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.’ (J. Lee Thompson) In the 1950s, ‘family entertainment’ was still the cinema’s core business, and it was inevitable that a promising new director would be pressed into the service of the mass market for insubstantial comedy and undemanding music. After all, even ‘the master of suspense’, Alfred Hitchcock, had been obliged to interrupt his thrillers with a musical – Waltzes From
The relationship between politics and popular culture is often seen to take one of two forms. Either popular culture is seen to disengage or passify citizens; or it is portrayed as a source of political knowledge and expression. Such claims are rarely subjected to detailed scrutiny. From Entertainment to Citizenship is an attempt to make up this deficit by examining carefully how popular culture’s politics is understood and used. Focusing on the lives and experiences of 17-18 year olds in the UK, it explores the extent to which these young people use popular culture to think about and engage with politics. The book compares the political role of different forms of popular culture (video games, music and entertainment television), and it considers different dimensions of the relationship. It looks at the phenomenon of the ‘celebrity politician’, at popular culture as a source of knowledge about the ‘real world’ and at the group identities forged around the pleasures of music, TV and video games. We conclude that popular culture is an important source of knowledge about the world, that it helps forge identities and the interests associated with them, and it gives form to the evaluations of power and its exercise. Rarely, though, does this interplay of politics and popular culture happen in neat or straightforward ways.
14 ‘Militant entertainment’? ‘Crisis music’ and political ephemera in the emergent ‘structure of feeling’, 1976–83 Herbert Pimlott Images of riots, demonstrations and strikes from across the world in the aftermath of the 2008–09 global economic ‘meltdown’ and subsequent factory closures, bankruptcies and job losses, provoke a strong sense of déjà vu. Some thirty-odd years ago, during the first major economic downturn of the post-war era, job prospects dimmed and social unrest grew as a generation of workingclass school leavers, facing the worst unemployment
12 The Nevinsons’ Hampstead – and central London entertainments Twenty-nine-year-old Virginia Stephen, soon to marry Leonard Woolf, lived in Bloomsbury. As Virginia Woolf, her Night and Day brilliantly evokes the excitement of central London’s busy street-life, its anonymous passers-by often unaware of each other. Her heroine Katherine Hilbery, living in the family’s spacious Chelsea home, had sufficient time on her hands: to walk all the way from Bond Street to the Temple if she wished it. The flow of faces streaming on either side of her had hypnotized
steadily came under the ownership of burgeoning big business concerns. According to Bakker the estimated number of persons employed in the entertainment industry in 1938 was 106,855. 2 Of these new electronic media forms the cinema was the most mature and extensive, employing some 37.9 per cent of the total number of people in the entertainment industry. 3 By 1930, particularly with the coming of the ‘talkies’ in 1929, the exhibition industry was both
tremendous advances in mass entertainment from the singing saloons in the 1860s to the Picture Palaces of the 1930s. Undoubtedly, empire was a genre of entertainment that successfully transferred from the stage to the silver screen, ensuring that filmgoers across the country would have been conversant with the epic imperial films of the 1930s. However, one cannot assume that through reading music hall lyrics or a film script we
Introduction If the vast majority of France’s inhabitants below retirement age spend a good deal of their time at work, in places of education and training, or travelling to and from them, most, of course, engage in leisure pursuits of various types. For example, the French are the most frequent cinema-goers in Europe: in 2015, 29% went four or more times in the year, as compared to 20% of the UK population ( Coulangeon, 2016 ). 1 In France, however, many such activities are not just seen as hedonistic ‘entertainment’ which is purely a private matter. For a
6 ‘THE PUBLIC MUST BE WOOED AND ENTICED WITH ENTERTAINMENT AND BUNS’: HEALTHCARE PROFESSIONALS AND THE BBC ’ Anti-stigma campaigners frequently suggest that irresponsible broadcasting and newspaper coverage fuels stereotypes of the dangerous madman – a perception which Chapter 4 sought to nuance. This chapter develops these ideas, examining the role played by healthcare professionals in the production of BBC programming on mental health issues in the mid-twentieth century. The BBC’s ethos of public service broadcasting enabled healthcare workers to secure a
In the early years of the cinema and into the 1910s and 1920s, it was less the film than cinema-going itself that attracted urban publics. In this era, people were enthusiastic about technology and the achievements of modernity; while at the same time they felt anxious about the rapid and radical changes in their social and economic life. In Germany, this contradictory experience was especially harsh and perceptible in the urban metropolis of Berlin. The article demonstrates how within city life, Berlin cinemas – offering the excitement of innovation as well as optimal distraction and entertainment – provided an urban space where, by cinema-going, appeal and uncertainty could be positively reconciled.