Sphinx’s first puzzle appeared in 2017 and solvers were delightfully flabbergasted to see it appear in a fictional context on the same night’s television . The programme was Inside No 9, but its world’s fictional setter was able to create puzzles in other worlds: witness 2020’s Dracula . Sphinx – AKA writer and performer Steve Pemberton – made a quiet reappearance last September with a puzzle which was not fully explained until this year, in episode six of Taskmaster , which you should watch now whether or not you’ve already seen it.
And Sphinx returned last week with a puzzle which regrettably marks the end of Inside No 9 . Time to catch up. Seven months from Sphinx’s Taskmaster puzzle to its episode: one of the longer-term seedings, no? Well, the show requires participants to bring in an item on a given theme which allows for broad interpretation, so when I read “Something you can get into” my mind immediately went to a hobby rather than a cardboard box.
I spent ages trying to create a grid with a Nina which essentially was me begging for points from Greg Davies, the Taskmaster himself, and spent my intervals at last year’s West End production of The Pillowman working up the crossword. On the day of recording before we’d even got to the studio some very clever people had already spotted the hidden message and surmised that I would be in a future series. I shouldn’t have been surprised but I was, especially as, via one of the clues – “He follows.