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Enigmatic Variations No. 1424: Lending a Hand

Ba-ba-da-bum! Click! Click!

Ba-ba-da-bum! Click! Click!

Ba-ba-da-bum! Ba-ba-da-bum!

Ba-ba-da-bum! Click! Click!

I’m not sure my mother quite approved of my watching The Addams Family when I was young.  (This is the original TV series, of course.  I haven’t caught up with the subsequent films, though given that there was anew animated version late last year, the franchise seems still to be going strong.)  Not particularly Methodist in its outlook, but with plenty of suggestions for how things could be done differently.

Their house is a museum

When people come to see ‘em

They really are a scree-um

The Addams Family

Never thought much of the first verse, which seemed to invent the word “ooky” solely to contrive a rhyme.  (These days, of course, “Ook!” is reserved for Terry Pratchett’s librarian.)  Addams was still around when the series appeared, which must have been gratifying.  The cast, by and large, have passed on, but Gomez is still with us, and is the father of Samwise Gamgee, a twist neither Addams nor Tolkien could have foreseen.

So, Addams Family trivia, I got it.  The fact that Lurch was Thing (most of the time –    occasionally they had to share a shot) seems one of the less likely facts.  Can you imagine the fun they must have had positioning two metres+ of actor on the floor?  It looks as though Ted Cassidy had done some work with glove puppets, so maybe he had the most expressive hands in the cast.

I can’t really say what made me try for a word-ladder – perhaps just the fact that they were obviously connected.  The two roles may have the same number of letters, but there’s not a lot of overlap.  My first few attempts would have required a very deep grid but I suddenly thought to check if LAUCH was in Chambers, and it (and I) was there.  I suspect that it may be the shortest chain possible (unless, of course, you know different…).

Stacking the rungs stairwise in the grid left me slots for the usefully symmetric ADDAMS FAMILY, which only left working Mr Cassidy into the misprints.

The original title was High-Handed (if you’re 2m+ tall, your hands are pretty high and Cassidy had to raise his hand high to portray Thing), but the editor wasn’t keen so we settled on Lending a Hand, which captures the same idea, and sits better in the preamble.

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This is the website of Paul Henderson, who sets crosswords for The Independent (London) under the pseudonyms Phi, for the Daily Telegraph (London) under the pseudonym Kcit, and anonymously for The Times (London) amongst many other outlets. For a more detailed biography see the About Me page.

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