Following the relative stability of the early and mid-1950s, the later years of the decade saw the British film industry experience another one of its frequent periods of crisis. This time the problem revolved around one issue: the severe – and rapid – erosion of the cinema audience. Although cinema attendances had been declining year on year since the high point of 1946, the rate of decline had been shallow, and until 1956, when ticket sales totalled 1,102,000, annual admissions had remained above the levels of the 1930s, when cinema-going had been ‘the essential social habit of the age’. However, over the next four years the decline became precipitous: admissions fell to 915 million in 1957, 754 million in 1958, 581 million in 1959 and 501 million in 1960. Within the space of four years, therefore, half the cinema-going audience in Britain had disappeared. It should be borne in mind that the film industry experienced this decline as a series of year-on- year shocks rather than necessarily seeing it as the pattern that becomes evident in hindsight. In 1956, for example, Kine editor William G. Altria reported that the 1,181,000 admissions for the previous year had been the lowest since 1940: ‘Once again the statistics … underlie the sharply deteriorating position of the industry – a state of affairs that is largely the outcome of unreasonable taxation, and which is aggravated by the state-aided competition of television which does not bear similar imposts.’ The following year it was reported that admissions were at their lowest since 1941, and the next year they were the ‘lowest on record’.