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It was interesting - and a red herring, I suspect - that all 5 (I'm not giving away anything important, I think) of the unaffected answers were all surnames, some of folk in ODQ. Unless I'm missing something. The only poem I can think of with a very short title has a very short title indeed.

Hi cockie, you're missing one; their placement in the grid !

Silly of me, ginge. I was fixated on Bilko and failed to pause when I couldn't parse it. All is now clear.

Malone, is this thread ‘will contain answers’? - in contrast to the strict standards which you encourage on Listener threads?

Rad, the 'may contain answers' for the Listener was sparked off after many debates, discussions, arguments. The EV and Inquisitor threads have never been as contentious and always seemed to just trundle along quite happily. Most of the time these contain just hints, but If I don't want to risk seeing an answer, I won't open an Inquisitor or EV thread.

Hi malone, I don't think you need justify your trying to help resolve the anomaly that appears to exist with some Listener "participants" re hints or full parsing. Personally, I think it quite ridiculous as some of the hints tend to be so obvious ...
I've often wondered if the supposed "kudos" associated with solving the Listener and having one's name accredited with "perfect attendance" is the sole domain of those never having required help here or elsewhere !

Thanks for the clarification, Malone.

Thanks, ginge. I didn't know how much Rad knew about past events, how serious his/her questions were and so on, so I thought a polite, short reply would do.

Maybe it's because I'm only an occasional solver of the Listener,that I find some aspects surrounding it to be fascinating - the 'perfect attendance' the 'gosh, am I really the first …' questions, the almost forensic scrutiny of clues.

Thankfully that was pretty straighforward, but before I embark on the grid search etc, I'd appreciate the parse for...

35a Fuel depots perhaps open late here? Big mess after everything's stripped

only 2 words can fit but they're slightly different spellings of the same word and the 1 letter difference is in an unchecked square

Cancel that, as per usual I see it just after posting.