For the slightly more adventurous there were also the newly opened resorts of Spain’s Mediterranean coast, where visitors could choose between bed-and-breakfast establishments,
The result was unprecedented and quite awful traffic jams that grew worse every year from the late 1950s. They followed predictable arteries: the A303 road south-west from London to Cornwall; the
Mass tourism, it has been well observed, may be environmentally insensitive but it has distinct re- distributive benefits. As prosperous northerners flocked to hitherto impoverished Mediterranean lands, jobs opened up for building workers, cooks, waiters, chambermaids, taxi-drivers, prostitutes, porters, airport maintenance crews and others. For the first time, unskilled young men and women in Greece, Yugoslavia, Italy and Spain could find low-paying, seasonal work at home instead of seeking it abroad. Rather than migrate to the expanding economies of the north, they now serviced those same economies in their own lands.
Foreign travel may not have broadened the mind: the more popular a foreign destination, the quicker it came to resemble—in all essential features save climate—the tourist’s point of origin. Indeed, the success of large-scale tourism in the 1960s and after depended upon making Brits, Germans, Dutch, French and other neophyte travelers feel as comfortable as possible, surrounded by fellow-countrymen and insulated from the exotic, the unfamiliar and the unexpected. But the mere fact of going somewhere distant on a regular (annual) basis, and the novel means of transport used to get there—private car, charter flight—offered millions of hitherto insular men and women (and especially their children) a window onto a far bigger world.
Until the 1960s, the chief source of information, opinion and entertainment available to the overwhelming majority of Europeans was the radio. It was from the radio that people got the news, and if there was a common national culture it was shaped far more by what people heard than from what they saw or read. In every European country at this time radio was regulated by the state (in France the national-broadcasting network closed down at midnight). Broadcasting stations, transmitters and wavelengths were licensed and typically owned by national governments: symptomatically, the few radio stations transmitting from outside national frontiers were usually situated on ships or islands and colloquially referred to as ‘pirates’.
Ownership of radios, already widespread before the war, was near universal by 1960: in that year there was one radio for every five people in the USSR, one for every four people in France, Austria and Switzerland, one for every three people in Scandinavia and East Germany. In effect, almost every family owned a radio.[136] Most domestic radio sets had evolved little from the large, unwieldy, valve-driven wireless units of the inter-war decades. There was usually one per family. It occupied a prime site in the parlor or kitchen and the family had perforce to listen to it while gathered in one place. Even car radios altered little in this respect—the family that traveled together, listened together, and parents chose the programs. Wireless radio was thus a naturally conservative medium, both in its content and in the social patterns that it encouraged and sustained.
Transistors would change all this. The transistor radio was still rare in 1958—in all of France, for example, there were just 260,000. But three years later, in 1961, the French owned two and a quarter million transistor radios. By 1968, when nine out of every ten people in France owned a radio, two thirds of those radios were portable models. Teenagers no longer needed to sit around with their families, listening to news and drama directed at the taste of adults and scheduled for ‘family listening hours’, usually following the evening meal. They now had their own programmes—
Battery-driven transistor radios were light and portable, and thus well adapted to an age of increasing mobility—their natural habitat was the tourist beach or public park. But radio was still an aural medium, and thus restricted in its capacity to adapt to what was an increasingly visual age. For older people radio remained a primary source of information, enlightenment and entertainment. In Communist states the radio set was also the only means of access, however inadequate, to uncensored news and opinion, from Radio Free Europe, the Voice of America and, above all, the BBC World Service. But young people everywhere now listened to radio above all for popular music. For everything else they turned increasingly to television.
Television service came slowly to Europe and in some places quite late. In Britain, regular transmitting began in the 1940s and many people watched Queen Elizabeth’s June 1953 coronation live on television. By 1958 more television licenses were issued than radio licenses: the country had ten million sets in domestic use even before the Sixties began. France, by contrast, boasted just 60,000 television sets in June 1953 (at a time when there were already 200,000 in West Germany and fifteen million in the USA); even in 1960 only one French family in eight owned a television, one-fifth the UK figure for a comparable population. In Italy the figures were smaller still.
In the course of the Sixties, however, television caught on almost everywhere—small black-and-white television sets had become an affordable and increasingly essential item of domestic furniture in even the most modest household. By 1970 there was on average one television set for every four people in western Europe— more in the UK, rather less in Ireland. In some countries at this time—France, the Netherlands, Ireland, Italy (Europe’s biggest manufacturer of television sets as well as fridges)—a family was more likely to own a television than a telephone, though by later standards they did not watch it very much: three quarters of Italian adults watched less than thirteen hours per week. Two East German households in three possessed a television (whereas less than half owned a fridge); Czechs, Hungarians and Estonians (who could watch Finnish television broadcasting from as early as 1954) were close behind.
The impact of television was complicated. Its subject matter was not, at first, especially innovative—state- owned television channels ensured that the political and moral content of programs for children and adults alike was strictly regulated. Commercial television began in Britain in 1955, but it did not come elsewhere until much later and in most European countries there was no question of allowing private television channels until well into the 1970s. Most television programming in the early decades of the medium was conventional, stuffy and more than a little patronizing—confirming rather than undermining traditional norms and values. In Italy Filiberto Guala, head of RAI (
There was very little choice—one or at best two channels in most places—and the service operated only for a few hours of the afternoon and evening. Nevertheless, television
Above all, television put national politics onto the domestic hearth. Until television, politics in Paris or Bonn, Rome or London were an elite affair, conducted by distant leaders known only from their disembodied voices on