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Just realised I should have addressed the above to Dylan, sorry!

I partly withdraw my objection to 29 - the Chambers app gives a further pronunciation that my CD-ROM does not (this was pointed out to me by a poster on AB). Still, I'm I don't like the extra letter/homophone combination very much.

Still don't see the homophone at 29 across and am pretty sure that my seventh extra letter needs to be from there. If I am looking for the correct person I am also struggling to identify the whereabouts of his/her first and last letters. Hmmm.

29's last two words indicate a homophone of a word meaning a garland (loosely, I think), also a tree and one half of a classic comedy duo. This leads to a word meaning "strap-like" which, on removing one letter, gives the entry. Hope that makes sense!

Yes, there's a suitable spelling in the hard copy, loge [and 'Chambers Dictionary (2016)' is given as the reference, after all] but it's from a different root and is defined differently.
Homophone clues usually require two definitions - one thing 'sounds' like a different thing - without relevant definitions we're on pretty shaky ground. If we're then to trim away part of what it sounds like - which is all we've got to go on in this instance - that's even worse (and isn't there possibly another 'sounds like' in Chambers ending '...ryl'?).
At this rate we can expect - suite/sweet for weet (or even wheat, at a push!).

Thanks to both. That's overly tortuous in my view!!

So we have a garland, which sounds a bit (but not much) like an undefined word, from which we remove the necessary letter to obtain the entry. That is awful.

I cottoned onto the theme after about five minutes when I could see 1 across. I now have a complete grid fill, with one of the five unclued entries clearly relating to the theme, and the other four seeming to me to have nothing to do with it. However, the theme is surely the obvious one from 1ac and the ten redundant letters, and it is twelve letters. There seems to be no option for three of the remaining unclued lights but there is an ambiguity in the last.

Is this a matter of researching Wikipedia more, or am I missing something obvious?

Hard to advise without ruining it for you.

If you have the interaction of (ten letters) and 1ac, then you’ll have a twelve-letter, non-single word phrase; two of the unclued are the two (of four available options) of that type.

The other unclued two, for different reasons, are thematic.

I hate to sound like a party pooper, but the first post - based on wording from Admin - directs thematic stuff away from this thread...

Please stop discussing the Theme in this GENTLE HINTS thread and move any such conversations to the EXTRA HELP Thread where NUDGES ONLY are to be given.

Nobody has posted in the EXTRA HELP Thread this week which is very puzzling.