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Triceratops, 8d. def. is 'Celtic winger' - not a football player. Slang word for a bed, around 2-letter abbreviation.
11d. hint given earlier in the thread.
35a. Def. is 'improvement'. 1-letter abb. in an anagram (fodder has an extra letter) + 'boiler' (3)

Eenk, Re highlighting. I found that the first two words from the extra letters led to two possible choices.
I initially chose the one which didn't work.

Eenk

If you have a solution for the uppers that matches the descriptions from the extra letters, then write it out in full with the other alternatives for each cell underneath.

For the lowers, concentrate hard on the first two columns, and look at what's already been provided in the blank row.

Hope this helps

Thanks both. Will try as you suggest.

Have now completed it and understand it all. Very clever, I suppose, but for me not a great puzzle. Too much GWIT, and also very unfamiliar theme.

I think I agree with eenk. Much of this puzzle was really delightful, but crashed a bit at the very end.

Most of the way, this was a treat. The clues were tough, but yielded to perseverance. Some were obscure, but were precise, so a pleasure to solve. I enjoyed the letters thing, and was pleased how much you could actually deduce even with a half-filled grid to help solving. Ingenious how the Ls worked, and the cryptic hints for the Us were amusing. Spotted what the title meant. The ambiguity of the U choices was intriguing. So far, so good.

Then came the staring and GWIT. Perhaps this bit was more satisfying to people more familiar with the theme. I'm not, and didn't know what was expected at this point. After a lot of mystifaction and playing around, the way the Us could be thematic emerged, but then it took me a LOT of googling to find the actual relevance. OK, now I've found that, I agree that it's really ingenious -- and truly delightful how the material works to make the result -- but the joy of finding it was spoiled for me by how much searching and pages I had to scrape through before hitting on the right connections. Maybe I need to work on my general knowledge a bit :-) If only the final bit of endgame could have been pointed clearer so it was less of a trawl. Or maybe I missed something that might have given a better hint!

Now I think I'm sounding much too grouchy -- this was (mostly) a really lovely puzzle, and I really enjoyed solving it. Much admiration and only very slightly qualified appreciation to Enigmatist.