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What an absolute stinker! Chock-full of deletions and obscurities, a heavy reliance on general knowledge, and a couple of dodgy definitions thrown in for good measure.

Please can anyone help with these two?

5a: Fifty maybe touching base in interval (8)
S?M?T?N?
Looks like SEMITONE (= interval, in music). I get that FIFTY could be SEMI-TON (half a hundred), but where does the final E come from?

48d: Film director hides old letter relating to Flower of Hades (7)
L?T?E?N
Looks like LETHEAN (= relating to the LETHE, the river of the Underworld). The film director is David LEAN, but can anyone explain the "old letter"?

Your parsing are correct. E is the base of the natural system of logarithms. And eth is an Old English letter

Thank you!

Agree.

In my view, the setter had poor grid awareness in that area, crossing Lethean with Porbeagle containing what i assume is a fairly obscure 'heard as' reference "caught unfortunate" as por and crossing that with a clue that contains rete as a network. Too much dictionary work and not much fun.

Is it just me or do others groan when they see flower for river? Twice in one crossword is just too silly.

It isn't just you, ASM - I'm no fan of it either (especially when used more than once in the same crossword). But my real bête noire is over-use of deletion-type clues, of which there were far too many on this occasion. This kind of clue is almost impossible to solve just from the wordplay; you need to guess the answer and then work backwards to try to figure out the parsing.

I agree totally with your other comments.

Out of interest why do you find deletion clues harder than addition clues?

Both require you to work out a piece of wordplay and then either add a letter or delete a letter to get to the entry

Because the clues usually take the format "Remove beginning or end of [word defined by X] to find [word defined by Y]". If X is a particularly broad definition (such as, for example, FISH) but the answer actually refers to a specific type of fish, there are endless possibilities for it. For an example of this, see this week's clue for 30d.

Ok thanks understood but I wondered why that was any different to a clue for say BROACH where the wordplay is black fish

Personally I guess I don’t find broad wordplay elements limited to just deletion clues

No, it isn't limited just to deletions. Another prime example is when the clue includes BOY or GIRL (or some variation thereof), and the answer turns out to be a boy's or girl's name.

There are three that still escape me:
23a. Religious adherent eats fish (5) I have H-S--
24d. See fashion designer cut short notices to audience (7)
I have --O-E-E
50a. Great old band in wings of theatre(7)
I have E-T-E-E