The Bletchley Park entrance exam: Simon's attempt

[@rjh1820]

Such a good effort, and thanks for showing us a crossword from history. I'd read about the crossword competition and to see it was special. I think Simon would have got in.

[@debrabowen4276]

I’m 100% sure Mark and Simon would have been whisked away to Bletchley Park!

[@mikesummers-smith4091]

I imagine that the invigilators will also have been looking at how people attacked the puzzle. Guessing but rapidly backtracking if implausible or wrong would have been key skills.

[@GordonjSmith1]

I think that two things are at play here. (a) Context is everything, clues that make contemporary references to either language or fashion are remarkably difficult to solve, and (b) The structure and rules of cryptic crosswords have evolved. I did get almost the same number of the answers (stopped video and thought about it), but it would have taken me a week! Bravo. Very very interesting.

[@cycklist]

Fascinating!

[@arthursharp9629]

A very impressive effort.

[@bryanroland9402]

Love the channel and the subject of this video was fascinating. Unfortunately, I couldn't hear Simon clearly or see the tiny letters of the clues. A decent microphone and a zoom-in on the clue being considered would be a great improvement.

[@alisonshanahan9529]

An aya is a nanny.

[@jimdetry9420]

I found it funny that you guys complained about the clues. I haven't done a crossword puzzle in over 30 years (I come here mostly for Sudoku) but I found these clues much more straightforward than the ones you have in the few crossword videos I've watched on your site. It was hard to tell but it appears these clues even told you, at the end, if the answer was two words and how many letters in each. The clues in your videos seem to depend on memorizing key words with "clever" double meanings that hint you should form an anagram, or write something backward, or use only certain parts of the clue, or manipulate one of the words in the clue, or whatever rather than simply being literal clues to the appropriate answer. I wouldn't know where or how to start with a "Cryptic." I obviously didn't try this crossword, partly because the resolution of the video made it nearly impossible to read the clues. I watched this because, when I took a vacation to England, I went to a museum that had a large display about the Enigma machine, Turing, and Bletchley Park that I found fascinating. I read somewhere that Turing will soon appear on a British bill. Good on him. I like to think you would both have qualified for code breaking if you'd had experience solving crossword puzzles in the 1940s. Maybe you could have had a 1950s live television show about puzzles instead of a KZbin channel.

[@tedchrapko7184]

P68

[@redpanda9060]

Impale = I'm pale; "it makes me lose colour".