The British Cinema Audience, 1949

Abstract

THE GOVERNMENT'S annual White Paper on National Income and Expenditure provides each year a reliable figure for the amount spent in the United Kingdom on cinemagoing and the relation between this and other forms of expenditure. In the first full year of peace, 1946, cinema audiences spent the record sum of $484,ooo,ooo;1 in 1947 (a year which saw a winter fuel crisis, a catastrophic experiment with sterling convertibility, and the nearexhaustion of the American and Canadian loans to Britain), the public cut back its cinema expenditure to $432,000,000. And for 1948 the total at $448,000,000 was still well below the earlier peak. Moreover, during the same three years total personal expenditure on all consumers' goods and services was rising steadily and thus the share going to cinema box offices declined each year. This absolute and relative decline in cinema prosperity was not shared by what might be considered competitive outlets for relaxation expenditure. Other forms of commercial entertainment at least held their own, and the amounts spent on liquor and tobacco showed considerable expansion. See table 1 (p. 252). In addition to these official figures we now have the results of the annual surveys of the British cinema audience conducted in the past three years by Hulton Publications. The first of these surveys was carried out in 1947. The interviewing occupied four months, January to April, and a sample of 10,200 men and women representative of the total population aged sixteen and over was interviewed. In 1948 and 1949 the field work occupied the same