this was no exception. FOI – RED CARPET, LOI – POPPY, COD – CENTRE SPREAD. Thanks Mara and Rolytoly.
Thanks Roly – 17.35 for me. In keeping with the week so far, gettable but took a little while for the penny to drop on a couple of them which maybe on a better day would have arrived more quickly. I’m blaming it on sitting up watching the test match with a bottle of my 2021 South London foraged hedgerow wine. But, at the end of the day, we won’t know how bad a score it is till both teams (everyone else on the blog) has batted on this wicket.
Great puzzle from Mara. Everything this week has been challenging but fair with very few if any NHOs. Anyway the England spinner is struggling with the breeze and keeps bunging down full tosses.
COD and LOI: OUIJA – something of a chestnut when it comes to boards but not seen it clued thus before.
Cheers everyone, have a good day in crosswordland wherever you are.
Horners
I also DNK the musical, and half-thought like Roly. Biffed 10ac, parsed post-submission. 5:56, under target for the first time in a while.
I found this hard and took nearly 18 minutes, though some of that was spent on a laborious search for a typo which prompted the dreaded Unlucky! message. I’m not sure in retrospect why I found it so tough, but the musical, the garden visitor and the magic word were among several that I struggled with. No complaints though, a good challenge I thought, thanks to Mara and Roly.
17:32
LOI OUIJA, nice clue
Is there really a musical POPPY?
Yes, indeed there is a musical called Poppy and I have seen it. It was written by Peter Nicholls with songs by Monty Norman and was produced by the RSC at The Barbican in 1982 where it received some less than favourable reviews.
The subject matter was the mid-19th century opium wars fought between China and Britain designed to keep supplies of opium flowing to Europe at a time when the Chinese authorities were trying to prohibit its distribution. Very dry stuff for a musical you might think, but Nicholls decided to to liven things up by presenting it as a full-blown pantomime with characters from Dick Whittington including including a Dame, a Jack Idle character and two pantomime horses, one of which was called ‘Randy’. It had some success opening in the run-up to Christmas in 1982 but has never had a full revival.
Oh, the crossword – I completed it in 7 minutes.
Tremendous SK – Specialist Knowledge! But I wonder how many people will use that as their route to solving the clue…
Probably just me! I still have the programme somewhere.
I still have the LP of the show.
Did not show the British in a very good light.
As an experienced solver, I found this pretty easy and full of write-ins. I had the whole top half done in two and a half minutes, but the bottom was a bit slower. I biffed red carpet and top dollar right at the start, and this provided a rich harvest of crossing letters. I was slowed a little by sloppy handwriting, and ended up on centre spread having to scribble down the anagram letters and cross out all but three – aha, that’s it.
Time: 6:07
I did this almost as a top down solve in about 7 minutes. I thought Poppy meant.. Like pop music as well. I’d never heard of the musical and I love musicals.
Found this really straightforward and was only held up for a while on the board trying to think of two agreement words from different countries. Saw it in the end after trying opina and several other non-existent woods! Can’t help thinking there’s a NINA here somewhere as I keep seeing a ‘RED CARPET of POPPIES EVERY SO OFTEN when I look at the GRID’.
Thanks R and setter.
No problems apart from never having heard of the musical, which sounds truly awful from Jackkt’s description.
Started with RED CARPET and finished with POPPY in 6.13.
Thanks to rolytoly
8 minutes for a nice puzzle. Like I suspect many (most?) people I biffed POPPY from one of the two definitions and never found the musical, and I also put in EVERY SO OFTEN without checking the anagram fodder or therefore noticing that one N had to be deleted. ACROSS was my LOI and held up what would have been an even faster time.
Thank you Roly for the blog
Cedric
Gave up as the SCC approached unable to see OUIJA. Just over 10mins for the rest but totally misdirected into thinking I was looking for a soundalike of two countries. Kind of frustrated with myself because we had this same clue about three weeks from Oink when it went straight in. Ho hum.
Edit: 8 Nov – “Board needing a “yes” from Paris and Berlin (5)” – much friendlier
It is important to recognize chestnuts- setters are always trying to disguise them. For me, this wasn’t much of a disguise.
You’ll probably remember it now!
I had exactly the same problem and stuck at it for a full 12 minutes on that last answer. When it came I kicked myself because, as you say, we’ve had it before.
Hopefully next time I’ll get it down to less than 10 minutes.
To be expected to know of a failed musical that Jackkt has seen but nobody else, including musical fan Tina, has heard of, would be more prize crossword fodder than QC, so I favour (and adopted) the “like pop music” parsing. Now awaiting the howls of the musically minded that pop is not music…
However, a nicely entertaining bunch of clues to accompany catching up with the cricket highlights and watching the birds empty the feeder again in record time.
Delayed by POPPY (needed all checkers), EVERY SO OFTEN (couldn’t see the definition) and REDBREAST (LOI). I liked ACROSS.
All done in 06:48 for 1.2K and a Decent Day. Many thanks Mara and roly.
6.26
Nothing really to add – relying on POPPY the musical seems odd so I tend to the POP-PY explanation though you’d expect a question mark? Anyway with P_P_Y I didn’t pause for very long.
I enjoyed this and managed a good time for me – I seem to keep matching jackkt these days 🙂 Only snag for me was Poppy. I put it in because it was unlikely to be anything else but I didn’t like doing it. I see there was a musical of that name but like most people it seems NHO.
Like Jack, I also saw the RSC Poppy, (although I haven’t still got the programme!) It’s a neat parody in pantomime form, exposing the hypocrisy of Victorian values with regard to drug-dealing. I thought it a very clever way of commenting on a less than salubrious period in our history. It won the Olivier award for best new musical. To my mind it’s a pity it hasn’t been revived.
8.15 (Hrafna-Flóki Vilgerðarson discovers Iceland, with navigational assistance from three ravens)
Slowest on the two long anagrams, TEDIOUSLY and EVERY SO OFTEN.
I’m definitely in the poppy=“like pop music” camp.
Thanks Roly and Mara
Always happy to see one of your dated references mention Norse history, but slightly puzzled by the dating of Flóki’s visit to 815 CE. According to Landnámabók, the first Norse visitor to Iceland was Naddodd the Viking (c. 830 CE) who was sailing from Norway to the Faroe Islands when he was blown off course. He is said to have given the island its first name: Snowland.
Some 30 years later (c. 860) Garðar Svavarsson visited. He is recorded as circumnavigating the landmass and determining that it was an island. Garðar renamed the land “Garðar’s Island” and sailed back home, but one of his crew, a man named Nattfari, stayed behind with a slave and bondswoman and these were the first permanent Norse settlers in Iceland.
Flóki Vilgerðarson knew of the visit by Garðar and set out to establish a settlement there. He did so in the Westfjords (Vestfirðir) but forgot to lay in supplies for the winter. He was forced to abandon his settlement and the story is that as he looked back at the fjord filling with ice he cursed the land and named it Iceland. His visit is widely reckoned to have been in 868-869.
Actually none of them are “the first discoverers” as it is widely accepted that Irish monks visited the island many years before the first Norseman. But that doesn´t feature much in the sagas!
I bow to your specialist knowledge of this subject. I confess that my date came from Wikipedia, a most unreliable source of knowledge.
That’s impressive knowledge – very interesting!
Lovely friendly puzzle, thank you Mara. LOI POPPY (couldn’t think why musical, just assumed POPPY like jazzy – thank you, jackkt, NHO), COD the extraordinary anagram of 41 + 7.
Thank you, Roly: oh I see, Mara slightly cheated over 41 + 7 (hence “not entirely”) – I missed that.
Well I found this difficult. I started off ok by getting a reasonable number on first pass but mopping up the remainder was very slow. Eventually finished in 25 minutes, all parsed (although I also parsed POPPY as like pop music, never having heard of a musical of that name).
FOI – 1ac RED CARPET
LOI – 18dn NOISY
COD – 4dn PLEASE
Thanks to Mara and Rolytoly
NHO POPPY musical, but word guessable. LOI NOISY, a guess again, not seeing that comic = anagram. TEDIOUSLY took a bit of working out.
It seems like just about everyone’s LOI is POPPY and I’m no exception. Never heard of the musical, and only tenuously linked it to pop music. Not as speedy as I would like to have been on this one, but still crossed the line in a respectable 10.20.
9 minutes for me.
LOI POPPY – I had thought of this early on and waited for something better to occur to me. I assumed it must be an adjective meaning like Pop Music; regarding a musical called Poppy, I would say that was beyond the GK limit (because I didn’t know it).
A good QC.
COD to RED CARPET.
David
Agree with blogger that more gentle than yesterday. Laboriously biffed then parsed several of the longer clues but couldn’t see what was going on with NOISY. Will have to add ‘comic’ to list of anagram indicators. Lots of overthinking, including missing the ‘primarily’ indicator in GRID and wanting ‘delight’ to be a noun in PLEASE. Enjoyable but no standout clues today. Thanks very much RT and Mara.
On edit: In contrast to many my LOI was DELIVER!
8:48
Terrible start which produced just two across answers on the first pass (GRID and OUIJA) – a slight improvement with the downs, but ultimately left with a dearth of checkers, particularly in the bottom half. 17a required a write-down of the letters – only solved once 4 checkers in. Not by best day…
Thanks Roly and Mara
A nice completion for me. Most of the anagrams went in quickly although I must admit to biffing most of the hiddens (very well hidden indeed).
A long time spend scratching my head over OUIJA until realisation finally dawned. Thanks Mara and Roly
Quick, slow, quick. Enjoyed this one, esp after two DNFs this week. FOsI 1d, 1a. RARE was so easy it gave me a false sense of security, but then found I had to work a bit harder. We had OUIJA the other day, so that was a write-in, luckily.
LOI ASCEND. NHO POPPY musical but biffed, like other solvers.
Liked NOISY, EVERY SO OFTEN, CENTRE SPREAD, REDBREAST, among others.
Was thinking that Melville wrote Moby Dick, but that turned out to be off-piste.
Thanks vm, Roly.
Like the description, we were the same with a G and T in the middle.
Maybe I need more gin🙂
From RED CARPET to OUIJA in 6:57. NHO the opera. Biff city today! Thanks Mara and Roly.
I thought this was an unusually gentle puzzle from Mara, which I managed to finish in 14mins – fast by my standards these days. Like others, Poppy went in just on the basis of the second definition once I had a few crossers. My knowledge of musicals doesn’t stretch beyond the very well known ones, and certainly doesn’t include Poppy, so it went in with a shrug. Overall, the puzzle seemed quite anagram heavy, but for once the hat was in good working oder. Joint CoDs to the Noisy Ouija overlap, though Please also brought a smile. Invariant
A pleasant QC taking 30 minutes.
I presume ACROSS is an old chestnut but I rather liked it and it was my second last one in.
Initially had POPEY for 9a but POPPY made more sense. I assumed the POP definition.
Thank you both.
About the same for me. A pleasant wander through the crossword and a comfortable seat in the SCC. And yes POPPY = like pop (music)
Started on the RED CARPET and TEDIOUSLY finished in 7:22
Apparently Poppy was also a 1923 Broadway musical which (according to Wikipedia) seems to have been popular at the time. I’d love to know what the setter had in mind.
Thanks to Mara and Roly
Straightforward solve today from top to bottom. I feel sure that the definition of POPPY is as Roly first had it; like pop music. Makes more sense as a cryptic clue than the little known musical of the same name.
As the two Ronnies might have said, it’s a OUI from him and a JA from me – lovely clue! Liked TRYING for the tiresome magistrate’s job and A CROSS for the hybrid. Slow to get started but once a few went in, all done in 12 minutes. Thanks to Mara and to Roly
5:56
Enjoyed this. Needed all the checkers for COD CENTRE SPREAD.
DOT to PLEASE clockwise finish.
Thanks Mara and Roly
13.29 The top half was slower than the bottom and I was breeze-blocked on POPPY and TRYING. Never heard of the musicals. Thanks rolytoly and Mara.
14:07. PRESTO, a REDSTART! Oh,on reflection better a REDBREAST, PLEASE.
27:20
Oh dear! Just couldn’t get OUIJA. Had the rest done in 15 but then spent 12 minutes on an alphabet trawl.
14:23 here, a smidge above my average according to the QUITCH. I liked this one, but RELEASE held me up strangely at the end. COD to EVERY SO OFTEN for sending me entirely the wrong way.
Thanks to Mara and rolytoly and happy Thanksgiving to everyone in the US.
Definitely a QC for me, today. I no longer time my efforts, but this must have been very close to my PB (10 mins).
RED CARPET and DOT went straight in, as did five of their seven dependent Down clues. DELIVER, RELEASE and PLEASE held me up a little, so I moved on and came back to them at the end.
Nice to see ACROSS clued as a Down clue.
OUIJA could have caused problems, but I think we’ve seen it relatively recently.
Many thanks to Mara and Rolytoly.
P.S. Mrs R is making a cake and has just brought me the mixing bowl to scrape out.
P.P.S. (Later): It was Lemon Drizzle cake and I was awarded a portion with a cup of tea, despite it being earmarked as a donation when we visit some relatives tomorrow. Absolutely delicious!
😋. . . a fitting conclusion to reward a ‘fast’ time !
Wow, turning off the timer is a win apparently.
🏆
Enjoyable puzzle with plenty of anagrams which are our strength. Thanks Mara.
Couldn’t figure Ouija for ages and assumed poppy meant pop music-like. Struggled with deliver as I was assuming ‘liver’ couldn’t be meat. Good fun for all that.
A gentle solve in 20 minutes. No unknown words and some very good anagrams. LOI OUIJA – very clever. Thanks Mara and Roly
14:42, which included some head-scratching but no frustrations, just the way I like it. I’m another who NHO the musical, which I imagine wouldn’t have done much over here. This is the second time I’ve seen the OUI JA trick, so I think I ought to learn it. Liked EXPLOIT. Not sure I’ve seen DOLL for model before. Embarrassingly, I never saw the hidden DOT.
Thanks to Mara and roly!
So that’s how NOISY works… Thx to our setter and the Mara for a forgiving puzzle.
FOI 1d Rare – to help with 1a
LOI 9a Poppy -had to be
COD 13a Leaf
I think that those who saw Poppy will remember it but the poor reviews made it a short run
Not that short a run actually. It was at The Barbican for 15 months and then transferred into the West End (Adelphi) for another 3 months. 18 months is not bad going. The critics aren’t the final arbiter in such matters as 3 years later in 1985 the RSC opened Les Miserables at The Barbican and it was absolutely slated in the press, but the public liked it and it’s still running today.
27 minutes, 0 errors. FOI Red carpet. LOI Release. DNK Poppy but couldn’t think of an alternative.
24 mins…
Took longer than I thought, but a nice puzzle from Mara. NHO of “Poppy” as a musical for 9ac, but after getting all the checkers it couldn’t be anything else.
FOI – 1ac “Red Carpet”
LOI – 9ac “Poppy”
COD – 20ac “Ouija” – seen this before somewhere else recently – but still a nice clue.
Thanks as usual!
30ish mins. Top right slowed me down. Release and Please, both easy on reflection. NHO Poppy but once I had the checkers, it was easy.
Thanks Mara and Roly
08:46
Got stuck on redbreast and every so often.
COD noisy.
Thought I might be on for a PB as the words kept flying in, but I must have spent more time thinking than I realised and I ended up nearly two minutes outside with 10:31. NHO of POPPY but it went in easily with the checkers. It was ACROSS that held me up most and was my LOI. Didn’t parse NOISY, but that’s got to be my COD now I know. Thanks Mara and Roly.