Help with stupidly hard quiz

[ApocalypseNowt]

Each year my work does a stupidly hard quiz. There are many stages and we get a month to try and do it.

Anyone help me with this stage? there are 21 pictures of celebrities and I've managed to work out who they all are but now I'm stuck on working out the password to the next stage. Each picture has a coloured Roman numeral in it so I assume I have to use those to work out the answer...

Middle Earth?

I got all excited there but middle earth and end or are the same.

@AccidentallyOnPurpose

So Middle Earth would be 'r' (middle of Earth?)

Tolkien's Land is the whole clue?

oh, bum!🤦🏻‍♀️

It's an 8-letter answer and there are eight clues, so I'd expect one from each I think.

@rosegoldwatcher

Ah - sweet or chick is pea!

So the solutions reading from top to bottom could be
Tropes
o
T
r
s
d
p
e

Those individual letters spell Tropes but there is an unused 'd'

I was just about to say sweet or chick are terms of endearment.

There seems to be a theme of the answers having end or last or all in them.

There seems to be a theme of the answers having end or last or all in them.

Not middle earth sadly.

Do we definitely know the solution is eight letters?

@PurpleDaisies

Yeah - the clue name says 'Literal (8)'.

What is a trope of literal?

How did I miss the title?!

Why is To the end the answer to the Parklife question?

The last released single is This Is a Low I think. 3rd of Jan 1995 , compared to 30th of May 1994.

Dunno if it makes a difference or if I'm doing it all wrong.

Thank you.

I looked on Wikipedia (to my shame) and there are several literal tropes with eight letters.
Metonymy
Metaphor
Allegory
Oxymoron

Allegory matches the format of the answers but I can’t for the life of me see why.

a trope is a literal metaphor (according to Mrs Google.)

Metaphor - 8 letters?

Am trying to make the answer chestnut

Carbon
H
E from summer wine
S from Mohicans
T
N
U
T

Not sure it's working

If you go with

C (carbon)
Y (end of the century)
T (Togo)
R (middle earth)
S (last of the mohicans)
D (end of the road)
P (pea)
E (last of the summer wine)

You get an anagram of DECRYPTS

Which is a word completely unrelated to literal 🤔

@AccidentallyOnPurpose

Why is To the end the answer to the Parklife question?

The last released single is This Is a Low I think. 3rd of Jan 1995 , compared to 30th of May 1994.

Dunno if it makes a difference or if I'm doing it all wrong.

"End of the Century" is listed as the last single from Park Life. "This Is a Low" was a promotional single.

But you've had to DECRYPT(S) the puzzle?

@pussycatinboots

But you've had to DECRYPT(S) the puzzle?

Yes... that was the only link I could think of.

What do we have to do with the footy one.

To get the answer you'd have to decrypt it (literally) ...?

The missing letter Y!

Decrypts looks like the answer. I’d have preferred a better link to literal though.

Decrypts! - Well done SoupDragon

I'm not sure where I am going with this but the first answers sound like:

C (See?) To the end to go endor (enter)...

@orangenasturtium

I'm not sure where I am going with this but the first answers sound like:

C (See?) To the end to go endor (enter)...

I think you need to read the last page!