Harder than usual for Phi - especially because of the title above.

Solving time: 34 mins

* = anagram

ACROSS

1 CUT BOTH WAYS

7 PHI Hidden

12 J zEALOUS

17 MA CU LAE cu in (a male)*

20 THROB Putting throw and lob together, I think

23 RYE Hidden

24 E (energy) LEPHANTINE (in the plane)*

DOWN

1 COWl

2 T ON ICe

6 SUMER IS ICUMEN IN (ensure mini music)* Appropriate to time of year - all new to me- very, very, early music. If you’re reading this, you’re on the internet, so Google to explain it all.

7 PUNCH BALL Good

8 INDE (PEN DE) NT Had to be that newspaper, didn’t it? And why not?

11 A DJ UDICATOR (court aid)*

17 MAC (BE) TH live = be in (match)*

19 ORIB I (biro reversed)

22 GEE hidden reversal

Solving time 13:40

Overseas or younger solvers will have struggled with this, but for fans of 50s/60s British comedy, it was a very good solve and full of nostalgia as you’ll see. There are effectively two themes - Hancock’s Half Hour and the Carry On films. These are linked by Sid James and Kenneth Williams, who appeared in both. I can’t remember now exactly how the theme emerged - probably from the fairly easy clues to the film titles. “H-H-H-H-Hancock’s Half Hour” ended when I was about one year old and we still didn’t have a TV in the house (our first one was apparently bought for the Tokyo Olympics), but bits of it have seeped into Brit culture and when they do recaps of comedy history on the telly you can rely on seeing a few bits of Hancock. Hancock himself was allegedly the inspiration for the grumpiness of Dougal in the Magic Roundabout. The Carry On films were lowbrow entertainment but can still raise plenty of giggles. Much wordplay worked out while I write this, as many answers were obvious once the theme was known.

A pretty fiendish puzzle. Trying circumstances for me, 10 minutes on a crowded tube followed by 20 over lunch approx, but I found this one very tough going, with a lot of quite advanced tricks. Vocab reasonably familiar, although some phrases seem a little contrived, but some very clever references in definition and subsidiary indications.

ACROSS:

1. STRANGE PARTICLE. Creating plaster*.

10. B OCHE. Oche being the ‘firing line’ in darts.

 12. (H)AVE RAGE. As in: “Oo, you’ve really annoyed me now, I have rage with you”.  (??)

13,18,24,16: PER MAN GAN ATE. The whole word must be read clockwise, but the three-letter words that make it up are all proper words read in the right order, so NAG and ETA are the actual entries. I was looking for the bits to read clockwise too, and got v confused.

14. RATCHET. CHATTER*. My one real gripe - I don’t mind the anagram fodder and anagrind being one word, but ‘boxes’? How does that work?

17. S MU(GG)LE. Run is the definition, cross=mule, GG= nag (hom).

19. SPANDAU. I imagine this may have defeated many. Luckily I used to live in Berlin, and actually knew that the river Spree (pron shpray) runs through it, though I didn’t remember that it ended in Spandau (where I once rode a dustbin lorry collecting unwanted goods from the British Army base during a previous life). I guess it runs into the Havel Lake.

22. ANSWERS. Boom boom. As long as you knew that a ‘light’ means the space for an entry in the grid, in crossword lingo.

28. ACTON. NOT CA<, with two defs - assuming an acton is a jacket, as well as a part of West London). 

29. DUO DE(CI)MO. A complete guess, but I knew it was roughly connected to 12.

30. THREE-LEGGED RACE. Now, people = race, and the first bit must refer to the Isle of Man’s symbol, three legs joined at the hip with no body. But I don’t know about the charge.

DOWN:

1. SHRINK-RESISTANT. D + def.

2. ROCKS. Kind of CD, but seems to lack something.

4. EXCE(R)PT. Liberties with punctuation here - R (run) ’seeds’ EXCEPT (save), and the definition is ‘cutting.

5. A RR EARS. Clever misdirection - it’s not a homonym - ‘we hear’ gives ‘ears’.

6. TABLE A U.

7. COC(K-A1-G)NE. Devious in the extreme. K(in)G hogs the part of COCAINE that is A1. That’ll be the bit he didn’t cut with talc then. Ref the imaginary mediaeval land of Cockaigne.

8. EBENEEZER SCROOGE. Once sober geezer*. Kind of opposite of rehab when you think about it.

15. TEAT ASTER. Tea taster???I had to let mine go when we reduced the size of the household. But don’t worry, the coffee taster’s doubling up.

21. UNWED GE. Another word you don’t find yourself using much.

22. A(GE L ON)G. Does this mean ‘evergreen’?

23. SE(AWE)ED. E.g. wrack. That’s good, very good.

27. OUIJA. Tips of the first five words.

Phew!

Solving time: an hour or so

Approached with trepidation, having downed a convivial pint or two with Ploy at Sloggers and Betters 2, but also having missed the final step in his “Travelling Light” Listener. But this was easy once the penny had dropped. The preamble said: “Each across answer must be modified before grid entry. Definitions of the entries are given by extra words or phrases in each down clue. Across answer/entry pairs might be loosly said to exhibit 5 down.” Well, it quite soon became apparent that each across clue had at least one L or R in it, and that if you swapped all Ls and Rs (i.e. the hands in “Handiwork”) in each one, you got another “Lear Wold”, as we might say. 5D turned out to be ENANTIOMORPHY - a characteristic whereby shapes or objects (like crystals or molecules) are mirror images of each other, with left and right swapped but everything else the same.

Once you got the idea, you just had to keep track of which surplus words in which down clue provided the def. of the entry. Elimination meant that for the last few acrosses solved, there were only a few choices of possible def. And of course, once you found a def., you could then solve the down clue. Or in some cases, you’d solve the down clue, then work out which words were superfluous, and then find the matching across clue. I seem to have lost track of one set of surplus words (36D), but as everything else works I’m confident.

I’ve only explained a few clues, but if you’re stumped by others, feel free to ask…