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.Television viewing was· 3 3 ·SB_C02.qxd 03/12/2004 15:25 Page 34SI XTI ES BRITAINby far the most popular of these, accounting for 23 per cent of male andfemale leisure time by 1969.Predictably the figure was highest amongmarried middle-aged men with children and lowest for young singleadults, but even with these variations, watching television was popularfor all social groups (Central Statistical Office 1970: 78).As AnthonySampson remarked:  in the last twenty years the small screen has becomethe central factor in most people s spare time.British families onaverage watch television for eighteen hours a week  far more than anyother European country, and twice as much as Belgium, Italy or Sweden(1971: 442).The next most popular leisure activity for males wasgardening, particularly in new towns, accounting for 12 per cent ofleisure time.Almost 80 per cent of British households had a garden(only Luxembourg among European nations had a higher proportion),and there was a sizeable market for lawn mowers, plants, sheds and allthe other paraphernalia of the keen amateur gardener.Females, mean-while, devoted 17 per cent of their free time to crafts and hobbies, usuallyknitting (Sampson 1971: 426 7).The pull of the world beyond thehome and garden was only experienced forcefully, it seems, by theunder-25s.Contradicting the stereotype of sixties youth, however, byno means all of them sought their escape in coffee bars, dance halls orbookshop-basement poetry readings.Instead, physical recreation tookup about 25 per cent of the leisure time of young males and females atthe end of the sixties (Central Statistical Office 1970: 78).In his surveyupdated in 1971, The New Anatomy of Britain, Anthony Sampson couldbarely conceal his disapproval of the British taste for mundane leisurepursuits:Britain is the greatest nation in Europe for handymen and potterers-about; it has the highest proportion of people who do their ownwallpapering, painting, drilling, and plumbing, and the highestproportion who buy second-hand cars.A broad picture unfolds of theBritish living a withdrawn and inarticulate life, rather like HaroldPinter s people, mowing lawns and painting walls, pampering pets,listening to music, knitting and watching television.If one wanteda symbol of what distinguishes contemporary British life from thatof other countries it might well be a potting shed.(Sampson 1971: 427)· 3 4 ·SB_C02.qxd 03/12/2004 15:25 Page 352 u Consumerism, youth and sixties pop musicYouth cultures, moral panics and pop musicOlder Britons might have spent their surplus income on new televisionsets and do-it-yourself, but the nation s youth had different spending pat-terns.As a social group they were to become the arch consumers of thesixties, spending some £800 million on themselves each year in the earlypart of the decade.Mark Abrams research probably exaggerated thereach of affluence among young Britons at the time (1959 and 1961), buttheir growing economic power was undeniable and it was to become oneof the decade s key cultural determinants.Not only were young peoplemore wealthy, there were simply more of them.The post-war baby boomof 1945 8 meant that a bulge of teenagers appeared in the population inthe late fifties.And it was as good a time as any to be young.Elvis Presleywas the symbol of a newly energised (and sexualised) youth culture thatwas blowing in from the United States, and, as we have seen, the endingof conscription in November 1960 meant that young men no longer hadto endure two years of National Service and having their hair cut off.Inthe short term, the main beneficiaries of this favourable climate for youthwere working-class teenagers.Unlike their middle-class counterparts,who were more likely to stay in education until they were 21, working-class youths tended to leave school at 15 and take advantage of the highdemand for unskilled and semi-skilled labour.Few of these teenagershad significant fixed financial commitments like a mortgage, nor did theybuy  white goods like fridges, cookers or washing machines.Insteadthey spent their disposable income on leisure, luxury items and culturalmarkers, a point that the culture industries were quick to grasp.Maga-zine publishing, fashion, film and cosmetics responded to the growingyouth market with new products and integrated marketing strategies.Advertisers fought to attract young consumers and popular papers suchas the Daily Mirror actively sought a more youthful readership throughtheir coverage of pop, fashion and teen issues.The most importantfield of all, in terms of how it allowed young people to shape their ownenvironment, was pop music.Teenagers bought cheap, portable, plasticDansette record players for their bedrooms, along with the records to playand posters of the groups and singers.In effect they turned their part ofthe family home into shrines that celebrated their favourite pop stars(Rees 1986: 36).· 3 5 ·SB_C02.qxd 03/12/2004 15:25 Page 36SI XTI ES BRITAINThis distinctive leisure market for youth was hardly a new phe-nomenon: something resembling one had begun to take shape in Britainas far back as the mid-nineteenth century (Osgerby 1997: 6).But whatwas novel in the post-war period was the amount of attention focused onyoung people as a specific social category, whether in the form of theteenager (usually working-class) in the fifties, or youth (which was seento transcend class and other cultural attachments) in the sixties.Thisattention was partly the result of public anxiety about increased juveniledelinquency in the fifties and sixties, continuing an upwards trend inyouth petty crime that had been evident since the war years (Muncie1984: 59).At the centre of rising juvenile crime rates were working-classmale youths who drifted in and out of delinquent behaviour.Organisedmobs of delinquent youth were rare, and although there were severalstyle tribes among the nation s young there was as yet no evidence that aBritish gang culture had evolved.The crimes committed by these juven-iles were relatively minor.The main offence was petty theft which,according to studies such as Mays in Liverpool (1954) and Wilmott s inBethnal Green (1966), had become accepted as a cultural norm amongyoung people (Muncie 1984: 62 4).The other reason for society s obsession with youth was youngpeople s growing predilection for forming highly visible subculturalgroups.Youth, it appeared, had developed a rebellious autonomy by theearly sixties which it expressed through leisure pursuits.The result wasa generalised moral panic about impending social breakdown.For a time,the  youth question became a metaphor for wider post-war social changeand an index of social anxiety (Hall et al: 1978: 234).By no means allyouths, it should be emphasised, had a close affiliation with subculturesor saw themselves as rebellious.In fact, surveys suggested that youngpeople in this period were usually quite conservative in their attitudesto sex, morality and social values.Most of them believed that they hadan investment in the social system as it stood and responded to it eitherdeferentially or aspirationally (Eppels and Eppels 1960; Schofield 1965;Veness 1962; Brake 1985: 60, 72) [ Pobierz caÅ‚ość w formacie PDF ]