You are viewing a free preview of this lesson.
Subscribe to unlock all 10 lessons in this course and every other course on LearningBro.
Of all the transformations of twentieth-century Britain, the rise of the mass media may be the one that touched daily life most intimately and universally. In 1918 the ordinary Briton's window on the world was the newspaper, the music hall and the pulpit; by 1997 it was the television set, watched for hours each day in almost every home, supplemented by radio, cinema, recorded music, and a vast popular press. Across these eight decades, radio and then television created for the first time a genuinely national culture — a shared body of programmes, personalities, news and entertainment experienced simultaneously by millions. Cinema drew huge audiences in the interwar and wartime years; the popular press reached almost every household; and from the 1950s a distinct youth culture, powered by recorded music and disposable income, transformed the texture of British life. The media did not merely reflect social change: it was itself one of the great engines of change, shaping how Britons understood their nation, their politics, their monarchy and themselves.
For a breadth study of how Britain was transformed, the media and mass culture are indispensable, running through and connecting the society, politics and culture threads across the whole period. This lesson takes the long view demanded by a breadth study, tracing the arc from the foundation of the BBC in the 1920s to the multi-channel, tabloid-saturated media landscape of the 1990s. The organising question is how far the mass media transformed British society — whether it created a genuinely shared national culture, how far it eroded old hierarchies of class and deference, and whether its power was ultimately a democratising or a manipulative one. This lesson reconstructs the rise of radio and the BBC, the age of cinema, the arrival and dominance of television, the growth of the popular press, and the emergence of consumerism and youth culture — and it asks throughout what these developments reveal about a society being remade by the machinery of mass communication.
By the end of this lesson you will be able to:
This lesson belongs to Edexcel 9HI0 Paper 1, Option 1H (Route H): "Britain transformed, 1918–97" — a thematic breadth study of political, economic, social and cultural change, assessed by extended analytical essays and by the evaluation of historians' interpretations. Within our own teaching sequence it draws together the culture and media thread across the whole century, connecting the changing communications landscape to the transformations of politics, class and society examined elsewhere in the course.
Because Paper 1 is a breadth paper, examiners look for command of change over time and for judgements that range across the period rather than narrow case-study description. Keep asking how each new medium altered the shared culture of the nation and the hierarchies of class, authority and deference. (For the precise assessment weightings and question wording, always consult the official Edexcel specification and sample assessment materials rather than relying on any paraphrase.)
The most important cultural institution of interwar Britain, and one of the great transformative forces of the century, was the British Broadcasting Corporation. Founded as a commercial company in 1922 and reconstituted as a public corporation under royal charter in 1927, the BBC enjoyed a monopoly of broadcasting for a quarter of a century, and under its formidable first Director-General, John Reith, it acquired a distinctive and lasting ethos.
| Feature | Detail |
|---|---|
| The Reithian mission | Reith conceived broadcasting as a public service with a moral and educational purpose, summed up in the famous formula that the BBC existed to "inform, educate and entertain" — in that deliberate order |
| Public-service monopoly | Funded by a licence fee rather than advertising, the BBC was insulated from commercial pressure and free (in principle) to pursue quality and improvement rather than mere popularity |
| National unity and standardisation | The BBC spread a standard form of English ("BBC English"), broadcast national events, and created a common culture experienced simultaneously across the country — from the shipping forecast to the monarch's Christmas message (begun in 1932) |
| Cautious independence | Its independence was real but bounded — during the General Strike of 1926 Reith kept the BBC nominally impartial while effectively supporting the government, establishing an enduring tension between independence and the state |
The significance of radio for the transformation theme was immense. For the first time, millions of people in every region and class heard the same voices, the same news and the same entertainment at the same moment, creating a genuinely national culture where before there had been a patchwork of local and regional ones. The wireless became the hearth of the interwar home. In wartime, the BBC reached the height of its authority and prestige: its news was trusted as a beacon of accuracy in occupied Europe, Churchill's speeches were carried into every home, and programmes such as ITMA sustained national morale. The Reithian ideal — of broadcasting as an instrument of national improvement and unity — shaped British culture for decades, and the debate over whether it was nobly high-minded or condescendingly paternalist is one a strong answer can deploy.
If radio was the sound of interwar Britain, cinema was its most popular spectacle. Between the wars and through the 1940s, "the pictures" were the pre-eminent mass entertainment, and cinema-going was a central ritual of British life on a scale difficult to imagine today.
| Aspect | Detail |
|---|---|
| Mass audiences | By the late 1930s there were around 20 million cinema admissions per week; attendance peaked in 1946 at over 30 million a week, as cinema-going became the dominant leisure activity of the working class |
| The picture palaces | Vast, ornate "super-cinemas" (the Odeon and Gaumont chains) offered a glamorous escape from the drabness of ordinary life, especially for women and the young |
| Hollywood dominance and British film | American films dominated the screens, prompting anxieties about cultural "Americanisation"; yet a distinctive British cinema also flourished, from the wartime documentaries and morale-boosting features to the celebrated Ealing comedies of the late 1940s |
| Newsreels | Before television, cinema newsreels were a principal source of visual news, shaping how the public saw events from the coronation to the war |
Cinema's significance lay partly in the escape and glamour it offered — a window onto a wider, more affluent and more exciting world that fed aspirations and, some argued, a growing consumerism. It also contributed to the anxieties about cultural homogenisation and "Americanisation" that would recur throughout the century. The decline of cinema from its 1946 peak — precipitous once television arrived in the 1950s — is itself a powerful illustration of how one mass medium could be displaced by another, and of the restlessness of a transforming culture.
The single most transformative development in the whole history of the British media was the rise of television. Though the BBC had begun a limited television service in 1936 (suspended during the war), it was in the 1950s that television became a mass medium, and by the 1960s it had displaced both cinema and radio as the dominant force in British leisure and culture.
| Milestone | Detail |
|---|---|
| The 1953 coronation | The televised coronation of Queen Elizabeth II (June 1953) was the great catalyst: for the first time, more people watched an event on television than heard it on radio, and the occasion drove a huge surge in set ownership |
| The end of the BBC monopoly | The Television Act 1954 created ITV, the commercial, advertising-funded network that began broadcasting in 1955 — ending the BBC's monopoly and introducing competition, popular programming and a more populist tone |
| Near-universal ownership | Set ownership rose from a small minority in the early 1950s to the great majority of households by the early 1960s and near-universality thereafter — television became the central fixture of the British home |
| A single national conversation | Programmes such as Coronation Street (from 1960), major sporting events and the evening news created a shared daily experience that bound the nation together as nothing had before |
Television's transformative power operated on several levels, and a strong answer distinguishes them. Culturally, it completed the creation of a shared national experience begun by radio, but on a far more intense and visual scale. Socially, it reshaped the home, drawing family life around the set and displacing older forms of sociability, from the cinema to the pub to the chapel. Politically, it transformed the conduct of public life: politicians had to master a new and intimate medium (the televised party broadcast, and eventually the televised leaders' encounter), and television news brought war, protest and disaster directly into the living room. The competition between the high-minded BBC and populist ITV also reshaped the culture — critics feared a "race to the bottom", while defenders welcomed a broadcasting that at last gave the public what it actually wanted. The arrival, too, of satirical and challenging programming in the 1960s (That Was The Week That Was) both reflected and accelerated the erosion of deference towards authority that is one of the great social changes of the period.
Alongside the broadcast media, the popular press was a mass medium of enormous reach and influence throughout the period. Britain developed one of the most competitive, concentrated and downmarket newspaper markets in the world, and the press both shaped and was shaped by the transformations of the century.
| Development | Detail |
|---|---|
| Mass-circulation dailies | By the interwar years, papers such as the Daily Mail, Daily Express and Daily Mirror achieved circulations in the millions, competing fiercely for readers through promotions, sensation and populism |
| The Mirror and the working class | From the late 1930s and especially during the war, the Daily Mirror pioneered a brash, campaigning, working-class populism, and became for a time the voice of Labour-leaning Britain |
| Concentration of ownership | The press was increasingly concentrated in the hands of powerful proprietors (the "press barons" — Northcliffe, Beaverbrook and later Rupert Murdoch), raising enduring questions about the political power of unelected owners |
| The tabloid revolution | Murdoch's relaunch of the Sun (from 1969) drove the market sharply downmarket, with an aggressive mix of sensation, celebrity, sport and populist politics; by the 1980s the tabloids wielded formidable political influence |
The significance of the popular press for the transformation theme is twofold. First, it was a powerful agent of a shared, if commercialised, mass culture — the tabloids shaped popular attitudes to politics, the monarchy, celebrity and morality on a huge scale. Second, its concentrated ownership and partisan power raised acute questions about democracy: the political influence of proprietors like Beaverbrook and Murdoch, and the tabloids' capacity to shape (or claim to shape) elections — most famously in the coverage of the Winter of Discontent and the 1992 election — made the press a genuine political force. The debate over whether the popular press served the public by giving it what it wanted, or debased public life by pandering to sensation and prejudice, is central to any assessment of the media's transformation of Britain.
The final and in some ways deepest transformation was the rise, from the 1950s, of a mass consumer society and, within it, a distinct and powerful youth culture. The "affluent society" of the post-war boom put disposable income into the pockets of ordinary people — and, crucially, of the young — for the first time, and the media both fed and profited from the resulting explosion of consumption.
| Dimension | Detail |
|---|---|
| Consumer boom | Rising real incomes and full employment brought consumer durables — televisions, refrigerators, washing machines, cars — within reach of the majority, transforming domestic life and expectations |
| Advertising | Commercial television (from 1955) and the press carried a flood of advertising that both reflected and stimulated the new consumerism, teaching aspiration and shaping taste |
| The teenager | For the first time, young people with money and leisure emerged as a distinct market and identity — the "teenager", a term and phenomenon largely of the 1950s |
| Music and style | Recorded pop music, from rock and roll to the Beatles and beyond, became the soundtrack and emblem of youth culture, sold through records, radio, television (Top of the Pops from 1964) and fashion |
Subscribe to continue reading
Get full access to this lesson and all 10 lessons in this course.