This week’s devilishly fiendish Round Blogworld Quiz question (see the previous ones and their solutions here) has been set by expert solver and League of Dabblers stalwart Jonathan Law. As usual, find the link between these cryptic clues. A point for each item you get, and an imaginary cream bun of regal proportions if you get them all. If you get the link straight off, please don’t give it away too early!
What connects a Shakespeare play with a capacity audience; the man who rode Tony the Wonder Horse; the naked lady of Henly’s Corner and a nightclub dancer from Harlem USA; Claireece P. and a medley-playing pianist named, but not usually called, Gladys; and Sir Ben Kingsley’s first meal of the day?
The overall answer connects with Bin Laden’s giant clock and “the band the Beatles could have been”.
Clues will be given as necessary, and the solution will appear later.
Aha!!!! I happen to know ‘the band the beatles could have been’
tom mix was the rider of tony the wonderhorse
Yes, Worm, Tom Mix is correct.
In 1612, with the hacking scandal at its height, and the Globe packed daily to capacity, Christpher Marlowe swore blind to a Culture Select Committee that Shakespeare, who he described as a “Redheaded floosie”, had nicked from him the idea for Will’s massive current hit: ‘Tom the Wonder Horse’, the play that made the name of Thomas Mix, King’s Player, who rode Tom nightly back-and-to around the Globe stage (Tom – the horse – was played by the effete and grateful Percival Arbuthnot, a Queen’s Player). Will claimed that the idea for Tom came when he was looking for a follow-up to Richard lll. The groat dropped, he said, when he revisited the line: “A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse”. He reasoned that audiences would lap-up the idea that Deadly Dick was rescued from the beastly Henry Tudor by Tom, who would toss the crookback mis’shapenly across his back and gallop away. The Select Committee, in its forensic hopelessness and galloping naievity, concluded that Will was the originator of Tom, and that he painted a perfectly plausible picture of the amazing Bosworth Field with its 16 feet statue of a naked lady down at Henley’s Corner, on the boundary with Stubbs’ Farm; the happy band of cotton pickers, who danced to their work when on the long night shift, except the dreary Claireece, working in the south west corner, known as the Cotton Club, brought over from Haarlem, Holland; the bingo players on the northern boundary, whose triumphant shout of “Ghandhi’s Breakfast, Number 80”, was always a cue for the resident Bosworth Field pianist Mrs Mills, or Gladys, to rattle out a medley of Elizabethan favourites, including ‘The Clock That Stopped at 9 Minutes to 11’ and ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart Club’s Band’.
(It was around this time that Will coined the phrase ‘a right load of codswallop’)
Amazingly, some of that is entirely correct. Some of it is not.
Alright, I’ll be more helpful. The following elements of John’s terrific answer are relevant:16 feet statue of a naked lady, Mrs Mills, Gandhi, Number 80.
Also, no plays by Shakespeare are involved in this solution.
The statue and nightclub dancer is dirty gertie.
Is it bingo?
dirty gertie = 30
Gandhi’s breakfast = 80 I think
Brilliant Adelephant! Can you work out the rest?
Tom Mix = 6
Alas I have to feed the children. Maybe someone else can finish off?
Binladens giant clock is Mecca like the bingo and according to Alan partridge ‘the band the Beatles could have been’ is wings, which gives us bingo wings! 😀
I hope that Adelephant’s “Alas i have to feed the children” wins the Comment of the Month prize!