2S - Social and cultural change: the expansion of the mass media
Learn how media, leisure, technology and protest changed British society in the 1960s, and why greater freedom coexisted with inequality and resistance.
Mass media and authority
Television reached a mass household audience and increasingly shaped what people knew about politics, consumer goods and other people's lives. BBC services and commercial ITV competed for audiences; BBC2 began in 1964. Television offered shared national experiences, while advertising helped turn products and styles into desirable signs of modern living.
Media could also weaken deference. News made distant wars and domestic confrontations visible; satire challenged politicians through programmes such as That Was the Week That Was. Coverage did not simply instruct every viewer to adopt one position. Editors selected material and viewers interpreted it through existing beliefs. Nevertheless, the ability to show a confrontation could make an official explanation harder to sustain than when it reached people only through a statement.
Radio illustrates how technological and commercial change interacted with youth demand. Pirate stations such as Radio Caroline, broadcasting from offshore in 1964, supplied popular music that established broadcasting did not provide as continuously. A contemporary audience survey found strong support among younger listeners, but sampled areas where reception was available; it should not be read as a census of every teenager. The survey, conducted in autumn 1964 and held by The National Archives as HO 255/1001, is evidence of a new audience and of the limits of measurement.
The 1967 Marine Broadcasting Offences Act restricted support for offshore broadcasters, while BBC Radio 1 began that year. Institutions adapted as well as resisted. Media expanded a national consumer culture and exposed controversy, but owners, regulators and programme-makers continued to exercise power over what could be heard or seen.
Leisure and affluence
Higher incomes, paid holidays, car ownership and shorter or more predictable working hours widened leisure possibilities. Television remained a relatively inexpensive household activity, while clubs, popular music, sport and shopping supplied other forms of entertainment. Package holidays and air travel made some foreign destinations accessible to families who had previously taken holidays within Britain.
Leisure changed expectations and relationships. Travel exposed people to different food, customs and ways of life; consumer advertising presented holidays as normal rewards for work. Music venues and cafés could give young people space beyond family supervision. England's football World Cup victory in 1966, followed by mass audiences, also showed how leisure could reinforce national identity rather than only encourage individual freedom.
Access remained unequal. Disposable income, transport and free time varied by class and region. Women responsible for household and care work could have less leisure than men in the same family. Older people and families facing poverty did not experience the same range of choices as the most visible consumers. New opportunities therefore altered the scale and expectation of leisure without making its distribution equal.
Consumption could also commercialise independence. A young person's style might challenge parental taste while still depending on businesses selling records and clothing. Calling leisure liberating is strongest when linked to a specific new opportunity; it is weaker if it assumes that spending automatically freed people from economic or social constraints.
Science and daily life
Scientific developments changed production, communication and private decisions. Computers and automation offered firms and government new ways to process information and organise work. This could increase efficiency and demand for technical skills, while also making some existing jobs and practices less secure. The social impact depended on training, investment and control of technology, rather than technology alone delivering progress.
Nuclear power, following Calder Hall's opening in 1956, symbolised hopes for new energy capacity. Space exploration and the Moon landing in 1969 encouraged confidence in scientific achievement. Satellite communication helped bring distant events into British homes. The Anglo-French Concorde project, whose prototype first flew in 1969, expressed ambition and international cooperation, but also raised questions about public expense. Prestige and economic value were not necessarily identical.
The contraceptive pill, available through the NHS from 1961 and more widely accessible later in the decade, could separate sexual relationships and family size more effectively from the risk of pregnancy. For some women this expanded control over education, employment and relationships. Access depended on medical practice and social attitudes, so a scientific possibility did not instantly become an equal freedom for everyone.
These examples help explain why Wilson associated modernisation with science. They also explain why social change could proceed even during economic difficulty. A household's opportunities, a firm's productivity and national technological prestige are different measures of progress; evidence of one should not automatically stand as proof of the others.
Censorship and public morality
Reduction in censorship widened what writers, performers and broadcasters could discuss. The 1960 acquittal of Penguin Books for publishing Lady Chatterley's Lover under the Obscene Publications Act 1959 was an important earlier landmark: public-good arguments could challenge the assumption that frank sexual content required suppression. It did not remove every obscenity offence.
The Theatres Act 1968 ended the Lord Chamberlain's power to approve scripts before performance. Playwrights gained greater freedom to address sexuality, political authority and social conflict. The original Act also retained provisions on obscene performances and other offences. Abolishing prior script censorship was therefore a major institutional change without making all expression legally unrestricted.
Mary Whitehouse's campaigning and the National Viewers' and Listeners' Association, formed in 1965, challenged what critics regarded as sexual permissiveness and declining broadcast standards. Their opposition shows that liberalisation created organised resistance. It does not prove that every older viewer was conservative or that every young viewer supported unrestricted expression.
The causal relationship ran both ways. Changes in law and media allowed subjects to be discussed more openly, while existing shifts in attitudes and campaigning made reform politically possible. Greater visibility can also make behaviour seem entirely new when it had previously been concealed. Historians therefore distinguish changing conduct from changing permission to depict or acknowledge it.
Continue this lesson.
You’re previewing NovaLearn without an account. Create a free account to read the rest.
Create free account