This wonderfully exuberant poster illustration, with its showgirls, check-suited comedian, balloons, party poppers, carnival masks and bottle of champagne, appears to be enticing audiences to the best New Year's Eve party in June. In fact, it advertised the twice-nightly mammoth revue This Year of Carnival, starring Lalla Dodd and George Doonan, at the Empress Theatre Brixton, for the week of 10th June 1935. It opened with the all-cast number Gay Carnival, closed with Spanish Fiesta, and featured sketches, songs, music, and dance numbers by The Gordon Ray Girls - just the kind of show in which the theatre, the impresario Bernard Montague and its producer Lew Marks specialised.

Originally built in 1898 as The Empress Theatre of Varieties, the theatre was enlarged and rebuilt in Art Deco style in 1931 to seat over 2,000 when it was acquired by Variety Theatres Consolidated. The advertisement on the poster of Sunday Talkies however, foreshadowed the ultimate fate of the theatre and large Variety shows, however glamorous. The Empress was converted into a cinema in the mid 1950s, and demolished in 1962.