From Austerity to Affluence: Holidays Abroad in Postwar British Film

Abstract

In Chapter 5 I looked at the cultural impact that holiday camps had for families in Britain after the Second World War, and how the film Holiday Camp appeared to respond to this. In this chapter I aim to look at the increasing affluence of the 1950s and 1960s, and how this appears to have been negotiated, ideologically, in the types of holidays seen in British films of the period. To begin with I consider the legacy of postwar British holiday films that Holiday Camp may have set a trend for, and how the representation of the traditional British seaside holiday appears to have quickly become viewed as something outmoded and unexciting. I then examine how the end of rationing and an increase in disposable income affected the types of holidays the British were choosing to take from the mid-1950s onwards, and the cinema’s response to this. Finally, I analyse the film musical Summer Holiday, considering how the film — and consequently the foreign holiday — may have been marketed to teenagers.