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History > Britain from 1914 to the present > Society, state, and economy > Mass culture

In terms of popular leisure, music hall declined in popularity in the second quarter of the 20th century, but it left its mark on much of British culture, not least on the motion picture, which hastened its demise, and on television, which followed its end. By 1914 there were 4,000 cinemas in Britain and about 400,000,000 admissions per year. By 1934 this had more than doubled, and admissions continued to rise steadily to reach a peak of 1.6 billion in 1946. This was a particularly popular form of entertainment, especially among the working class: the lower down the social scale one was, the more likely one was to visit the cinema. The suburban middle-class motion picture audience of the 1930s was important but remained a minority. It is difficult to exaggerate the dominance of the cinema as a form of entertainment. In 1950, out of over 1,500,000 admissions to forms of taxable entertainment (and this included horse racing and football matches), cinema made up more than 80 percent. Hollywood films dominated, though until World War II there was a thriving British film industry. This domination continued after the war, although British cinema asserted itself powerfully from time to time; for instance, in the Social Realism of the 1960s, notably in the work of director Lindsay Anderson, and later in the films of Ken Loach and Mike Leigh. Parallel to these artful dissections of British life were the less high-minded but extremely successful ‘‘Carry On'' comedies, which drew on the music hall tradition.

Reading matter continued to be produced within Britain, above all in the form of the newspaper. The British are inveterate newspaper readers, and there was mass consumption of a nationally based daily and Sunday newspaper press as early as the 1920s. This did much to create cultural uniformity, although, as with motion pictures, there were considerable differences of taste and preference regarding newspapers. However, after 1950 the emphasis on uniformity became more marked and was reinforced by the progressive concentration of ownership in the hands of a few proprietors. This circle of ownership became even smaller as time went on, so that at the beginning of the 21st century the empire of the most powerful of these media moguls, Rupert Murdoch, not only dominated much of the popular press and made considerable inroads into the so-called quality press in Britain but was also international in scope. Newspapers, however, were but one component of Murdoch's and similar empires. The revolution wrought by new information technologies put control of a wide variety of communication forms, most importantly television, in the hands of these powerful individuals. Their political influence swelled as politicians of all persuasions were compelled to accommodate their power and, in a form of spin, play their version of the political game.

The development of a national mass culture seen in the previous period, in which the distinction between “popular” and “high” culture, if still important, was to some extent bridged, was to continue into the 20th and 21st centuries. (Cultural homogeneity was also intensified by increasing social and lifestyle uniformity.) To a considerable extent, from the 1960s, all culture became popular culture, so that differences of gender, class, and ethnicity became if not merged then renegotiated in terms of a mass, “shared” culture. In this process, the older class differences were eroded, in line with other changes in class structure, particularly in the manual working class. At the same time, new differences and solidarities also emerged, particularly around age and levels of consumption.

Photograph:One of Britain's most influential punk rock groups, the Sex Pistols, performing in 1977.
One of Britain's most influential punk rock groups, the Sex Pistols, performing in 1977.
© Paul Slattery/Retna Ltd.

Popular music—or pop music, as it came to be called from the 1960s—became an important area in which identities were formed. Pop has modulated through many forms since the 1960s, from the punk of the late '70s and early '80s to hip-hop and the rave culture of the '90s, and distinct styles of life have accreted around these musical forms, not only for the youth. The development of a uniform popular culture, at least as expressed through popular music, was greatly beholden to similar developments in the United States, where social identities were explored and developed in terms of black popular music, not just by African Americans but also by young white Americans. Given the great importance of Afro-Caribbean immigration into Britain after 1945, and latterly south Asian immigration, the experience of ethnic minorities in Britain to some degree also paralleled that of the United States. Concerns about national identity, as well as personal and group identity, became more important as Britain became a multicultural society and as the growth of European integration and economic globalization increasingly called British—and English, Welsh, and Scottish—identity into question.

The liberalization of the 1960s appears to have been crucial for many of these changes, with shifting gender roles being only one part of a broader international agenda. The civil rights movement in Ireland, student protest, and the anti-Vietnam War and civil rights movements in the United States were all part of the assault on the still-strong vestiges of Victorianism in British society, as well as, more immediately, a reaction against the austerity of postwar Britain. Change in family life and sexual mores was represented in the 1960s by a range of legislative developments: the Abortion Act of 1967; the Sexual Offences Act of 1967, partially decriminalizing homosexual activity; the 1969 Divorce Reform Act; and the abolition of theatre censorship in 1968. (Moreover, debate concerning sexual mores continued in Britain throughout the 20th century and into the 21st, not least regarding the ongoing attempts to change the legal age of consent and the controversial Section 28 Amendment to the Local Government Act in 1988, which prohibited local authorities from promoting homosexuality.)

Change was also based on the relative economic affluence of the late 1950s and '60s. The disintegration of older values (including middle class values) was evident in the “rediscovery” of the working class, in which films, novels, plays, and academic works depicted working-class life with unparalleled realism and unparalleled sympathy (including the works of the Angry Young Men). The working class was therefore brought into the cultural mainstream. This was ironic at a time when working-class communities were in fact being broken apart by slum clearance and the relocation of populations away from the geographical locations of their traditional culture.

Changes in higher education, with the development of the polytechnics and the “new universities,” meant that, at least to some extent, higher education was thrown open to children from poorer homes. There was also the liberalization of educational methods in primary and secondary education, along with the emergence of comprehensive schooling, ending the old distinction between the secondary modern and the grammar schools. In practice, many of the old divisions continued and, indeed, increased. However, rather than being accompanied by increasing cultural divisions, the opposite was the case. There was a much more positive understanding of the “popular” than before. A more fluid, open, and commercial popular culture was signalled by the development in the 1950s of commercial television and, with it, the slow decline of the public broadcasting, public service ethic of the BBC. With the explosion of new channels of communication in the 2000s, particularly in television, there was a noted ‘‘dumbing down'' of all media, which was especially evident in the celebrity culture of the new century and not unique to the United Kingdom. The new television gorged on this, as well as on reality programming and on the enormously increased popularity of professional football. These brought all classes together in a new demotic culture, although at the same time differentiation according to income, taste, and education became increasingly possible because of the technologies of the new media.

The various lifestyles associated with different genres of popular music are one telling indication of the way that lifestyle can determine an individual's identity in modern society. This development reflects the withdrawal of the state from the direct intervention in social life that was so characteristic of the third quarter of the 20th century. The state's turn to the market as a model of government has been reproduced in terms of the market's direct role in the formation of cultural life, so that the relationship between public culture and consumer capitalism has been close, in many ways the one constantly trying to outguess the other. This game of one-upmanship, marked by ironic knowingness, has been labelled “postmodern.” However, this term has come to describe much of late 20th- and early 21st-century international culture and society, not only in Britain. It points to the growing understanding of the relative nature of truth, itself a reaction against the prevailing supposedly “modern” certainties of the 20th century (reason, freedom, humanity, and truth itself), which indeed have often had an appalling outcome. However, it was a sign of the times that these antifundamentalist currents, themselves critical of much of Western culture, emerged at much the same time as new fundamentalisms emerged in the forms of American neoconservatism and certain strains of radical Islam. The ferment of intellectual and cultural changes involved was inextricable from the massive changes under way in the transition to the novel forms of society made possible by new information technologies.


Patrick Joyce, Jr.
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