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Thanks Kilgore.

I don't think I would have ever spotted that.

Thanks, Kilgore, for that help, and congratulations on getting it. I would never have spotted those words in a week of staring. I shan't be sending my solution in since I can hardly claim I solved it.
It's just about the unfairest Listener I can recall, and the least enjoyable of the year. It's not my idea of a good Listener and certainly not my idea of fun. Cockie put it beautifully earlier on with his comment on life ebbing away. It's very easy to set a puzzle where thematic elements are hidden as obscurely as this. I know from experience that this grid would have presented few, if any constructional problems (though the clues would have been tougher to write). I appreciate elegance in a puzzle and the encapsulation of the theme in a grid. There's nothing elegant about this. I don't mind being defeated by cleverness or ingenuity, but this is neither clever nor ingenious.

How is it 'unfair'? I solved it; kilgore solved it; I am sure we are not alone. The preamble was quite accurate. The grid fill was easy for a Listener. The appearance of ELTON was a real clue, not a red herring.

Was the endgame difficult? Yes
Was it tedious and frustrating? Almost certainly; it was for me...
But unfair? I don't think so

I think of this as being like a Magic Eye puzzle - one of those pictures you stare at and stare at and then suddenly the 3D image comes into focus.

The Listener is supposed to have the occasional puzzle that is maddeningly hard. Was this one of them? I'm not sure, but the fact that you needed help on this one does not mean it was unfair.

I don't know about 'unfair', there have been various recent Listener puzzles with ambiguous preambles, that haven't alluded to abbreviations, that have misled on editions of Chambers and ODQ. But this isn't one of those, at least. I do agree with Dryden that the 'wordsearch' ending has become trite (as paper folding did for some time a few years ago) but this was one of the better ones. But Elton John ? Radio 2 music for people who didn't live through the 70s...

Much belated thanks, Unclued, for "noni". It's not in my 2003 edition of Chambers, nor does it appear in the online Chambers word search engine so for a while I was trying to justify "nong" to myself as a sort of Australian "fruit" but I suppose our Antipodean cousins would object to their country being described as a "South Pacific island"!

I have the message but can't get anything meaningful from it. Incidentally I can't find Elton either. Is he really relevant?

Which message escuan? The one from counting characters?The one in the grid? Elton is at 26d going SW - he is "sort of" relevant for the title under the grid.

Escuan, it took me a little time to realise that the "other" clues are the ones beginning with a vowel other than "u".

I had identified all the "other clues" but could still make no sense out of the instruction. thanks for pointing out the whereabouts of Elton.

Buzzb, I didn't say it was unsolvable. Obviously it wasn't, but a crossword can be solvable yet still be unfair. How is it unfair? I think it's unfair to subject solvers to a frustratingly long and tedious search with precious little in the way of a clue as to what they might be searching for. To judge from this site and AB, those who solved it did so after hours of searching, one solver saying it took five times as long to find what to highlight as it did to fill the grid. ELTON didn't appear to connect with anything in the grid so could have been an accident of grid construction and easily overlooked, especially with the red herring of REVELATION in the title and MISSIVE centrally placed. At least when you look for a needle in a haystack you know what you are looking for. It's also arguably unfair to refer to words in the preamble, when what we have is isolated, scattered letters that form words.

The preamble starts, "To illustrate the theme..." The highlighting doesn't look much like a R....T to me. I might have been more impressed with the grid if it did.

Some might remember Asylag by Elgin, which only 15 or 16 solvers managed to solve, so far tougher than this one. I was not one of them, but I didn't think the puzzle or the endgame unfair when I saw the solution, because it had a thematic logic to it. What's the thematic logic for the presentation of 'words' here?