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I had only completed about a quarter of the grid when the unclued entry and the message became apparent. It meant that the grid fill followed quickly afterwards, thankfully. Cheers Stick Insect. Some good words in there that were new to me.

All done bar one letter in 25d.
Any hints welcome... TIA

'shooting' as in photography - two 3 letter synonyms for the wordplay ('s' is dropped).

Enjoying this one, and making good progress. Interesting twist when the wordplay gives the shortened entry — makes them a bit trickier to figure even with a few cross letters. Nice. Just enjoying the irony that it so happens that I have filled the top right and bottom left quadrants completely and only a few more, so far, which means I have pretty much alternate letters for the description: enough to make it look like it should begin to be guessable, but as they are alternate letters not actually guessable :-) Onwards…

drxx - thanks: can see what I missed now....

Thanks drxx for your hint on 25 down. That had me stumped as well.
A nice puzzle. Will now tackle the end game.

Very unusually for me, I got the theme early on, long before I filled the grid - and that even after a hasty dash down the wrong rabbit-hole because of less than careful Googling (I found a very plausible fill of the centre column, albeit with a missing letter - in keeping with all the other entries - and with a prominently associated non-spectral colour); then, balked by the Porpoises, on a more careful Googling I got the obvious theme - not immediately at the front of my brain as I'm an elderly male, although of course like most people of my generation I know the crucial coloured line very well.

Having sussed the thematic graphic and its colours, I then spent hours of puzzlement wrestling with the filling of the, for me, extraordinarily difficult NW and SE quadrants; it didn't help that I couldn't see what the first 7 letters of the description should be - in retrospect, obvious right from the word Google. But very, cleverly, obscure wordplay kept 11a, 13a, 17a, 28d, 36a, in particular, resistant for a long time.

I'm still a bit dubious about the definition for 36a; 'covers' doesn't seems to tally directly in ChApp either way; but generally a very challenging and entertainig solve - thank you, Stick Insect.

I am confused by the porpoises clue. The word play seems to be anagram of looser cans but that is ten letters and there are 9 spaces. The answer I thought it was almost works, with a B removed.

Lumen, reconsider the clue and try different wordplay and definition.

Thanks, got that now.