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Popular Culture in Great Britain
 Piccadilly Circus, London Art Print Avis, Roy 15.736 in. x 19.67 in. Buy at AllPosters.com Framed Mounted Following World War II church attendance revived for some years, though the anticipated "return to religion" did not occur. Increased interest was manifest in the religious themes of C. S. Lewis (d. 1963), a professor of English at Cambridge; and Dorothy Sayers, an interpreter of religion as well as a gifted writer of mystery stories, was a best seller. Interest in religious problems remained active, even though church attendance dropped sharply in the sixties.
Honest to God ( 1963), was widely read and discussed; the author, the Bishop of Woolwich, concluded that the Church had not succeeded in interpreting God in intelligible terms to modern man; the traditional notion of a personal God and perhaps even the ideas of the Incarnation and the Trinity were in question.
In June 1961 Dr. Arthur Michael Ramsey was enthroned as the one hundredth archbishop of Canterbury. His sermon for the occasion tells us much about our times; he spoke of Christian unity, of racial equality and of the involvement of the Christian in the life of the community. For the polity of the Church of England itself he said then (as he reiterated later): "We seek for a greater freedom in the ordering and the urgent revising of our forms of worship." He had in mind the events of 1928 when a new prayer book was voted down by the House of Commons.
The new Coventry Cathedral was consecrated May 25, 1962, in the presence of the queen. Alongside the ruins of the medieval St. Michael's, a casualty of the Blitz in 1 940, now stands the new edifice, a remarkable achievement, designed by Sir Basil Spence and constructed in seven years' time at a cost of £1½ million. It includes a Chapel of Unity which in 1965 was given a Congregational minister as its warden. The new Anglican cathedral is "a triumph for a church anxious to present its faith to the people in a contemporary way," declared the Economist. Since 1962 it has drawn an unending stream of visitors.
Dreams of Christian unity are about to take on some reality. By 1970 we may see organic union of the Established Church and the Methodist Church. There will be, according to plan, a first stage in which the two churches will be "distinct" but "in full communion," this to be followed by complete union. The membership of the Established Church is sometimes given as 27,000,000, though a more realistic figure of Easter communicants reduces it to about 2,250,000. The Methodists number about 1,100,000. Roman Catholics in England are estimated at 3,750,000. The Established Church has taken a warm and friendly interest in the ecumenical movement in Christendom and sent observers to the Vatican Council in 1963. In the summer of 1962 Archbishop Ramsey visited Aleksei, Patriarch of Moscow and all the Russias, in Moscow.
Entertainment and Literature
Changing fashions and interests in entertainment do not permit of easy generalizations. By the sixties television had come to be more of a necessity than central heating or plumbing. In 1959, 70 per cent of households had the "tele"; by 1964, 90 per cent. Until 1955 it was a monopoly of the B.B.C., but then the argument "we are not a nation of intellectuals" won out over violent protest, in provision for commercial television. The I.T.A. (Independent Television Authority) was created and by 1964 was transmitting from twenty-two stations into some 13 million homes. But controversy returned with the report of the Pilkington Committee in 1962 which concluded that the I.T.A. fell below reasonable standards and had not realized the aims of broadcasting as found in the Act of 1954. In the Television Act of 1964 the control of the I.T.A. over its contractors (and thus over the programs) was strengthened but it was denied a second channel which, however, was accorded the B.B.C. The 26 part serial "The Great War" was transmitted on both channels of the B.B.C. in 1964-65 and was a notable success and a program of merit. Sound broadcasting is provided by the B.B.C. alone; its Third Programme, started in 1946, devotes itself to broadcasts of intellectual and artistic distinction and is widely credited with raising popular tastes.
The English ballet has gained a worldwide reputation through the Sadler's Wells Ballet, which was incorporated in the Royal Ballet in 1957. The prima ballerina has been the incomparable Dame Margot Fonteyn. For years, until 1950, Robert Helpmann was premier danseur with Sadler's Wells. The male star is now Rudolf Nureyev, born in East Siberia in 1929, who made his Covent Garden debut, in Giselle, in February 1962. British films improved in quality after World War II and stimulated higher quality in Hollywood. Sir Laurence Olivier won a commanding position on both stage and screen, and from 1962 was the Director of the National Theatre Company, which gave performances in London's Old Vic pending a new home on the south bank of the Thames. Plays are produced in memorable version by the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford-uponAvon and at the Aldwych Theatre in London. A distinguished season of orchestral concerts is presented in London (especially at the Royal Festival Hall and the Albert Hall) and elsewhere. Opera is given during the year at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden and at Sadler's Wells, and a summer season, with internationally known stars, is presented at Glyndebourne in Sussex.
No treatment of popular culture is complete without reference to the Sunday newspaper, even more of a tradition in Britain than in America. Over Saturday night each week some 25 million copies of London newspapers are delivered in Great Britain. It is sometimes argued that as a class English newspapers are more informative than the American press, but this is a matter of opinion. A better case can perhaps be made for the proposition that the best of the English weeklies such as the Times Literary Supplement, Spectator, New Statesman, Time and Tide, and The Listener are superior to the best in the United States. Of the numerous journals that appear three or four times a year some of the postwar ventures such as Horizon ( 1940-50), the Cambridge Journal ( 1947-54), Encounter, Past and Present (a historical journal) and for a time the New Left Review, have been boldly experimental and creative. In these journals we have a bridge back to the kind of commitment found in leftist writers in the thirties.
Many prewar writers such as Henry Green, Elizabeth Bowen, Joyce Cary, Rebecca West and Evelyn Waugh reached the peak of their powers after 1945. But by the sixties they had ceased to be topical and as such had been replaced by a group of younger writers (among them Kingsley Amis, John Osborne, John Wain, Alan Sillitoe) who, for the most part, were born between the wars. (We have an excellent study in Postwar British Fiction [ 1962], by James Gindin.) In an age in which class distinctions are supposed to be disappearing one of the most popular themes in fiction has been the study of conduct in a class-conscious society.
A common character is a lad from a working-class background who goes to a university (usually Oxford) on a government grant and finds himself in unfamiliar situations controlled by ideas of class. He confronts the problem of his own identity in a world neither he nor anyone else understands. His way out is that of the author who creates him--usually the existential solution. In much of postwar writing we find recognition of the impossibility of finding final answers through reason, of the many-sidedness of truth, of the fallacy of the abstract, and of salvation in the comic, the absurd and the ironic. Therein lies morality and commitment as well as freedom.
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