Re “Two Cats”: I had in mind Rossini’s famous duet for two sopranos; just Google “Cat Duet” and you can spend the rest of the day comparing performances!

Happy New Year!

Glow-worm

My way into this was through THEATRE and TWANKEY, which made me think that 1A might actually be PANTO; only when MIRREN and SMITH slotted into place did I twig that the the key word at 1A was DAMES. PANTOMIME and HONOURS fell quickly into place and then it was just a case of deciding where to accommodate the various dames – like Hihoba, I knew DENCH had to be in there somewhere!!

I have to admit that TROTT and SARA were not really familiar to me as named characters in pantos and are surely far less widely known that Widow Twankey, Mother Goose or any of the honoured dames. I guessed both of them and then tried to track them down on Google, where incidentally there was no easy way of finding the character names of dames in different pantos. Ultimately, I wasn’t even sure of SARA, since most of the online references that I found to Dick Whittington spelt her name as SARAH. I suppose that overall I would have preferred these entries to have been clued in some way, rather than just left to fill in from general knowledge or guesswork/checking.

I basically recognised the lyric from South Pacific, which was a nice twist, and when taken in conjunction with the puzzle’s title, it nicely confirmed the theme. I struggled most with the SE corner, both with solving the clues and identifying the missing letters. I had wrongly been assuming that the text of each clue with the extra letter taken out still had to make sense as a piece of English prose, and for a long time would not accept (W)ATCHDOG, for example – I know that we are not told that this is the case but it often is in puzzles that use this device.

Like HolyGhost, I took cats to mean jazz players or fans.

Still not quite sure how 1d DUETTISTS comes from “Two cats, maybe” – “cats” are jazz fans, but …?

Still, a very neatly played out theme from Glow-worm, and enjoyable to solve, so thanks; and a happy new year to all our setters & bloggers, not to mention the lurkers (see Chambers).