Terry Pratchett, in his foreword to the millennium edition of Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, notes that it is a book which encourages cross-referencing. Start on your initially chosen topic, and your eye is drawn to another entry on the same page which looks awfully interesting. So you check that out, and your eye is drawn to another entry on the same page which looks awfully interesting… This process can be clearly discerned in many of his books.
Wikipedia hasn’t quite the same effect, but something like the process can be replicated – why is person A mentioned on the page devoted to person B? Well, I never knew person A was born in place C – and place C was the original home of museum D, and…
All of which leads up to the fact that I can’t quite recall how I ended up on the Wikipedia page for Mission to the Unknown, and discovered the only episode of Dr Who to feature neither Doctor nor Tardis. Nor, in fact, any of the Doctor’s companions – but it did have Daleks. Very Hamlet without the Prince (but with Laertes).
It felt like the sort of thing that, once encountered, required a crossword. I recall a puzzle a couple of years ago which played on the fact that William Shatner’s last Hollywood film before he appeared in Star Trek was in Esperanto – I mean, how could you not exploit that once found?
Then the cruciverbal brain kicked in: MISSION/TOTHE/UNKNOWN (7,5,7). A sort of inverted haiku using word lengths instead of syllables – but, importantly, symmetric, and a grid pattern begins to form. If TOTHE is to be central, then that’s an odd number of columns. Put the title on a diagonal – make it NW -> SE, meaning any vanishing of the Tardis or Doctor (because that’s what must happen) will be in NE and SW.
I’d also decided (the first sketch is above; yes, it does look as if I had managed to miscount the number of letters in UNKNOWN) that the vanishing elements would be diagonal too, so I’d need six further columns for TARDIS which led me to a 13×13 grid, and ultimately one with not too many long entries. The number of clues meant the usual recommendation of Chambers couldn’t be fitted into the preamble.
Gridding intricacies aside, there remained the need to prod solvers in the right direction. One could expect MISSION TO THE UNKNOWN to be deducible from cross-checking letters, but it doesn’t exactly scream ‘Doctor Who’. So a clue gimmick was needed and I settled on misprints. The vanishing Doctor was William Hartnell (though he still had to be mentioned in the credits due to contractual agreements). He is known almost solely for his Dr Who performances, so his name is a good signpost. The roughly even distribution of (7,8) suggested putting the forename in the Across clues, and the surname in the Downs.
I like having some misprints: there’s a nice process to scanning the words to be clued, including the next few, and thinking: ‘I need to misprint an L – current clue? No, but the next one looks hopeful.’ The main constraint is not forcing the last n misprints into the last n or n+1 clues – so, occasionally you do need to take the trickier option. But you’re not cornered into having to find a misprinted V in the definition for BALEEN, say. (Been there, done that, keep your eye out for it.)
Hard to imagine the series allowing this sort of thing to happen these days.
But I dare say there would be Daleks to compensate if so.
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