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...sorry, that should be 'seeing these 4 letters in order', because you must deduce what the other letter on that line should be (which shouldn't be too difficult).
Good luck, 0pt0.

This one has yielded its secrets rather slowly for me even allowing for the festivities and a long journey to pick up a piece of farm equipment.

I have the 4 wordplay only clues and most of the grid but would welcome a hint on 16a and 4d if anybody could help?

16a - Def is last two words; wordplay uses the last def of "bouncer" in the BRB
4d - Def is last two words; wordplay is an anag of "has" + (compass-) pointless "joke".

Spam

Wahey I solved a playfair! Ok it was probably as easy as a playfair could get given the amount of encryption we were treated to. Also the encouragement on here was key. Many thanks to you all and Dysart RIP and JEG too. Happy New Year

I got there in the end with this one. Final task was to reconstruct the Playfair square to reverse engineer the 2 word phrase and fill in the blanks.

For some reason it took me ages and several sessions to spot the victim, despite searching the grid for instance of the first two letters together. There's probably some technical term for that sort of word blindness!

Thanks, Will37 - and sorry I didn't see your helpful hint sooner.

Both confirmed my reading of the clues, but I'm still none the wiser. It could be I'm not seeing a suitable synonym for 'bouncer' or 'joke' or it could be an error in 2d, 3d and 15a causing me confusion. I'll persevere.

whistler - the required synonym for "bouncer" is provided by Chambers; you then have to move a one-letter contraction of "in".
You don't need a synonym for "joke". "Joke" minus it's compass point + "has" are the two elements making up an anagram of a six-letter word (which I hadn't previously encountered).

Drxx, thanks for trying to help me, but I am still struggling. I had, in fact already played around with the fifth and seventh pairings and ended up with OHER as my four letters. these mean nothing to me.

You haven't reversed one of those pairs from cipher to plaintext, 0pt0 - the 'O' is at the far end because it codes to the 'H' at the start of the line, with a gap before the last letter [so you should have 3 letters (gap) 1 letter]. Doesn't that combination suggest a longer thematic word?