Competition: Malcolm Tent

Lucy Vickery presents this week’s competition

In Competition No. 2690 you were invited to invent names to fit jobs.


This assignment was suggested to me by a regular and long-standing competitor-who-wishes-to-remain-nameless, and was also a favourite of the brilliant Mary Ann Madden, who for many years presided over New York magazine’s literary competition.

Several of you fondly remembered Kenneth Tynan’s superlative ‘Charles Louis D’Ince’, bandleader, while Nigel Harding drew my attention to a Radio 4 report some years ago about an American financial planner called Rosie Scenario.

Cyberspace is groaning with websites giving lists of comedy names of this ilk so I was looking for unprecedented levels of wit and ingenuity. Inevitably, there was a fair amount of repetition: step forward and take a bow, Patti O’Dawes, home improvement consultant; Rick O’Shea, sniper; Walter Wall, carpet fitter; Millie Tant, union leader; Claude Baddely, lion tamer; Lars Torders, publican; Joe King, comedian; Toby Ornottoby, Shakespearean actor; Sam O’Nella, bacteriologist; Bill Moore, commercial lawyer; Alf Resko, outside events organiser; Orson Kart, rag-and-bone man.