PC200 Popular Culture and History - Lecture 1 Review

Our first lecture was an introduction to the module and we gained an understanding and outline of its main themes. After taking us through the module requirements and assessment arrangements, Richard began by informing us of the origins of cultural studies.

We were told that cultural studies is used as a synonym for ‘popular culture’. We discussed grand narratives and micro narratives, and how popular culture reflects bigger events, for example: Disney 1955/1956-Theme Parks.

The lecture then progressed to Richard talking about the Americanisation of popular culture, and the fact that America dominates Pop culture, and Britain is influenced.

We were informed that we were going to be studying the strands of meaning that interconnect to form British Popular Culture, and that these strands create a very colourful picture of contemporary Britain. The ideas of our module span the last fifty years, approximately 1956 to 2006.

Discussion of 1956 as a key year helped us understand how the past has influenced our lives and culture today. It was the year of Elvis Presley, Bill Haley and the Comets and The Suez Crisis. The topic of Britain always having been a multi ethnic society because of commonwealth and empire brought us on to think about how Britain’s culture has changed very significantly through its eating habits, and we discussed relevant examples that were on our handout.

The differences between high and low culture were introduced to us by discussing television. Hugh Carleton Greene, brought the BBC into the sixties, and we compared the BBC to ITV, which was launched in 1955. ITV was initially seen as common and vulgar, soon had 72% of viewing public. Hoggart and Williams hated ITV and described it as shiny barbarism, anti culture and synthetic culture. We discussed

Coronation Street

which was introduced in 1960, which was loved by the working class people it represented, but hated by middle class critics. The last point we discussed about TV was that television was seen as a threat to the theatre and cultural elitists.

The Sun newspaper was introduced in 1955, captured working class, as they were drawn to consumerism.

We briefly heard about The Beatles and ‘The Menace of Beatlism’. Private Eye regarded the Beatles with contempt. They were seen to have no aesthetic worth.

Overall, the lecture introduced many ideas and themes that the module involves, and we learnt a lot about the cultural industry in Britain and also the influences that other countries cultures had, and are still having, on British popular culture.