The world of British television off and on the screen, as it was sixty years ago.

Hammer Time

An international conference on theatre history which opened on 18 July is reported in The Times on 19 July 1955. The conference, at the British Academy in Burlington Gardens was organised by The Society for Theatre Research and it was pointedly noted that Mr Benn Levy, who presided over the morning session, was equipped with a gavel made from the wood of a London theatre which has recently been taken over as a television studio. “A reminder of the inroads of mechanised entertainment.”

Centrepiece of the evening’s entertainment is Christopher Fry’s A Phoenix Too Frequent, produced by Owen Reed and starring Noelle Middleton as Dynaneme, George Cole as Tegeus-Chromis and Jessie Evans as Doto. Peter Forster sets the scene in Radio Times:

Set in antiquity, it has a beautiful young widow named Dynamene mourning beside the underground tomb of her late husband; but try as she may, mourning does not really become Dynamene, and the intrusion of a handsome young man eventually reconciles her to the pleasurable hazards of life.

Elsewhere Mervyn Levy’s pupil for Why Not Paint? is Sarah Lawson, and Dorian Williams and Bill Allenby commentate on The Imperial Cup for International Horse Show.

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