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Thanks to Brendan for a witty and enjoyable Prize this week.

Definitely on the gentle side, but an apt and clever theme.
FOI 10, LOI 13.

As a longtime Grauniad puzzle solver, COD must be 6, edging out a chess geek's favo(u)rite 3. Among others, clues 5, 7, 14, 17 and 13 deserved COD consideration.

Pangram fake-out.
The theme has a "special feature" aspect.

It feels like ages since we last had a Brendan prize, so this was a pleasant surprise. I can’t add anything to geeker’s perfect summation.
FOI 1a, which made me think (wrongly) that I had a write-in on my hands. LOI 10, which I’m not sure I like.
I’m pleased to see that my COD, 13, merited geeker’s consideration for the accolade!

FOI was 1a, LOI was 27a, which is an indication that this was a fairly gentle Prize puzzle. COD for me was 5d, which took me too long to parse.

Theme was incorporated well into the puzzle, and has made me wonder if there is some crossword-related milestone today for the Guardian. Some titles are still familiar to me from when I first tried to make sense of cryptics as a uni student, an eternity ago.

Sorry, meant to type FOI 1a but misread my notes.

OMG, Buccaneer aka Picaroon in the FT! I was just mourning his move "upstairs", but this is a brief respite.

Thanks to me (just kidding 😀) Brendan for an at times taxing and, at other times, fairly straightforward crossword.

When my FOI were 1a followed by 4a I thought I was in for an easy ride but, as I said above, that wasn't the case.

If you do get stuck there is at least one long anagram and at least one hidden, both in the acrosses.

Can't quite gett my head around the parsing of 24a - I was hoping there was an alternative spelling where the 2nd letter of the 2nd word might be D to gve a 3 letter "poor backward" but Google says no.

Fairly sure I wouldn't have noticed the theme if Geeker hadn't mentioned it.

COD - 5d purely for the image it conjures up. I kept picturing a group of primates sitting around a table smoking pipes and discussing the finer points of the Bible.

Thanks to Brendan for a good way to kick-off the weekend:-)

How many thematics did you find? Four here so far, but my erudition in the field is limited.

I've got 4 so far Geeker, the same as you, plus the The i puzzle but that doesn't really count.

24a - I think my query got buried my always overlong post - any thoughts?

Brendan, I wrote in 24a without thought, but on review don't see a good parsing. I started off (not so confidently) with 3, 2, 1 but stalled out on the final 4 letters.