Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (70 page)

Not everyone could afford St Tropez or Switzerland—though the French and Italian coasts and mountains were still inexpensive for travelers from Britain or Germany, exchanging sterling and Deutschmarks for the undervalued francs and lire of the day. But
domestic
seaside holidays, still much sought-after by British, Dutch and Germans in particular, were now truly cheap. Billy Butlin, a Canadian fairground worker who opened his first operation at Skegness in 1936, went on in the Fifties to make a fortune selling ‘cheap and cheerful’, all-in family vacations in holiday camps strategically set along the seashore of industrial England: ‘Walmart with overnight accommodations’ as one critic dismissed them in cynical retrospect. But Butlin’s was immensely popular in its day—and was the unacknowledged institutional ancestor of France’s Club Med, the collective recreational preference of a later, more cosmopolitan generation: even down to the
‘gentils moniteurs’
(or ‘Redcoats’, as Butlin called them).

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,
pensións
or modest seaside hotels block-booked by a new breed of package-tour operators. And all of these could now be reached by car. Dressed in summer leisure clothing (itself a new product—and evidence of the new affluence), millions of families would squeeze into their Fiats, Renaults, Volkswagens and Morrises—often on the same day, since official vacation dates tended to cluster around a block of weeks in August—and make their way to distant coasts, along narrow, inadequately serviced roads designed for an earlier age of travel.

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
Routes Nationales
6 and 7 from Paris to the Mediterranean coast; the
Route Nationale
9 from Paris to the Spanish border (from a few thousand tourists in 1955, French visitors to Spain numbered three million by 1962, seven million two years later—in Franco’s Spain even the French franc went a long way, especially after the Gaullist revaluation).
¹³¹
German tourists followed the medieval trade route south, pouring through the Austrian Tyrol and over the Brenner Pass into Italy in ever increasing numbers. Many continued on into Yugoslavia which, like Spain, opened itself to foreign tourism in these years: already at 1.7 million in 1963, foreign travelers to the only accessible Communist country in Europe (blessed with a long and very cheap Adriatic coastline) numbered nearly 6.3 million per annum a decade later.

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 nationalbroadcasting 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.
¹³²
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—
‘Salut les Copains’
on French national radio, ‘Pick of the Pops’ on the BBC, etc. Individualized radios bred targetted programming; and when the state radio systems proved slow to adapt, ‘peripheral’ radio stations—Radio Luxemburg, Radio Monte Carlo, Radio Andorra, transmitting legally but from across state frontiers and financed by commercial advertising—seized the opportunity.

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 (
Radio Audizioni Italiane
—the Italian national broadcasting network) from 1954-56, instructed his employees that their programs were ‘not to undermine the institution of the family’ or portray ‘attitudes, poses or particulars which might arouse base instincts’ .
¹³³

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
was
a medium of social subversion. It contributed hugely to ending the isolation and ignorance of far-flung communities, by providing everyone with the same experience and a common visual culture. Being ‘French’, or ‘German’ or ‘Dutch’ was now something shaped less by primary education or public festivities than by one’s understanding of the country as gleaned from the images thrust into each home. ‘Italians’, for good or ill, were forged more by the shared experience of watching sport or variety shows on RAI than by a century of unified national government.

Above all, television put national politics onto the domestic hearth. Until television, politics in Paris or Bonn, Rome or London were an élite affair, conducted by distant leaders known only from their disembodied voices on 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, à 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.