Viz and Private Eye

An unlikey connection

I frequently struggle with cryptic crosswords. I don’t always (or often) finish them, but I don’t struggle enough to completely abandon all hope. The private Eye crossword is supposed to be one of the easier cryptics. The Times is the standard in difficult crosswords – they even have a Latin crossword sometimes.

The recent edition had this clue as 9 down, which was one of the rare ones I got almost immediately. The black-out is where I wrote the answer. I usually do this before I fill in a clue so that I can check that other solutions match letters.

How to solve this logically? As with all cryptics, there are two parts to the clue. One is a straight clue, the other is a riddle to get to that straight clue. Part of the fun (yes, fun) is working out which bit is the straight clue. This is usually either the first or last part of the clue, but you don’t know which and you also don’t know where the straight clue finishes and the cryptic starts.

In this case, the straight clue could be ‘Foreign’, ‘foreign minister’ or perhaps ‘on the right’. But ‘on the right’ politically, driving on the right or on the right hand?

Knowing how cryptics work after many years, the last part flags that there will be some word-building needed. The phrase ‘that is’ signals that the letters ‘ie’ will be used. ‘On the right’ means, for a down clue, that the other letters will be on top of ‘r’. So the word ends ‘ier’, and the ‘foreign minister’ is the straight clue.

The ‘scurrilous comic’ is the first part of the cryptic. Comic can mean a couple of things, it could be the name of a comedian or a paper comic. From the title of this post, you might have guessed that the word ‘viz’ is in the answer.

I first read Viz back in 1988 when I was at 6th form. Even then, it wasn’t as funny as it used to be. After a few years I stopped getting it very frequently, though my parents bought me a Viz annual in the 90’s. They had no idea what was inside until my dad and my uncle (who were both about 60 at the time) read the annual and were both shocked and very amused by Buster Gonad¹.

So the assembled cryptic is ‘viz..ie..r’, or ‘vizier’, the name for a dignitary from Persia and the surrounding region. I’m pretty sure the first time I heard of a vizier was in a pantomime – probably Aladdin – where the baddie was the vizier. Indeed, Jafar was the vizier in the 1992 Disney film of Aladdin.

After two weeks I haven’t finished this one, and will need to wait for the next edition to find the answer to 15 down: You might claim booze is from Iceland – I’m dubious (9). I think it’s an anagram of ‘Iceland Im’ (the word ‘dubious’ indicates an anagram), but other than that, I don’t know.

1. “He’s got his knackers in a wheelbarrow!” ↩︎