In a previous article, I mentioned the surprise cameo by the Guardian setter Arachne in Nick Hornby and Stephen Frears’ BBC comedy State of the Union. Real-life Arachne clues are the basis for a key conversation between Tom (played by Chris O’Dowd) and Louise (Rosamund Pike) before a session of marriage counselling – and the content of the clues is awkwardly appropriate.
the Guardian Bookshop.
Unlike with fellow BBC series Inside No 9, this was not a conspiracy. So had Hornby pored over dozens of cryptics to find clues that reflected a marriage under strain? No, he recalls: it was serendipity. “Those clues all appeared on the day I was writing that particular episode.” Hornby is, it transpires, a devotee of this paper’s puzzles. “I love the Guardian crossword and have been a solver for many years – no other newspaper comes close.”
And what of Tom’s horror at solving on a printed-out A4 sheet, rather than in the paper proper? This is, it seems, the product of experience. “I don’t like doing crosswords on screens or on PDF unless I have to – when I’m travelling, for example.”
Arachne herself was tickled to be told by a pal – Supertramp’s John Helliwell – that she had a cruciverbal cameo. “It’s a gem of a series, as you’d expect from Frears and Hornby,” she says.
“We tried to follow Lucy Mangan’s advice and pace ourselves, but ended up bingeing the whole lot in one go,” she says. And yes: as she told us was common in a Q&A, she had no memory of composing the quoted clues.
Finally, what next for Hornby and cryptics? “One day I would like to set a crossword, but I wasn’t tempted to write the clues myself,’” he says. “It would have taken me hours.” Well, when the time comes, this is a puzzle I would like to see. For the writing and rewriting of clues, the author could, I have discovered, rely on the support of a stalwart setter – Arachne.
More crosswords in fiction:
