The Holiday and British Film

Cultural historian Jeffrey Hill considers that holidays are ‘imagined events’ (Hill, 2002: 86). Although referring to the work of John K. Walton (2000), he puts it succinctly that holidays ‘exist in the mind’ and are ‘capable of generating immense pleasures of anticipation and remembrance’ (Hill, 2002: 86). The social research organisation Mass Observation highlights the ‘holiday dream’ in its study of Bolton mill workers in the 1930s and, as Cross points out, ‘For many the holiday dream means a release from routine, a radical change from accustomed space, time, and activity’ (Cross, 1990: 42). If a Sunday visit to church helps workers ‘through the rest of the week’, the holiday has a’longterm function’, giving millworkers ‘something to look forward to’ as manifested in the weekly saving of money in holiday clubs (Cross, 1990: 40).¹ A Butlin’s souvenir brochure from 1939 demonstrates that the company similarly understood the ‘before, during and after’ aspect of the holiday experience:

The thought behind the issue of this souvenir is to provide a happy ending to a perfect holiday. First there was the thrill of holiday planning, then the holiday itself. Now comes the pleasure of looking back through these pages, which it is hoped, will help you to live again the happy carefree days you spent with us. (Illustrated in Read, 1986: 23)

In the introduction to this book I discussed the idea that holidays can be considered as ‘imagined events’ (Hill, 2002: 86) and how this might relate to the way that films, like the holiday, can generate feelings of ‘anticipation, transportation and elevation’ (Kuhn, 2002). In this chapter I will think more specifically about what the social function of the holiday film might be, and how audiences might respond to it. Landy argues that recent studies of genre pictures have ‘sought to analyse the ways in whichmass cultural productions are part of ameaningful system of social exchange in which the audience, rather than being the passive consumer of these texts, is an integral element in their production and reception’ (Landy, 1991: 4). Therefore, when looking at film in terms of national cinema, it isn’t just the film texts that have to be considered, but also the industry that produces them, and the society that consumes them.

In this chapter I explore some of the ways in which the holiday has been theorised as a cultural ‘text’ or cultural ‘practice’. I look at the holiday in terms of class, the spectacle, the tourist gaze and the periphery. I also consider how the holiday might construct feelings of national identity. Examining these theories will provide the reader with some useful tools for analysing representations of the holiday in British film.

In Chapter 1 I considered how the holiday film might appeal to British audiences, and offered a speculative analysis of how audiences might respond to these films. From the present chapter onwards I look in more detail at the films themselves, contextualising them, and considering who their intended audience may have been at the times of release. I also use some of the theories and methods outlined in Chapter 2 to analyse specific film texts.

In Chapter 3 I examined British holiday films that emerged at the dawn of British cinema, reaching a peak with the series of films made by Hepworth. These films appeared in a period of increasing mass travel (by rail) and mass communication (through film, and printed media such as the postcard). To begin with, the holiday was a luxury, largely taken by the leisured classes who could afford to rent a house by the sea, sometimes for the whole summer season, as ‘hotels had not been thought very respectable until 1900’ (Angeloglou, 1975: 25). As the twentieth century moved on, however, the working classes increasingly hankered for some free time away from their hometowns. For these people, the holiday (as opposed to the day trip) became a distinct possibility, particularly in the Lancashire mill towns which benefited from the economic success of the cotton industry. For other working-class folk (in the East End of London, for example), a working holiday was the only alternative. Some of these families took seasonal hoppicking jobs in Kent, following the adage that ‘a change was as good as a rest’. A British-Pathé newsreel from September 1931, for example, depicts (what it refers to on its intertitle as) a ‘profit and pleasure’ holiday, with one young woman commenting on the health benefits rather than the drudgery of the job by saying, ‘Oh what a difference to London — I’ve come down here to try and get that schoolgirl complexion’.¹

In Chapter 4 I examined the holiday film in a period without widespread holidays with pay for the working classes. When the Holidays With Pay Act was passed in 1938, the opportunity of an annual break was in turn scuppered by the restrictions of the Second World War. Widespread holidays for the working classes only became a reality after the war had ended, and even then, this was a relative luxury in the immediate postwar period. For most people, some sort of restoration of ‘normality’ was their main concern in a period of ‘make do and mend’ and rationing. It was in this era that the regulated jollity of the holiday camp flourished. The mass pleasures on offer at these camps were perhaps temporarily able to convince the British holidaymaker that life wasn’t such an anticlimax after the victory celebrations had ended.

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.

In Chapter 6 I looked at how the postwar era of affluence was expressed in British films of the late 1950s and early 1960s, which represented the excitement and exoticism of the foreign holiday. The British film industry itself had arguably reached some sort of zenith in the 1960s, both commercially and artistically. The myth of ‘swinging London’ had fed into British society as a whole, and helped to attract Hollywood investors, as Richard Lester suggests in Hollywood UK:

After decades in which Britain had followed American leads, suddenly the process seemed to have been reversed …. By 1967, 90 per cent of the funding for British movies came from America. (Evans, 1993)

British film, alongside the fashion and music industries, worked to perpetuate the idea of affluence — which the promotional tie-ins of Summer Holiday demonstrate — but this period of artistic and financial success was not to last. At the end of the decade, many of the American studios either reduced their spending on UK productions or withdrew financial support completely, and so the British film industry had to find new ways to support itself.¹

In Chapter 7 I considered how holiday films of the 1970s ideologically reconstructed a sense of Britishness through their representation of the ‘traditional’ holiday at the seaside, in holiday camps and at caravan parks, in a period of economic and cultural crisis. Representations of the British embarking on foreign holidays can also be found in this period, for example in Carry On Abroad and Are You Being Served? These films — although ‘sending up’ their British characters by depicting them as comedy stereotypes — arguably construct a sense of Britishness by emphasising cultural or racial difference between the holidaymakers and the peoples of the country they are visiting. This is a theme I explored earlier, for instance, in the problematic encounter between the young British men and the Yugoslav characters in Summer Holiday. When cultural and racial difference is treated crassly for comic effect, racial stereotypes can be constructed, and, as Cliff Richard and director Peter Yates found, offence can be felt by an entire nation (and voiced by the government of that nation), who are represented by a small number of characters on screen.

Throughout this book I have argued that the holiday film can ideologically construct feelings of national identity through its representation of the traditional British holiday. I concluded Chapter 8 by saying that national identity is not ‘fixed’ and that it is an ideological concept that shifts and changes over time. By analysing the holiday film across a century of cinema it may be expected that a number of different representations of national identity can be revealed, from the sedate middle-class holidaymakers of A Seaside Girl to the hedonistic holidaymakers of Kevin and Perry Go Large. As I have demonstrated, these identities are often marked by distinctions of class, gender and race, although I have also highlighted representations of social mixing: of the different classes (in the case of Holiday Camp, for example), and of multiculturalism.