No. 500: The winners
COMPETITION
Trevor Grove reports: Inviting suggestions may be the first step down the treacherous path that leads to professional suicide: but at least the risk of asking competitors to set their own com- petitions produced an abnormally large entry and in almost every case some very good ideas. However, competition setters, myself included, are extremely sensitive to the fluctuations of the market, and a sudden flush of new names is apt to make one re-examine the formula that produced it with minute and loving care. According to my private poll more new com- petitors broke cover this week than ever before. Oddly, scanning entries for evidence of the criticism direct registered a negative reading: suggested competitions were well within the traditional styles. Of the criticism implied, the laconic Malcolm Shaw offers the most telling example—`Competitors are invited to write something that will make readers laugh'—though
J. A. Lindon may have had sinister motives in calling for limericks about myself. . . .
Unexpectedly, a certain amount of thinking seems to have been done in concert; nursery- rhymes, proverbs and 'Write a notice about the Wednesday Play' to end all Wednesday Plays' were among the most frequent suggestions. Otherwise proposed competitions could be roughly divided into `political' and 'literary,' a narrow field but fertile as T. L. Roy, ploughing an irreverent furrow, darkly hints: Competitors are invited to write an extract from St Paul's Epistle to the Permissive Society.
On quite a different theme, though equally irreverent, E. 0. Parrott also deserves an honourable mention : Heart transplants, liver transplants, kidney transplants. Where will it all end? It looks as though there is going to be a big new trade in medical circles soon, looking for spare bits. Bearing this in mind, competitors are asked to provide an excerpt from the classified ad pages
of some medical journal of the future.
G. J. Blundell's entry-a field day for the parodists-has considerable potential, so three guineas to another, though more subtle, would- be iconoclast: The prestige of the school story seems to have declined in recent years. Competitors are asked to set matters right by giving an extract from a school story by Henry James, Jane Austen, Thomas Hardy, D. H. Lawrence, Arnold Ben- nett, or any other eminent novelist.
On the political side of the fence Malcolm Murray Brown comes up with a winner and gets three guineas:
In the woeful saga of Knocker Powell, the one
bright light was the backhanded compliment in his published letter to Mr Heath, following his dismissal from the Shadow Cabinet. Write a note of resentful departure, with the required sting-in-the-tail, from Prince Albert to Queen Victoria, Captain Bligh to the Admiralty, Friday to Robinson Crusoe, a new-hearted man to his old-hearted wife or from Ringo Starr to the other three.
J. M. Crooks wins four, guineas for his very ingenious plan to improve the public services: The playwright John Mortimer has complained that people like bank-clerks and lawyers do not have to face regular criticism of their life's work and so cannot understand how playwrights feel about critics. Since criticism of such people might obviously be of value, write a review of the work of your dentist, dustman, or stock- broker, or anyone else whose work is not nor- mally reviewed, suitable for publication in 'any newspaper or magazine.
And E. C. Jenkins, whose entry also wins a well-deserved four guineas, emerges as the setter of this week's competition:
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