Postwar

radio, lifeless newspaper photographs or brief, stylized appearances on formulaic cinema newsreels. Now, within the span of less than two decades, political leaders had to become television-friendly: capable of conveying authority and confidence while feigning egalitarian ease and warm familiarity to a mass audience—a performance for which most European politicians were much less well-prepared than their US counterparts. Many older politicians failed miserably when faced with television cameras. Younger, more adaptable aspirants stood to profit immensely. As the British Conservative politician Edward Heath was to remark in his memoirs, a propos the media success of his nemesis, the Labour Party leader Harold Wilson: television was ‘open to abuse by any charlatan who was capable of manipulating it properly. So it proved in the following decade.’

As a visual medium, television was a direct challenge to cinema. Not only did it offer alternative screen entertainment, but it could also bring feature films into people’s homes, obviating the need to go out to see anything but the latest releases. In the UK, cinemas lost 56 percent of their customers between 1946 and 1958. Numbers fell more slowly elsewhere in Europe, but sooner or later they fell everywhere. Cinema attendance held up longest in Mediterranean Europe—especially in Italy, where audience levels remained fairly constant until the mid-1970s. But then Italians not only went to see films on a regular (usually weekly) basis, they also made them: in mid-1950s Rome the film industry was the second largest employer after the construction trades, making not only classical films by famous auteurs, but also (and more profitably) a steady stream of forgettable movies starring beauty queens and evanescent starlets—‘le maggiorate fisiche’ (the ‘physically advantaged’).

Eventually, even the Italian film industry, and Italian cinema attendance, languished. European film producers, lacking the resources of Hollywood, could not hope to compete with American films in scale or ‘production values’ and confined themselves increasingly to ‘ordinary life’ cinema, whether ‘new wave’, kitchen sink or domestic comedy. Cinema in Europe declined from a social activity to an art form. Whereas audiences in the 1940s and 1950s had automatically gone to see whatever happened to be showing at the local cinema, they now went only if they were attracted by a particular film. For random entertainment, to see whatever was ‘on’, they turned instead to television.

Despite being a ‘young’ medium, television had a particular attraction for older audiences, especially in its early, state-regulated, culturally cautious years. Where once they would have listened to the radio, or else gone out to the cinema, mature men and women stayed at home and watched television instead. Commercial sport, especially traditional spectator sports like soccer or dog racing, suffered: firstly because their audience now had an alternative source of entertainment, more convenient and comfortable; and secondly because sport soon began to be televised, usually at the weekends. Only young people went out in large numbers. And their tastes in entertainment were starting to change.

By the end of the 1950s, the European economy was beginning to feel the full commercial impact of the baby boom. First there had been the explosion in products for babies, toddlers and children: baby carriages, cribs, diapers, baby food, children’s clothing, sporting equipment, books, games and toys. Then came a vast expansion in schools and education services, bringing in its wake a new market for school uniforms, desks, schoolbooks, school equipment and an ever-widening range of educational products (including teachers). But the buyers for all these goods and services had been adults: parents, relatives, school administrators and central governments. Around 1957, for the first time in European history, young people started buying things themselves.

Until this time, young people had not even existed as a distinct group of consumers. Indeed, ‘young people’ had not existed at all. In traditional families and communities, children remained children until they left school and went to work, at which point they were young adults. The new, intermediate category of ‘teenager’, in which a generation was defined not by its status but by its age—neither child nor adult—had no precedent. And the notion that such persons—teenagers—might represent a distinct group of consumers would have been quite unthinkable a few years before. For most people the family had always been a unit of production, not consumption. To the extent that any young person within the family had independent cash earnings, these were part of the family income and used to help defray collective expenses.

But with real wages rising rapidly, most families could subsist—and better—on the income of the primary wage-earner; all the more so if both parents were employed. A son or daughter who had left school at fourteen (the typical school-leaving age for most young west Europeans in these years), who was living at home, and who had a steady or just a part-time job, was no longer automatically expected to hand over all his or her earnings every Friday. In France, by 1965, 62 percent of all 16- to 24-year-olds still living with their parents were retaining all their own earnings to spend as they wished.

The most immediately obvious symptom of this new adolescent spending power was sartorial. Well before the baby-boom generation itself discovered miniskirts and long hair, its immediate predecessor—the generation born during the war rather than just after it—asserted its presence and its appearance in the gang cults of the late Fifties. Dressed in dark, skin-hugging outfits—sometimes leather, sometimes suede, always sharply cut and vaguely threatening—the blouson noirs (France), Halbstarker (Germany and Austria) or skinknuttar (Sweden), like the teddy boys of London, affected a cynical, indifferent demeanour, something between Marlon Brando (in The Wild One) and James Dean (Rebel Without a Cause). But despite occasional bursts of violence— most seriously in Britain, where gangs of leather-clad youths attacked Caribbean immigrants—the chief threat that these young people and their clothes posed was to their elders’ sense of propriety. They looked different.

Age-specific clothing was important, as a statement of independence and even revolt. It was also new—in the past, young adults had had little option but to wear the same clothes as their fathers and mothers. But it was not, economically speaking, the most important change wrought by teenage spending habits: young people were spending a lot of money on clothes, but even more—far more—on music. The association of ‘teenager’ and ‘pop music’ that became so automatic by the early Sixties had a commercial as well as a cultural basis. In Europe as in America, when the family budget could dispense with a teenager’s contribution, the first thing the liberated adolescent did was to go out and buy a gramophone record.

The long-playing record was invented in 1948. The first 45rpm ‘single’, with one song on each side, was marketed by RCA the following year. Sales in Europe did not take off as fast as in America—where turnover from record sales rose from $277 million in 1955 to $600 million four years later. But they rose nonetheless. In Britain, where young people were initially more exposed to American popular music than their continental contemporaries, observers dated the pop music explosion from the showing of the 1956 film Rock Around the Clock, starring Bill Haley and the Comets and the Platters. The film itself was mediocre even by the undemanding standards of rock music movie vehicles; but its eponymous title song (performed by Haley) galvanized a generation of British teenagers.

Working-class teenagers for whom jazz had never held much appeal were immediately attracted to the American (and in its wake, British) revolution in popular music: driving, tuneful, accessible, sexy and, above all, their own.[138] But there was nothing very angry about it, much less violent, and even the sex was kept firmly under wraps by record company producers, marketing managers and radio broadcasting executives. This is because the initial pop music revolution was a Fifties phenomenon: it did not accompany the cultural transformation of the Sixties but preceded it. As a consequence it was frequently the object of official criticism. Disapproving local council watch committees banned Rock Around the Clock—as they did Elvis Presley’s decidedly superior rock musical, Jailhouse Rock.

The city fathers of Swansea in Wales thought the British skiffle player Lonnie Donegan ‘unsuitable’. Tommy Steele, a moderately energetic British rock singer of the late Fifties, was not allowed to perform in Portsmouth on the Sabbath. Johnny Hallyday, a half-successful French attempt to clone US rockers of the Gene Vincent or Eddie Cochran mould, inspired outrage among a generation of French conservative intellectuals when his first record appeared in 1960. In retrospect, the horrified response of parents, teachers, clerics, pundits and politicians across Western Europe appears quaintly disproportionate. Within less than a decade Haley, Donegan, Steele, Hallyday and their like would seem hopelessly outdated, relics of an innocent prehistory.

European teenagers of the late fifties and early sixties did not aspire to change the world. They had grown up in security and a modest affluence. Most of them just wanted to look different, travel more, play pop music and buy stuff. In this they reflected the behavior and tastes of their favorite singers, and the disc-jockeys whose radio programs they listened to on their transistors. But all the same they were the thin end of a revolutionary wedge.