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Wonderful puzzle this week. Thank you Ploy, a good workout with some excellent clues. Endgame was good fun and neat.

Apologies. I meant IQ 1848. Could an admin please change the title of this thread?

No problems with the grid fill or finding the two characters, but knowing nothing about the theme (save that it's appeared in about 8 godzillion other puzzles over the years) all I can do is Google. I see plenty of lists of the vertical character's "inappropriate" catchphrases but can't see how to change 3 cells in (presumably) the other character to create any of them. So:

1) is the to-be-highlighted phrase in the same language as the unclueds and 2) is it the case that in creating the third character by changing two cells, you overwrite one cell in one of the other two names (or is that a red herring?).

Hints only please.

The theme was a great favourite of my son. I’m afraid that it gave me the pip and still does. To continue a litany of cliches, I avoid it like the plague. I enjoyed some of the very clever clues - misdirection often masterfully deployed. But gave up on the endgame out of mere antipathy. My loss no doubt. Thanks to Ploy; you weren’t to know that I would be such a crusty old git concerning this subject!

Not a lot of help being given here.

1) The highlighted phrase is in English (2 words on separate rows).
2) Letter changes for the 3rd character affect both rows (the following 3 letter changes complete the 2nd word).

The way the 3rd character addresses one of the other characters is what's 'inappropriate' this time (if this is too much help, I'm sorry - but it's better than nothing, I think).

Thanks. Never would have seen that in a godzillion years.

Agree that it's a great puzzle, but I still can't complete 22 down. I have Ps.ms.y. The spacing would suggest the same letter is missing in both gaps. Could someone help please ?

Now have it. Took some finding in Chambers though...

I used Quinapalus for that one. Handy where you have a couple of missing letters.

https://www.quinapalus.com/cgi-bin/match?pat=*&misp=0&minl=1&maxl=31&sps=abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz&sbs=psmsy&outp=0&dict=0&ent=Search

I'm glad everyone else seems to have had no problems, I've got a couple of dozen clues, 8 clashes and a load of that clearly have nothing which fits, including one of the unclued entries.

Guess this is going to be a lot of cold solving or, more likely, a two-week wait for the solution