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IMHO the word "recent" is doing a lot of work in the preamble...

I guess “at the time of writing and taking the 2 year Listener backlog into account” couldn’t be included for space reasons ;)

Is one of the ten characters not a letter? I am going round in circles trying to complete the end game as I believe the two surnames are 17 letters and the final 3 letters of one of them is spookily connected to the theme.

Highlight a cell number for the last character.

Gitto you are right about the characters and the spooky connection which we had missed

Pretty straightforward if enjoyable grid fill once the P has Dd. The first word of the instruction is always guaranteed to draw a groan from this solver. On a personal level it appears to be one of my betes noires where the difficulty of the end-game is out of proportion to that of the initial solve.

For me the LH column is the problem. Complying with the instruction gives words or unchecked letters in all other cols but the LH cell needs to remain as is, or am I missing something?

greeengage - think you just need to do the first three words of the instruction in the right place of the respective rows and this isn’t an issue

Aha! Thanks candledave. Come on Switzerland!

@Candledave - Now that the topic of that pesky left hand column has been brought up, I'll re-ask my previous question at #4 but a little more clearly.

I have a unique final grid, but I can see multiple ways to carry out the first three words of the instruction to achieve this goal. Does that sound right?