Enigmatic Variations No. 1168: Call Sign by Shark

In CALL SIGN, Shark offers up: a ’non-standard’, rectangular grid – 10 x 14; seven unclued entries, all of a kind; no misprints/corrections, just four significant extra words in clues; and finally, some colouring in to be done. What will transpire?…

Chambers tells us that a ‘call sign’ is ‘a combination of letters or numbers identifying a particular ship, aircraft, etc.’. So we could be looking at something naval or airborne here..(?).

Enough navel-gazing…on with the solving, which for me at least seemed to go fairly smoothly, and ignore the frilly bits for now. I made good progress, helped by the long entries around the edge, apart from 3A which wasn’t in any of my dictionaries – but fair enough, it was pointed out as being in the ODE but not in Chambers.

The left-most unclued across entry looked like SH?P, which could be SHIP, so sort of supports the naval theme theory. However, I was lucky to get an early PDM from the left-most down one, P?TR?, which I deduced as PETRA and immediately thought of Blue Peter and John Noakes, and SH?P became SHEP. (Get down, boy!) I guess I could just as easily have linked PETRA to the ancient civilisations of the Middle East and gone off on a tangent there…maybe some of you did?

So SHEP, PETRA and GOLDIE brought back memories of Blue Peter in the late Seventies and early Eighties of my childhood. Three others, while probably guessable as CONNIE or BONNIE, MABEL and MEG, needed some Wiki-oogling research to confirm. And the seventh, LUCY, had all crossing letters, so didn’t need any deduction at all. (Conversely, LUCY would have helped to provide crossing letters for normal clues if you hadn’t already got them.)

The other instruction from the preamble was to find four additional words in clues, which would ‘cryptically’ indicate two pioneers of the theme, around which we were to do some colouring. Given that the Blue Peter is a flag – not the one with the Jolly Roger-style ship on it, which is the symbol of the program, but a plain blue flag with a white rectangle – it was likely that we were looking for something in the shape of a flag – and so it proved, with JOHN HUNTER BLAIR and (Christopher) TRACE as the FIRST PRODUCER and FIRST PRESENTER, respectively. (I’m not sure how these four words indicate anything ‘cryptically’, they are fairly straight definitions, as far as I can see.)

So, colouring the letters around this rectangle gives us a nice representation of the theme:

I eventually worked 3A as CHIFFOROBE, LOI by a fair way, which also confirmed BONNIE, not CONNIE.

And I have only just worked out the title…Chambers has BLUE PETER as a ship’s flag, or sign – and also as a ‘call for trumps’ in whist – hence CALL and SIGN.

So, thanks to Shark for a pleasant amble down memory lane – I guess this might not have been so accessible to overseas solvers, or those much younger or older than my generation, who might not have had the cultural reference points, but you could probably say that about most thematic puzzles of this sort. (And ever since Bill Gates invented the computer, and Tim Berners-Lee invented the interweb, and Messrs Page, Brin and Wales put all the facts in the world together in a couple of places, that kind of cultural gap has narrowed into a few keystrokes and searches on key words…I’m not saying this is a good thing or a bad thing, it is just the thing we have right now!…)