Thank you to Beale. Definitions are underlined in the clues.
Across
1. Lean the wrong way, drop a catch (7)
PITFALL : Reversal of(… the wrong way) TIP(to lean/to put into a sloping position, as in “tip your chair back”) + FALL(drop/move from a higher to a lower level).
Defn: …/a hidden difficulty.
5. To drink without company proved a disaster (5-2)
SCREW-UP : SUP(to drink) containing(without) CREW(a company/an organised group).
9. A large branch gets a wake-up call (5)
ALARM : A + L(abbrev. for “large”) + ARM(a branch, of an organisation, say).
10. Complimented little chap drinking coffee (9)
FLATTERED : FRED(diminutive of/little “Frederick”, a chap’s name) containing(drinking) LATTE(a coffee made with steamed milk).
11. Domestic tip for a more effective stack (7,3)
CHIMNEY POT : Cryptic defn: A domestic tip/an end attached to a home, namely an attachment to the top of a chimney stack to increase its effectiveness.
12. Fastening for jumper (4)
FROG : Double defn: 1st: … for a coat; and 2nd: A jumping amphibian.
14. Predisposed to subtle spice blend (11)
SUSCEPTIBLE : Anagram of(… blend) SUBTLE SPICE.
18. Having missed out at home, tucked into spread (11)
DISSEMINATE : Anagram of(… out) MISSED plus(Having …) IN(at home/not out) + ATE(tucked into food).
21. Struggles to take top off paint (4)
OILS : “toils”(struggles/performs a hard task) minus its 1st letter(to take top off).
Defn: … used to paint oil paintings.
22. Slip quantity into vegetable and herb with duck (10)
PECCADILLO : CC(abbrev. for “cubic centimetre”, a unit of volume/quantity measurement) contained in(into) PEA(a green seed vegetable) plus(and) DILL(an aromatic herb, of the parsley family) plus(with) O(letter representing 0, specifically a batsman’s score of 0 runs/a duck in cricket).
Defn: …/a relatively minor fault.
25. Said thank you in turn, joining praise for property (9)
ATTRIBUTE : Reversal of(… in turn) TA(said to express “thank you”) plus(joining) TRIBUTE(an act, statement or gift to show praise for someone or something).
Defn: …/a characteristic.
26. Level score (5)
NOTCH : Double defn: 1st: …/a degree in a scale, as in “the volume went up a few notches”; and 2nd: …/an indentation on a surface.
27. Willing to finish first — it’s nearly over now (7)
ENDGAME : GAME(willing to participate in, as in “I’m game to make the trip”) placed after(… first) END(to finish/to stop).
Defn: …, as in a chess match, say.
28. Hard left get too excited, then get stuffed (7)
OVEREAT : “overheat”(to get too excited, as in “the involvement of too many people can overheat the discussion”) minus(… left) “h”(abbrev. for “hard”).
Down
1. Skip page, dream time away (6)
PRANCE : P(abbrev. for “page”) + “trance”(dream/a state of abstraction/unresponsiveness to externa stimuli) minus(… away) “t”(abbrev. for “time”).
Defn: …/move with bouncing steps.
2. Romeo trapped by title, sick at heart, like Hamlet (6)
TRAGIC : R(letter represented by “Romeo” in the phonetic alphabet) contained in(trapped by) TAG(a title/a nickname given someone or something) + middle letters of(… at heart) “sick“.
Defn: …, the central figure in Shakespeare’s tragedy.
3. Give notice to cleric (10)
ADMINISTER : AD(short for “advertisement”, a promotional notice) plus(to) MINISTER(a cleric/a member of the clergy in Christian Churches).
Defn: …, eg. medicine.
4. Grand room providing storage above yard (5)
LOFTY : LOFT(a room in a house immediately under the roof for storing stuff) placed above(above, in a down clue) Y(abbrev. for “yard”, the unit of length).
5. Barred item at work time, creating TV drama (4,5)
SOAP OPERA : SOAP(which comes in the form of bars/barred, hence “a bar of soap”) plus(at) OP(short for “opus”, a piece of musical or literary work) + ERA(a long period of time).
6. Rubbish a job listing (4)
ROTA : ROT(rubbish/nonsense) + A.
Defn: … of who is to do what when.
7. Retro tie with decoration, seen on front row outfits (8)
WARDROBE : Reversal of(Retro) DRAW(a tie/a result of a match in where the scores are even) plus(with) [OBE(abbrev. for “Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire”, an honour/decoration awarded by the British sovereign) placed below(seen on, in a down clue) 1st letter of(front) “row“].
8. Family secure involvement of detective and free missing female (8)
PEDIGREE : [PEG(to secure/fasten with, well, a peg) containing(involvement of) DI(abbrev. for “Detective Inspector”)] plus(and) “free” minus(missing) “f”(abbrev. for “female”).
13. People there wreck a tent at ball (10)
ATTENDANCE : Anagram of(wreck) A TENT
plus(at) DANCE(a ball/social gathering at which people dance).
Defn: …/attending.
15. One can work things out using this playground equipment control (5,4)
SLIDE RULE : SLIDE(a children’s playground equipment) + RULE(to control/to hold power over).
Remember this?:
… so that you didn’t have to look up these: 
16. Bill about to divide ballot for lawyer (8)
ADVOCATE : AD(short for “advertisement”/a promotional bill/poster) + [CA(abbrev. for “circa”/about, when refering to time periods) contained in(to divide) VOTE(a ballot/an election)].
17. With no one around, I planned to eat nothing (8)
ISOLATED : I + SLATED(planned/scheduled, as in “that issue is slated for discussion during the meeting”) containing(to eat) O(letter representing 0/nothing).
19. Student in scrap with man is completely unconcerned (6)
BLITHE : L(letter displayed by a student driver) contained in(in) BIT(a scrap/a small piece of something bigger) plus(with) HE(the third person pronoun for a man).
20. Tails partner to slippery path (3,3)
TOP HAT: TO + anagram of(slippery) PATH.
Defn: …, in the phrase “top hat and tails”, a man’s formal dress.
23. Belief in honour? Leave it out, love! (5)
CREDO : “credit”(honour/recognition) minus(Leave … out) “it” + O(letter representing 0/love in tennis scores).
24. Pass through without first stopping (4)
VISA : VIA(through/by way of) containing(without) 1st letter of(first) “stopping“.
Defn: Authorisation to enter or leave a country.
Thanks Beale and scchua
I didn’t find this easy, and thought it was a bit loose in places – CC for quantity, for instance. I didn’t see where SOAP came from in 5d; now it’s explained, that become my favourite clue.
Isn’t PEDIGREE a line of descent rather than a family? Your siblings aren’t part of your pedigree.
I doubt if anyone has used a SLIDE RULE in 50 years, though I do still have mine somewhere.
[SLIDE RULE brings back memories from university, getting a multiplication answer and then having to work out how many tens to multiply it by. Also, c 1970, my tutor excitedly showing us an electronic calculator (with a memory!) that was at least a foot wide!]
I was not really on Beale’s wavelength today. I found myself guessing/solving quite a few clues, and parsing later.
Favourites: TOP HAT, VISA (loi).
New for me: FROG = an ornamental coat fastener or braid for 12ac.
Did not parse CHIMNEY POT; soap bit of SOAP OPERA.
Thanks, Beale and scchua.
Tough solve today but very enjoyable. I liked ATTRIBUTE, SOAP OPERA and PECCADILLO. DNK that meaning of FROG.
Ta Beale and great blog scchua
Ta for the blog. Frog turned up in the cryptic the other day in the guise of the thing that holds/tightens e.g. violin strings. SOAP had me foxed too, but heyho.
Some of these took me way too long to finally get, but I am not sure whether that’s me having an off day or Beale making it tough (for a Quiptic) TOP HAT was my favourite, though Astaired at it for ages before it clicked.
Apart from the dreaded LATTE this was a very cool quiptic-in fact a good cryptic
So thanks Beale and scchua
AndySmith @5: of course it did, I have a useless memory!
Petert@6: Puck on 10th Feb presented a double-themed ‘Top Cat and ‘Top Hat’ puzzle in which one of the theme solutions for the latter thread was ‘tails’. Therefore ‘tails partner’ was fresh in the mind. I wonder if that suggested this clue to Beale, but I do not know how far in advance of publication these crosswords are set and submitted.
Spooner’s catflap@9 I wondered about that, too.
Christ, I struggled with this. But it was well worth it though – lots of very clever misleading surfaces, even in something as simple as OILS for which I was struggling to grock the plural. ADMINISTER was possibly my favourite today.
Doesn’t 2d need both the middle letters of “sick” – IC – to make TRAGIC?
GrannyJ, yes, typo with “letter”. Blog corrected.
I enjoyed the challenge – it brightened my Monday, but there’s no way this was a Quiptic. The Cryptic took less than half the time of this.
Far less difficult than some Quiptics, but I still wonder what the Graun’s editors are thinking with most of these.
24D was LOI. Favourite was probably 20D, which had me thinking ‘Heads? No, Sonic!’ before finally getting there.
Thanks scchua and Beale.
Again, this is more difficult than today’s Cryptic; I pity beginners trying to wrestle with this.
I gave up on VISA, especially as ‘first stopping’ is not S, and neither is ‘front row’ R. As muffin @1 said ‘quantity’ for CC is pretty loose.
I liked SCREW-UP, DISSEMINATE and OVEREAT.
Thanks Beale and scchua.
Perhaps one more for (experienced) solvers in a hurry than beginners? Hard to put my finger on why I feel like that though – perhaps it’s the number of clues that required more than one or two steps that moved it outside the usual Quiptic fare? No real complaints – as others have said there have been tougher ones, and pitching the Quiptic at an appropriate level (if there even is one!) seems to be tricky for a lot of setters.
I actually found this slightly easier than the Cryptic, but I’ve always struggled to get on Pan’s wavelength.
Extract from a 1990 article ‘On Language; Screwing Up‘ in The New York Times Magazine:
In World War II, the particle up used in combination with a verb made an impact on slang. Louse up, ball up, gum up, mess up, foul up were among the less offensive forms meaning ”to botch, to make an egregious mistake, to bungle, to err repeatedly.” Screw up, in this sense, is first found in a December 1942 issue of Yank, and was further popularized in the 1951 ”Catcher in the Rye,” the famed novel by J. D. Salinger: ”Boy, it really screws up my sex life something awful.”
Little to enjoy here.
I agree with Gasmanjack – little to enjoy here – not a quiptic.
I also found this quite hard for a Quiptic. For a brief time I thought I was going to be unable to finish it, but I staggered across the finish line.
If I’m not mistaken, the parsing of 7dn doesn’t work: “on” in a down clue should mean “before”, so the clue should lead to WARDOBER rather than WARDROBE.
Ted @21
On a similar note, is “top off” the first letter for OILS? It would have worked better in a down clue.
Muffin @22 — That one seem OK to me, because “top” does have a general sense of “beginning”, as when a band leader says to “take it from the top”.
“on” could also mean “attached to or stuck to (the surface of) something”, as in “the picture on the wall” or “the fan on the ceiling”. Thus, in an across clue, it could indicate “attached to the front or to the back (of a word/letter)”, and in a down clue …
Great crossie Ms Beale. Please come back soon.
I thought this was a good – quite hard but perfectly fair – mainstream Quiptic. Thanks Beale for a nice puzzle and scchua for an excellent blog.
scchua @24 — I think you’re right, and the clue is OK. The reference in the blog to the fact that this is a down clue is then a red herring.
Andy+Smith @5: just on a point of order: the frog is the moving element on the violin bow which acts to straighten out the natural curve and therefore tighten (or loosen) the bow hair: the strings on the fiddle itself are adjusted by the pegs set into the scroll at the head of the instrument.
Ted@27: “… down clue is then a red herring”… Not quite. It was to point out that since it’s applied to a down clue, the “seen on” means “under”, rather than “after” which it would have been were it the “normal” case of an across clue.
Often, the level of the Quiptic seems to vary. For anyone interested, there’s a lovely, simpler daily Criptic in the following link, set by Cincinnus. It’s an American site, and you have to grumble through an ad, but it’s obviously English in its clues.
https://games.metro.us/games/cryptic-crossword-by-cincinnus
As others have noted, this was a good Cryptic, but an absolutely terrible Quiptic. Sometimes, setters seem to forget that the whole point of a Quiptic is that it’s easy. People who want tougher challenges have the main Monday puzzle and about ten years worth of archives to go through. Beginners only have this one thing.