Lucy Vickery

Lucy Vickery presents the latest competition In Competition No. 2617 you were invited, in the wake of Big Brother’s demise, to submit a proposal for a new TV reality show guaranteed to pull in the punters. This assignment was an invitation to plumb the depths of bad taste. And plumb them you did. I winced as I waded through a postbag that incorporated all the hallmarks of reality TV: cruelty, banality, inanity, exploitation, voyeurism and abject humiliation. W.J. Webster’s entry, the epitome of awfulness, was couched in language that managed to combine cliché, political correctness and bogus compassion in a truly toxic brew.

Lucy Vickery presents the latest competition In Competition No. 2616 you were invited to continue Edward Lear’s self-portrait in verse — ‘How pleasant to know Mr Lear’ — or T.S. Eliot’s response — ‘How unpleasant to meet Mr Eliot’ — for a further 15 lines, substituting the name of the poet of your choice, or sticking to the originals if you preferred. Lear’s poem, and Eliot’s response, proved to be a fruitful starting point, prompting an avalanche of entries in which Larkin, Eliot and Pound made regular appearances and were mostly unpleasant to meet.

Lucy Vickery presents the latest competition In Competition No. 2615 you were invited to provide a lesson in the facts of life courtesy of Mrs Malaprop or the Revd William A. Spooner. This comp produced an especially enjoyable entry, highlights of which deserve to be shared. Here’s Brian Murdoch: ‘In these days, when over-copulation has become a purse, it is important that boys yearn about losing their bodies in a gay that is wood. I entreat all mean-age tales, though assailed by the pierce fashions of youth, to resist above all the surge towards elf-abuse’. Over now to Adrian Fry: ‘When you children grow up and experience presbytery, you’ll feel sectionally tractored to the opposing agenda.

In Competition No. 2614 you were invited to submit a press release by the tourist board of one of the following fictional holiday destinations: Lilliput; Wonderland; Oceania; Brave New World. The entry was split fairly evenly between the first three destinations, while the prospect of trying to entice visitors to what Huxley referred to as a ‘negative utopia’ left you cold. Well, not quite: a solitary cheerleader in the wilderness was Susan McLean, who made a spirited if ultimately unconvincing case for ‘a vacation from morality’. Lilliput and Wonderland were undoubtedly easier to sell than Oceania, but a doughty few pulled off the impressive feat of making Orwell’s totalitarian horrors sound like a compelling reason to book a trip.

In Competition No. 2613 you were invited to submit a cautionary tale for our times, in the style of Hilaire Belloc, about the consequences of too much time spent texting or on social networking sites. The grisly fates of Belloc’s creations — Jim, eaten feet upwards by a lion, and Mathilda, burnt to a crisp — both thrill and appal children. I remember being puzzled, though, by a moral universe in which Algernon, who narrowly fails in his attempt to shoot his sister with a loaded rifle, gets off with a light reprimand; while Rebecca, for the relatively innocuous crime of slamming doors, perishes miserably, flattened by a marble bust of Abraham.

In Competition No. 2612 you were invited to provide an extract from an issue of The Spectator from the year 2109. Back in the mid-1950s competitors were asked to look into their crystal balls and come up with content from The Spectator of 2080.  In the report on the results, they were sternly berated for a lack of inventiveness; Orwell and Wells casting a long shadow over the entry. Viewed from 1955, the future was somewhat soulless and monochrome, and we are no less pessimistic 60-ish years on, it seems. This time around the smallish postbag was cheering in its quality but spirit-dampening content-wise. I longed for a sliver of optimism amid the dystopian visions of post-apocalyptic social breakdown, remorseless dumbing-down and the death of grammar and spelling as we know it.

In Competition No. 2611 you were invited to provide a poem to be recited on the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square. Thanks to Juliet Walker, who suggested this challenge: it was a popular one that drew a large and bracing entry. What is more, I was unaware when I set it that there is already a fully fledged plinther poet in our midst. George Simmers, a regular on these pages, took to the plinth at 1 a.m. on 6 August and recited his specially composed poem, which begins: ‘So. Here we are. Trafalgar Square./ And I’m up here and you’re down there...’. A statement on his webzine, Snakeskin, reports that Mr Simmers ‘was there, he thoroughly enjoyed himself, and he didn’t fall off’.  And, unlike some, he remained fully clothed. Mike Morrison, G.M.

In Competition No. 2610 you were invited to submit an extract from the diary of the partner of a famous person, past or present. The puns came fast and furious this week. ‘I’ll make him a nice bombe for his tea tomorrow,’ writes Guy Fawkes’s other half (Juliet Walker), while Caligula’s long-suffering steed Incitatus (Frank McDonald laments that ‘...one can’t say neigh to an emperor’. But John Plowman took the biscuit. Francis Nisbet records an exchange with her husband Nelson about his purported infidelity: ‘I said he was in denial. He did admit he was — in Egypt.’ Ouch! Honourable mentions to Josh Ekroy for an entertaining account, courtesy of John Bercow’s wife, of a fraught trip to John Lewis.

In Competition No. 2608 you were invited to submit a poem in praise of adjectives. While the inspiration for last week’s challenge was a verb-hating French doctor of letters, this time around you can blame Ezra Pound. In The Spirit of Romance he states, ‘The true poet is most easily distinguished from the false, when he trusts himself to the simplest expression, and when he writes without adjectives.’ The entry was a spirited and magnificently unPoundian celebration of this oft-maligned part of speech. Commendations to Martin Parker and Melissa Balmain. They were narrowly squeezed out by the winners, below, who are rewarded with £30 apiece. The bonus fiver goes to Bill Greenwell.

In Competition No. 2607 you were invited to submit a piece of verbless prose (present participles used as adjectives or nouns were permissible). ‘Invaders, dictators, usurpers of our literature,’ boomed the French writer Michel Thaler in the preface to his verb-free novel Le train de nulle part, published in 2004. His hatred of the doing word was such that he organised a symbolic, and well-attended, burial ceremony for it at the Sorbonne. There was a revolutionary mood in the ranks this week, with mutterings in the entry about the pointlessness of this kind of challenge. But it did produce a lively and varied postbag that was a pleasure to judge. On particularly cracking form were David Silverman, Esdon Frost and Seree Zohar.

In Competition No. 2606 you were invited to imagine Gordon Brown taking some tips on style from a writer of your choice and submit an extract from the resulting speech. I thought more competitors might have steered the Prime Minister in the direction of Milton or Dryden, given their spin-doctoring credentials. As it was, Shakespeare was the most popular mentor. Drawing on a more modern influence, Basil Ransome-Davies chose as the PM’s template ‘Spain’, Auden’s ‘dishonest’ poem, rhetorically powerful but morally bankrupt — which struck me as appropriate to the times we live in. Thanks to Susan Therkelsen and D.A. Prince for conjuring up the image of Gordon Brown, dub-poet-in-training, channelling Benjamin Zephaniah. One to savour.

In Competition No. 2605 you were invited to compose an anthem for a county of your choice. Some competitors played it straight but many chose to subvert the anthem’s traditional fawning tone. Northants, in particular, got it in the neck, with Greg Whitehead (who lives there) and John Brown (who doesn’t) struggling to find a redeeming feature between them. The postbag been swelled in recent months by a welcome influx of entrants from the US. They were out in force this week, casting an often caustic eye o’er the land of the free and the home of the brave. A lot of entries read well on the page but I couldn’t imagine them being sung anthemically.

In Competition No. 2604 you were invited to submit a passage from a novel that is the product of a collaboration between two unlikely bedfellows. Hot on the heels of eminent literary partnerships past — Somerville and Ross, George and Weedon Grossmith — come such unlikely yet intriguing alliances as Eric Carle and Marcel Proust, Jean Rhys and Capt W.E. Johns, Ian Fleming and Wilkie Collins. P.G. Wodehouse found himself in bed with, among others, Iris Murdoch, Daphne du Maurier and St Mark, though you resisted the temptation to tuck him up with A.A. Milne, which might have produced some entertaining squabbling. Some competitors melded the themes of one author with the style of another; others blended styles. All were on cracking form.

In Competition No. 2603 you were invited to submit a newspaper article on a subject of your choice currently in the news containing as many excruciating puns as possible. I’ve never been a big fan of puns but something of a pundemic broke out in a discussion thread on the web about swine flu — ‘I rang NHS Direct and got crackling on the line’ — and it made me laugh out loud. True to Edgar Allan Poe’s observation ‘The goodness of the true pun is in the direct ratio of its intolerability’, I chortled and winced my way through the entry. Top seed topic-wise was Wimbledon, which produced various painful permutations on ‘Murray mints net profit’. Graham Grafton was unlucky to be squeezed out of the winning line-up, printed below.

In Competition No. 2602 you were invited to submit a poem in praise of urban living. The countryside’s praises have been well sung by poets; cities’ less so, although Wordsworth had his head turned by the early-morning view from Westminster Bridge. There are seven winners this week so I’ll pause only to offer warm commendations to Martin Elster, G. McIlraith and David Mackie. The magnificent seven, printed below, get £20 each. Shirley Curran nabs £25. Say not commuting naught availeth, That bendy buses are in vain, The traffic jam yields not, nor faileth, And misery packs the morning train. For first impressions may be liars; It may be, in yon fog concealed, Are gleaming now the city spires And, will, by noon, possess the field.

In Competition No. 2601 you were invited to submit snippets of misleading advice for tourists visiting Britain. You were at your cruel and mischievous best this week; the entry was a magnificent compendium of misinformation. There were a lot of like minds out there. J. Seery’s ‘In public toilets it is considered rude not to engage the man in the next urinal in jovial conversation’ was echoed by many. Equally popular were variations on D.A.

Lucy Vickery presents the latest competition In Competition No. 2600 you were invited to submit a poem containing the first or last line ‘Whenever you see a rhinoceros’. Inspiration for this comp came from Philip.mortimer (who signed himself with an email address only), who sent me a copy of a letter from Richard Jebb to the widowed American intellectual and socialite Carrie Slemmer, whom he later married.

In Competition No. 2599 you were invited to step into the shoes of a well-known writer, past or present, and give their account, in verse or prose, of a career path they might have taken. The assignment was inspired by the Observer’s ‘My other life’ column, in which writers reveal their fantasy job. Jan Morris, for example, harbours a desire to take to the waves: ‘If I weren’t me, I would like to be a ship...’. No ships in a large and excellent entry, but step forward Jane Austen, stripper; John Betjeman, trapeze artist; Harold Pinter, florist; Geoffrey Chaucer, astronaut; and John Samson’s Ernest Hemingway, stand-up comedian (‘Which painter had both inside and outside pissoir? Two-loos Lautrec.

In Competition No. 2598 you were invited to provide pithy definitions of Hell. Thanks to Michael Cregan, who proposed this competition and reminded me of Kim Howells MP’s unpopular pronouncement that his idea of Hell was three Somerset folk singers. The folk tradition didn’t crop up in the entry, but you are clearly not fans of the avant-garde; Harrison Birtwistle and John Cage in particular (‘Hell is full of music, all of it Sir Harrison Birtwistle’s’: Adrian Fry). Gerard Benson and Paul Griffin narrowly missed the cut this week. The winners, printed below, get £25 each.

In Competition No. 2597 you were invited to submit a report written by a social worker on a character from Shakespeare. Congratulations all round: you were on top form. All the biggies — Hamlet, Lear, the Macbeths, Richard III — were subjected to the beady if sometimes myopic eye of social services. There were some sparkling examples of death by jargon, among which Adrian Fry stood out. Admirable though a determination to see the good in people is, the blind optimism in some of your reports had a chilling topical resonance.