Technical Theatre Preservation GroupOn Tuesday the 9th of September TTPG will be presenting, along with the HSLC and the BECG at London Olympia. After three short presentations, Rob Halliday (Mr. Classic Gear) will chair a Q & A session from the audience.
Attendance at Plasa is free provided registration is done before September 5th. There is lots to see!
Ian Grey will be on the Classic Gear Live stand on the Tuesday afternoon along with lots of interesting items and people.
https://www.plasashow.com/programme
Marian is the Strand Electric system CD/TH100 that was installed at the new Nottingham Playhouse in 1963. She was eventually replaced by a Rank Strand memory system circa 1976 but rather than go to scrap, Marian was rescued by an Amateur Theatre called Nottingham Arts and reinstalled by a team of technicians and telephone engineers overseen by David Clarke. Marian was in use at the Arts until circa 1985 when an M24 was installed with Thyristor dimmers.
When hearing about the forthcoming restoration of Betty (Palace Cambridge Circus) by the HSLC, David contacted us advising he still had some documentation that would hopefully prove useful. He passed the folder to Mike Hall when the TTPG were completing the move of the EnLighten/Shane Guy/NTU collection from Rocket Scenery in Nottingham up to Scotland. The documents have all now been scanned and passed on to the HSLC. We are grateful to Jon at Theatrecrafts who was able to do an A0 size scan of the original surviving schematic which was rather worse for wear after more than sixty years of being a working document. It was scanned in both TIF and JPG formats but it is only practical to include the jpeg in WordPress due to file size limitations.
The TTPG is pleased to announce that we will be presenting a paper at the Plasa Seminar this September.
The provisional date/time is on Tuesday the 9th September from 10:30-11:15am and speakers are being finalised in advance of the formal announcement. The session will be chaired by Rob Halliday the “Classic Gear” column writer.
Plasa show admission is free if booked in advance, details at https://www.plasashow.com/programme
Today was our final visit to Rocket Storage to collect the balance of the Nottingham Trent University/EnLighten Initiative items that had to be rescued last September. We are grateful to Rocket for providing storage and assistance over the last 9 months in an environment more conducive to preservation than a domestic self-store. After loading the van up this morning Mike will be driving it north to Scotland for unloading in the TTPG store.
We are aware that Ian, Mike and Shane haven’t been photographed together until today!
(From Ian)
Our presentation went well this morning, the venue had a hiccup with their laptop (it had applied updates that munged it) but they quickly provided another one well before the doors opened. The only oversight was that I had forgotten to set the taskbar to auto-hide on the new laptop and only noticed when I had set Mike’s presentation going. Mike watched on from my tablet on the speaker’s table and was even able to have a couple of conversations with audience members he knew at the end.
Mike’s pre-recorded presentation is now up on Youtube at https://youtu.be/SB1UUzSRzzQ Ian and Shane were not recorded but we expect the slides to appear on Facebook BETA shortly.
Plasa Focus Leeds opens today and we will be presenting early doors.
If you are reading this after scanning one of our QR cards at the show then rest assured we will get our presentations up here once the dust has settled.
Leeds Armouries today and the Plasa Leeds get-in is well under way. Show laptop tweaked, sound equalised and video projector keystoned, ready to go tomorrow.
…until Plasa Focus Leeds 2025 and the launch of the TTPG.
…has arrived to have some to hand out at the talk on Tuesday at Plasa Leeds.
