Grim Nostalgia and the Traditional British Holiday of the 1970s

Abstract

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