Quick crossword No 150

I didn't get the theme at all before I looked at the annotations, with the result that I had to brute-force a lot of the clues and didn't enjoy the puzzle as much as I could have. Is the term it relies on standard? It's not one that occurred to me.

Spoiler...

Haha I got exactly two-thirds of the way through without a clue what was going on then read your spoiler and it went from frustrating to genius in a split-second 😆 great idea, though it does need the spoiler I think, and wonder if there's a subtly-worded version of it that could be in the SI itself? The concept is the star, but also special mention to 9a in the cryptics 😁