design seen today of the renowned theatre architect Charles J. Phipps, creating three galleries instead of two and making the front door face Hope Street instead of Cowcaddens Road. It continued to accommodate about 3,000 people. It is now the largest surviving example of Charles Phipp's theatre work in Britain. In the early 1880s a number of managers ran it until Baillie Michael Simons arranged for it to be made available to two actor managers, James Howard and Fred Wyndham, in 1888. They announced that in addition to plays, opera, musicals and summer revues it would be known above all as a pantomime house, their first being The Forty Thieves. The new company, Howard & Wyndham, went on to produce pantomimes across Britain for almost 80 years. Howard & Wyndham also presented from the 1930s onwards the famous Half Past Eight Shows which later became the record-breaking Five Past Eight Shows. They were not operators of music-halls nor presented variety, which was the forte of Moss Empires. In 1895 the company became Howard & Wyndham Ltd, quoted on Stock Exchanges, and growing to own and operate the largest group of quality theatres in Scotland and England, with the Royal as its flagship. In the same year a fire destroyed the auditorium again, but was rebuilt six months later under the attention of Charles Phipps with few visible changes. Howard & Wyndham Ltd soon added to their stock of theatres by building the Frank Matcham designed King’s Theatre across the city centre in 1904. In 1957, the theatre was sold to Scottish Television in a joint venture with Howard & Wyndham Ltd (who moved their own shows to their new flagship the Alhambra Theatre in Waterloo Street) for conversion of the Royal into a Scottish Television Theatre, studios and offices, becoming the main home for the commercial ITV network in central Scotland. Live performances in music, dance and comedy were transmitted across Scotland and networked to ITV areas south of the border. STV also transmitted concerts and operas from other venues and became the first and largest sponsors of Scottish Opera started by Sir Alexander Gibson in 1962 In 1974, Scottish Television moved to custom-built premises next door and offered the Theatre Royal to Scottish Opera who bought it with public support, converting it to become its home theatre and Scotland's first national opera house. A major rebuild and refurbishment ensued,