Crossword Help Forum
Forum Rules

Demeter, all the down answers have a letter in common which has to be moved.

Thanks dryden.

If you can solve 18a you'll see which letter and where it goes. 18a has a horribly elusive and indirect definition. Think of the sort of thing that might be beaten.

Excuse my absence, Demeter - I'll be out again this afternoon too. Down answers are entered normally except for one letter which gets dropped to the end.
18 was a word I'd not encountered before, only got it because I'd been able to fill 4 of the checked cells.
If you've got the theme (through the moved letters from across clues), identified the production and secret sign, then solving becomes progressively easier. No twists in the tail. The 'Contest' is a subtitle of the production, supplied by the wiki site.

Strange to have such a heavyweight puzzle for a theme so flyweight.

Filled grid, done the unravelling to find the contest, just can't see 31D....

I cannot be certain, but assuming the answer is NO-MAN I think the wordplay is N (and) O (of) MAN (ie worker). This means SLEIGHT is removed.
What I haven't worked out is what it becomes in its partner,11d, which seems to work as it is.

I think it must be SLY, relegating 'Shifty' to a second anagram indicator, one for the answer and one for the removed letters

To convert C to K at the top of the column, the letter added must be H, so HEIGHT ? I didn't make it work in 11, either. SLY and L dropping from SOCIALLY (inept) answers the clue.

Those who are struggling or diving up should be comforted by the fact that this is the most difficult Listener I've seen in years.

I have finished but have a couple of questions:

How does the wordplay to 20acr work? In particular 'live without low-sugar'?

What's up with the title?

Having gone back to the clue I came to the same conclusion as greengage. SLY and L in SOCIALLY are jumbled, not sequential, so there needs to be a jumbler for those letters. Shifty is the jumbler for SLY and L. The difference between the two words is Y on the one hand and EIGHT on the other. EIGHT gives you the number to add to C to get K.