Guardian Cryptic 29,156 by Picaroon

128 comments on “Guardian Cryptic 29,156 by Picaroon”

1. I found this tough going at first until the key solution made it a lot easier. To not only have them in the same grid but in the correct order on the same line is just majestic. I did wonder if non-UK solvers would struggle with some of the less well-known DOUBLE ACTS. The theme was also extended in clues like Ike & Tina and at a push, the superb Bowie ALTER EGO. SNATCH was my loi and also favourite. Another super puzzle from the master.

   Ta Picaroon & loonapick.

2. As usual, missed the theme completely (although I sensed that something was going on from the clue to 18a).

   Good to have a few easy anagrams to get a toehold, and they don’t come much easier than ANGLOS, my first in. There were quite a few words that one would only expect to encounter in Crossword Land, not the real world, such as “leman”, which I’d not have known had it not been in another puzzle relatively recently. The only one that I thought was a bit mean was the French department, but easily solved with a little help from Wikipedia.

   Wasn’t sure whether Cook was an English cricketer (cricket’s not my thing). so just to check I typed “cook english batter” into Google, which produced lots of exciting recipes for fish and chips and things. Changing “batter” to the now obsolete “batsman” solved the problem!

   Picaroon is still my favourite setter, but I was disappointed by (and didn’t finish) his last offering. I considered filing for divorce, but am pleased that today normal service has been resumed, and I enjoyed it immensely. Perhaps I was just on the wrong wavelength last time.

   Too many good ones to list them all, but ADAPTERS was probably my favourite.

3. SHALE OIL has a cryptic componenet – hale (well) in soil (ground)

4. Thanks Picaroon and Loonapick.
   I think that 1 across might be seen as hale (well) in soil (ground)

5. I didn’t get much first time through, but things quickly fell into place after that. As usual I missed the theme.

   Thanks Picaroon and thanks in advance loonapick

6. Hale in soil. Happy

7. Hi Loonapick, is 1A not hale (well) in soil (ground) rather than just a cryptic definition.
   I was amazed to spot the theme ( it was very clearly hinted) and as it was before I had matched any pairs it allowed me to zip through the across clues. All that telly watching has given me something!
   Thanks to you and to Picaroon

8. Oops – I am happy but that was a slip of the paw

9. Thanks Picaroon and loonapick
   Despite being told there was a theme, and even told what it was, I only spotted three of them!
   Slow start. I didn’t parse SANTOS or had heard of EURE.
   Surely Tina should be Ike’s ex-partner? They had a very acrimonius breakup.
   Favourite MOORED.

10. Isn’t 1a hale (well) in soil (ground)?
    Enjoyable puzzle but found RH side easier than left and could not parse several so thanks Loonapick,
    and Picaroon of course

11. Missed SNATCH & COOKROOM but did get HALE in SOIL.
    Good job 10a didn’t appear this coming Monday as it is a “Ban Collie Day”. (I nicked that joke from PostMark, so blame him.)

12. sorry for repetition – overtaken by faster typists!

13. I’ve never heard the term COOKROOM. It sounds like a too literal translation from a foreign language.

14. Relieved that muffin and Georgek have restored my faith in Picaroon by parsing SHALE OIL. COLLIERY was my favourite clue. Was ELYSEE a setter’s response to those who complain about ELY in crosswords?

15. Everyone’s gagging at the bit it seems.

16. Loonapick : isn’t 1a Hale=Well inserted in Soil=Ground ?

    11 ANGLOS and 3 Americans constitute the DOUBLE ACTS.

    Couldn’t resist inserting this clip of my favourite Peter Cook and Dudley Moore sketch. Apart from being really funny, there’s the added entertainment of the two of them pulling all kinds of manoeuvres to stop themselves corpsing with laughter and wrecking the sketch

    https://youtu.be/njK6zQp2Fdk

    Thank you Picaroon and loonapick.

17. I think that this is the first time ever that I have got the theme and it has been of meaningful help in filling in the grid. Was hoping to see Eric & Ernie somewhere, but they can’t be the easiest names to fit into a crossword. Cannon and Ball, of course, were famously described as the first comedy double act with two straight men. Thanks Picaroon for a lot of fun and thanks loonapick for the blog, especially for shedding light on the parsing of SANTOS (I would have expected an indicator for French, but presumably the word has now been absorbed into English), ENSURE (nho the French department; one to remember) and URGENT, which is now one of my favourites alongside ALTER EGO.

18. I always hesitate to suggest it, but isn’t 1a thus a genuine &lit?

19. I recently saw a statuette of Stan and Ollie in a street in Ulverston, Cumbria, from whence Stan came.

20. It was generous of Picaroon to highlight the theme at 18a – I probably wouldn’t have spotted it otherwise. As it was, I was a bit slow seeing them all, until I twigged that they were in all the across answers. And in the correct order, as AlanC says @1 – brilliant.

    SANS in 26a immediately brought to mind Jaques’s speech from As You Like It: “Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything”.

    muffin will have appreciated “cathedral city” for ELY in 20d!

    Many thanks Picaroon and loonapick.

21. Oh good grief! I couldn’t see what “seven are found here” meant when solving 18a so moved on, and by the time I finished, I’d completely forgotten about it. Would have got the HALE part of SHALE OIL an awful lot quicker if I’d picked up on that.

    Cracking puzzle. Thanks, Picaroon and Loonapick.

22. muffin@8
    The ‘fuel from’ isn’t used in the wordplay.
    A Clue-as-def or an extended def category, I feel.

23. muffin@18
    SHALE OIL

24. Very enjoyable puzzle although I did not like the clue for 20d much – ‘Dealing with Ike’s partner, a bit of a looker’. Ike Turner was a physically violent man who abused his wife in terrible ways with wooden shoe stretchers, coat hangers & other items as well as burning her with scalding hot coffee. After beating her, he would rape her. Luckily, Tina Turner managed to escape from his cruelty and abuse. She divorced him and became much greater than he ever was. Her solo career (1976 to 2009) lasted more than twice as long as her ‘Ike and Tina’ period (1960-1976) – she is so much more than ‘Ike’s partner’. It is like referring to Cher as Sonny’s partner, when she left/divorced him many decades ago (but in that case, there was no domestic abuse as in the case of Ike and Tina). In a similar way, I doubt that Harvey Weinstein’s now ex-wife wants to be known as ‘Harvey’s partner’ either now or for many decades into the future.

    I probably feel this more keenly because I watched the 2021 biopic/documentary TINA on a streaming channel a few days ago but I already knew of the abuse Tina Turner had suffered decades ago.

    Anyway, that said, I see that Picaroon wanted to use Ike and Tina as one of his double acts for the theme of his puzzle. I saw Cook & Moore, Stan & Ollie, Ant & Dec, Ike & Tina but did not see the other three – I never heard of them.

    Favourites: SPEEDILY, MOORED, AND THE LIKE.

    9ac – why does AUGUSTAN = like pope?

    New for me: EURE, SANTOS (thanks, google – a small city with population of 418,000. Cannot parse this clue).

    Thanks, both.

25. muffin@18 my recollection of time on the edges of the Texas energy industry is that the word ‘well’ was not much, if ever, used regarding the extraction of shale oil. Mining was a more frequent term. Oil wells are drilled speculatively in the hope of finding a trapped pool of oil. The location of shale oil is known in advance; the trick is getting the oil bearing rocks out and separating oil from rock in an economic manner. But happy to be corrected by others more expect than I.

26. KVa
    That’s why I hesitated.
    Lord Jim
    I did!

27. me@25 ‘expert’ of course, not ‘expect’

28. Apologies for missing the HALE in SOIL element at 1ac – was rushing to get the blog done as it was already late. My PowerBook wouldn’t play ball this morning, but all seems fine now.

29. Given that one definition of a city is a town with a cathedral, is “cathedral city” a tautology?

30. Tim C, yes only one definition. I reside in a city that’s sans cathedral.

31. Thanks for blog, loonapick(not to mention Picaroon)
    More than 10years since I was on UK soil so GK a tad rusty.
    ANT and DEC feature frequently in puzzles -and I guessed PENN amd TELLER
    Didnt know MEL & SUE
    But being a jazzer, I wondered about CANNONBALL and NAT (Adderly)
    Also wondered if ALTER EGO constituted a double act -or for that matter ELY SEE
    Great grid construction and enjoyable puzzle, as usual from the Pirate

32. Which one’s that GDU?

33. Sunny Coffs Harbour.

34. This UK solver hadn’t heard of some of those double acts, so they were of no help. I also failed on the cricketing arcana as usual, but I expect that. I did like COLLIE.

35. Condolences on your problems, loonapick – I’ve been there several times.

    A superb gridfill, with the double acts perfectly positioned – I was chuffed to get them all – and wonderful cluing throughout. Once again, too many ticks to list.

    Flea @16 – many thanks for the clip! I’ve more than once given the link to one of my other favourites – the Art Gallery one – where they had the same difficulty and Dud splattered his sandwich.

    It might be worth mentioning that the Pope in 9ac is Alexander, poet of the Augustan period: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/alexander-pope

    Many thanks to Picaroon and loonapick, particularly for parsing SANTOS.

36. Thanks loonapick as I couldn’t parse SANTOS at all, but luckily knew the football club. As others said, explicitly stating the presence of the duos was a big help as I doubt if I would have got eg MOORED today otherwise. I liked ALTER EGO for neat construction+ surface with AND THE LIKE for the misdirection allowed for by enumeration and use of “lithe”. Nice to see the BIG ISSUE which also has a cryptic crossword, at least it did not long ago. This certainly provoked a couple of Chuckles so there’s an eighth duo, possibly even less well known to others on here – thanks Picaroon!

37. That’s a country town GDU @33 🙂

38. At least half of the doubles in the theme I’d not heard of — some are rather unknown in the Antipodes. But it didn’t matter. Proof that a good puzzle still works without knowledge of the theme. Well done, Picaróon.

39. With you Michelle@24. An insensitive clue, 19d you meant to say?
    AUGUSTAN Adjectival, like Pope Augustus.

40. Tim C @ 37, you should have been here many moons ago when we were officially proclaimed a city. Within 24 hours all the street signs (eg “Town centre”) had been replaced!

41. Correction. Like Pope Alexander, as Eileen said @35.

42. This was a lot of fun. I found I was solving the LHS most easily than the right so the theme was a genuine help. I did get a bit stuck once I had Mel as I was convinced her partner was Kim! Thanks to Picaroon and loonapick.

43. Clever clever Picaroon, and thanks to loonapick for the unravelling, as there were some unfamiliar (to me) “DOUBLE ACTS” and several tricksy clues. But lots of fun along the way. Always grateful for the appearance of the blog though as it clarifies and amplifies the experience.

44. Once I’d realised that of course 1ac couldn’t be Snake OIL, but with the HALE in place a much more appropriate solution, and with SPACES quickly in next, for almost the very first time I spotted early on that there must be a theme in play. This made the across clues very accessible except for the ones that revealed PENN and TELLER, which I didn’t know. Having Adaptors instead of ADAPTERS in at 13d held me up discovering MEL and SUE, my final pair. Had Ardent instead of URGENT for a while too. Didn’t I read yesterday that the RETINA of the human eye is going to play an important part in medical research re spotting signs of early illness?

45. Augustan – it’s a period of English literature, Georgian, when Alexander Pope was active. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augustan_literature
    Great crossword. Cheers, Camilla

46. Nice one Picaroon.
    CELERIAC has ERIC
    ENSURE has ERN – “All the right letters – but not necessarily in the right order” – reverse order in fact.

47. SHALE OIL FOI and favourite. Don’t know if it’s more familiar to me as it’s plentiful in the area of Queensland, Aust, where I grew up. Maybe that was the only day I paid attention to my science teacher. But I didn’t do cryptics then, and was very happy to solve and parse it first up.

48. Thought that was brilliant! The theme actually helped force. Hadn’t heard of Eure, but had heard of Santos, the club for which Pele played.
    Thanks to Picaroon and Loonapick

49. FrankieG @46. Nice one!

50. Please, in 26A, how does CLOSED equal TO?

51. Robbo @50
    The door is closed/to. Northern expression, I think.

52. Midlands, too – you just beat me, muffin.
    Robbo – this quite often appears in crosswords – worth filing away.

53. Ribbon @50. Everyone always asks that.

    My Yorkshire Granny would always ask us to put the door to and so we did what we were told and closed it

54. Eileen’s second paragraph says what I thought

    Thanks to her, Picaroon and Loonapick

55. Crispy @48, the French Departments crop up a fair bit in crosswordland, but I always find myself reverse engineering which department is being referred to given that there are 94 of them. Here is a useful resource which explains them.

56. For reasons of completeness – Gareth HALE & Norman PACE
    PENN Jillette & Raymond Joseph TELLER – I didn’t know he had a forename, let alone two.
    ANThony McPartlin & DEClan Donnelly – they even appear on TV “in the right order”
    Here’s a clue: “Geordie entertainers getting transfer (6)”

57. Only know Pete and Dud and Stan and Ollie, but had no idea they were there. Not to fret. Thanks Michelle @24 for making explicit the abuse Tina suffered. I knew of it of course, but nonetheless thought the clue pretty neat this morning; chastened now. Pope had me going “now what was the poet’s forename”, but even with it Augustan was a shrug. Enjoyed it overall, thanks Pickers and Loona.

58. A superbly clever puzzle from Picaroon. Fortunately I got 18A early and guessed the theme, after which all fell into place smoothly.
    One very slight query re 6D: Why “athlete”? Why not just “One who’s paid…”?

59. FrankieG@46 🙂

60. Thanks for the blog, a nuclear theme, often indicated by this setter. COLLIE was a clever clue, and CANNONBALL a neat construction. People who have not heard of MEL and SUE can thank their lucky stars. QUINTAIN is a nice new word to learn , obscure to me but the clue was fair with letters in place.

61. [ AlanC topping the charts once again , it is now 29-20 , weekend away meant I missed Azed and Cyclops. Going to show off my football knowledge, SANTOS is famous due to Pele. ]

62. AND THE LIKE & RETINA – They’re “in the right order”, too – Why aren’t they highlighted?
    I confess I thought of IKE & MAMIE first!

63. My first glance at the clue for 18a had me worried: tennis is very much not my thing, and having to find seven tennis-themers would be a hard ask. Thank goodness it turned out to be DOUBLE ACTS (all sufficiently well known in the UK, though possibly not elsewhere), and that was helpful, particularly with COOKROOM where I knew Dudley’s partner far better than the required cricketer. So helpful in fact that I forgot to parse SANTOS or CANNONBALL properly.

    Speaking of double-acts, here’s one making splendid use of 4d.

64. Quizzy Bob
    PROPOUND
    Pro in the following sense:
    ‘a person who plays a sport as a job rather than as a hobby’.

65. FrankieG@62
    RETINA
    Maybe because this clue explicitly mentions Ike and hints at Tina, this was outside the
    hidden 7 pairs. Possible?

66. A shout-out for a notable DOUBLE ACT which, as I went on, I discovered was not canonical. Starting in the NW corner, I was struck by the co-presence of Alastair COOK in 11a, and (Andrew) STRAUSS in the clue for 1d. And with (Olly) POPE around there as well, I thought we might be in for a puzzle of notable England cricketers. It was not to be …

67. Never heard of either Penn and Teller or Mel and Sue, so while the theme was clearly signalled and immediately reinforced by CANNONBALL and Ike’s partner, it didn’t help much. I knew QUINTAIN; I can’t be certain how, but suspect it was from T.H.White’s The Once and Future King, “that glorious picture of the Middle Ages as they never were, but as they should have been”.

68. 26A, Where does ‘to’ come from ?

69. FrankieG@46 and Spooner’s catflap@66
    More pairs. Great.

    In the cryptostan, ELY-SEE per se is a double act.

70. Phil @68 as mentioned above – Leave the door to (closed ) – as said by many mothers when I was young.

71. gladys @63 – thanks for that link! It always springs to my mind when I see that words in a crossword – which is surprisingly often.

72. Phil@68
    Please see 51-53

73. ‘word’, of course.

74. Roz @61: Impressed. Edson Arantes do Nascimento did indeed play for Santos, and also how I guessed the clue along with other solvers above.

75. High quality and clever setting to reveal all the DOUBLE ACTS.

    I liked the wordplay in SHALE OIL, the egg in URGENT, the COLLIE(ry), the low energy in MOORED, the ‘IN A MO’, and the surface for SPEEDILY. I grumbled a bit about the lack of an ‘old’ for leman, and the not very GK for Eure, although there is always the internet. I failed to parse SANTOS and SNATCH, both good clues in retrospect.

    Thanks Picaroon and loonapick.

76. FrankieG @62: I also thought of Ike & Mamie and that is maybe why Picaroon didn’t use ex-partner, as that would have made it too easy, and ruined the possible misdirection.

77. [AlanC I read his obituary , he died in the Albert Einstein Hospital, it said he played all his normal career for one smallish team Santos, which I thought was impressive. He only played in the USA when he had almost retired. ]

78. Frankie G @46 brilliant! Chapeau sir/ madam!

79. Robi @75

    LEMAN appeared very recently in Picaroon’s latest Prize puzzle, blogged just four days ago. I said then that we used to see it quite frequently. paddymelon gave us an interesting link to its etymology.

80. RIP TINA Turner. After her recent death I found a song on my ipod that I couldn’t remember ever having heard before.
    Tonight(1984) – A duet with David Bowie (ALTER EGO “Ziggy Stardust”) a reggae song with these spooky lyrics:
    ‘I will love her till I die | I will see her in the sky | Tonight’ – As usual Wikipedia explained everything…
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tonight_(Iggy_Pop_song)

81. Didn’t spot the theme at all, though I made a note about it — I thought there would be seven tennis performers.

    Never heard of Ziggy Stardust or most of the double acts.

    There was a young fellow named Hatch
    Who was fond of the music of Bach.
    He said, “It’s not fussy
    Like Brahms or Debussy —
    Come, let me play you a snatch.”

    Thanks, Picaroon and loonapick.

82. Like FrankieG@46 I spotted ERIC in CELERIAC but I never did find ERNIE, so kudos to Frankie. Never heard of MEL & SUE, which according to Roz@60 makes me one of the lucky ones. I had IKE & TINA as the seventh pair, but that spoiled the elegance of the correctly completed grid. (I totally agree with the criticism from michelle@24 about the insensitivity of the clue for 19d. It always makes me cringe when I see old clips of Tina performing with her abuser’s band – he always looks so sinister to me.)

    I liked ‘mine doesn’t reach railway’ for COLLIE(ry), but I thought ‘is poor delivery able’ was itself pretty poor – anyone can deliver a NO BALL at any time, there’s no CAN about it!

    Thanks to Picaroon and loonapick.

83. paul@78 – I’m a sir…
    “I’m not a madam – I’m a concierge!”
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2DzZFMPqi4
    Zero Mostel & Gene Wilder – another DOUBLE ACT – two straight men with Madelyn Cates as the comedian.

84. paul@78 – So this chapeau you’re going to give me – you’ll need to know my cap size…
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mViUtaV4foM&t=40s
    Bud Abbott & Lou Costello – ‘Jonah & The Whale’ – another pair of DOUBLE ACTS

85. Eileen @35 – thanks for explaining the Augustan poetry period and the connection to Alexander Pope.

    paddymelon@39 – yes, that is what I meant, that 19d is an insensitive clue.

    grantinfreo@57 and sheffield hatter@82 – thank you for responding to my comments @24 re the clue for 19d

86. Roz @70. Of course ! Silly me. Thanks.

87. Absolutely lived this. Spotted the double acts about half way through and that penny drop moment helped me to finish up.

88. Very clever and enjoyable. Anglos, however, are Germanic peoples who settled in Britain; the British (now called “Welsh” by some – were here for at least 100y before the Angl-Saxons) are not Anglos at all. English would have been closer than British.

89. This seems like not a bad time to quote (again) one of my favourite classic clues;
    ‘He wrote ‘The Ancient Mariner’ (6).’

90. Eileen @89
    Not keen on “The Ancient” in that one.

91. Thanks Eileen @79; even if we have seen it recently, all the major dictionaries give it as archaic, so I think it deserves an ‘old’ in a clue.

92. The word turns up quite freqently in “historical murder” stories, such as Candace Robb’s Owen Archer stories.

93. Thanks Picaroon. The theme, although stated, was lost on me because I had only heard of PENN & TELLER and STAN & OLLIE. I revealed SNATCH, used a word finder for PROPOUND, failed with URGENT, and guessed an unparsed SANTOS. In other words this was not smooth sailing but with the pirate at the helm there’s always joy to be found. I liked SHALE OIL, DECADENT, SPEEDILY, RETINA, and especially ALTER EGO. Thanks loonapick for the blog.

94. Phil@86 a usage closely followed by – Were you born in a barn ?

95. Copland@88 , very good point. I wish that somebody would tell our Home Secretary that we are all immigrants, we just arrived at different times.

96. You could argue that all humans are historically immigrants to where they are now, with the possible exception of parts of Africa’s Rift Valley…

97. …though I suppose it makes a difference if other humans had already settled there.

98. Ingenious stuff as always from Picaroon: great clues and a clever theme meticulously worked out. The DOUBLE ACTS were a mixture of the great and mediocre, but fitting them all in was an achievement.

    LEMAN was new to me, the French department needed google confirmation, and I couldn’t parse SANTOS, as neat as it is once explained.

    I share the concern which was eloquently expressed by Michelle@25 and others: Ike Turner left a great musical legacy but was an awful person, and his presence in the crossword was very jarring, though “a bit of a looker” is an amusing definition for RETINA.

    Speaking of double acts, thanks to Picaroon and Pickaloon for puzzle and blog.

99. muffin @96,97. The Indigenous Australians, Maori, Amerindians etc have been known to agree with the likes of UKIP, the National Front and the Tories: all recent immigrants should be sent back to their contries of origin.

100. Cook hasn’t been playing for a while. I thought of ROOTROOM. No one else see Stan Collie(more) ?
     Thanks both. Nice easy theme.

101. I still don’t understand the parsing of SANTOS. Why would TO mean closed?

     Thanks Picaroon and Eileen.

102. tim the toffee @100
     Cook is still playing county cricket, though I think he is retiring from that at the end of the season.
     bonnylass @101
     see 51-53

103. Tassie Tim if everyone is sent back the Rift Valley will get very crowded.
     It depends what you mean by recent. The Maori in NZ are very recent compared to most other occupations. For Native Americans it is very complicated , several waves at least , and the Clovis people probably displaced much earlier settlers.
     Even Indigenous Australians, by far the longest continuous settlement, probably displaced the Denisovans.
     The Neanderthal in Europe have a pretty good case as well, and as for Homo erectus in Asia ….

104. Stan Collymore, surely?

105. To pick up late in the day on FrankieG’s brilliant comment @46: a friend has pointed out to me that CELERIAC is an anagram of ALEC and ERIC, the names of the Bedser twins who played for the great Surrey sides of the 1950s. Another memorable double act.

106. 1a – I had CRUDE OIL, so everything else was scuppered.

     1d – I was looking for an element in the periodic table, so had CARBON.

     I could go on, but I will not.

107. @Bonnylass – read the comments above. It’s used in the context of a door. ‘Pull the door to’ means ‘close the door’. It’s common enough where I grew up (North Midlands) but maybe not as common elsewhere.

108. Eileen @89 Would that be SEAMAN (Owen Seaman, the former editor of punch) or VIKING (Viking Dahl, a Swedish composer and author)?

109. LTL@108. You need to read the clue @89 in the context of Eileen’s earlier comment @35.

110. Long Time Lurker @108 , I find that eating spinach improves my ability to solve clues.

111. If all else fails, you can find the answer here:
     https://www.fifteensquared.net/2017/03/14/guardian-cryptic-27144-by-crucible/

112. “Never knowingly undersolved” 🙂

113. Eileen @111: good to see this blog was feisty before I started to contribute. What a superb clue (and the rest).

114. Misspell YNAMORATA

115. …and his INAMORATA will appear

116. @110@111 Got it now thanks – a much better answer than my weird suggestions! ?

117. Not sure if anyone else noticed but IKE and TINA can also be seen in 13d and 19d

118. SirFrankieG@83&84 many thanks for the entertaining diversions!

119. I’m running a day behind but just wanted to add my voice to the chorus of approval – super puzzle!

120. paul@118
     https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knight_Frank
     …is an estate agent around these parts. (Rutley was dropped in 1996). I always take it as an imperative, but nobody has knighted me till now.
     It’ll have to be an honorary title, as I’m !rish – like SIrBobbyG & SirTerryW…
     https://www.irishtimes.com/life-style/people/2023/05/09/bob-geldof-said-yes-annie-macmanus-said-no-barry-mcguigan-said-both-so-what-was-the-question
     …tells me Seán O’Casey, the playwright, refused a CBE in 1963 – a 60-year anniversary.

121. …I’d be in better company with refuseniks like David Bowie (ALTER EGO “Ziggy Stardust”) and other Heroes of mine here…
     https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_who_have_declined_a_British_honour
     …including T. E. Lawrence of Arabia and the man who played him – Peter O’Toole.

122. 225@117 🙂

123. Thanks, Bingham at 07. Im afraid I hadn’t picked it up in previous comments.

124. Bingy! Damn autocorrect!

125. A day late but had to post to say how much we loved this! And our fastest ever Picaroon solve! We must be slowly improving. Mind you, we still haven’t finished last Thursday’s!!

126. I’d only heard of 4 of the 7 double acts, and I didn’t spot any of them in the grid. I got 18ac fairly early, and by the end had completely forgotten to look out for them. I had to cheat in a couple of places — I didn’t know the Brazilian city SANTOS, and I couldn’t spot 1dn (SNATCH), although in hindsight I don’t know why.

     [I might not have known about Ant and Dec were it not for the scene in Love Actually where Bill Nighy addresses one of them as “Ant or Dec.” (I know that that movie is a bit marmitey. Personally, I wish there were a whole film just about Bill Nighy’s character.)]

127. Ted if you are going to mention horrors such as that film then you should really post a warning first.
     ” This post contains material that will strike fear into the hearts of anyone with taste . “

128. GeorgeK @4 – Parrot

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