Cinema, TV and screen entertainment from 1920
The Arrival of Cinema
Moving pictures reached British audiences at the end of the nineteenth century. The Lumière brothers demonstrated their Cinématographe in London in February 1896, and purpose-built cinemas began to appear in British towns and cities from around 1907. Early silent films were short, simple and accompanied by a piano or organ played live in the cinema. By the early 1920s, cinema had become the most popular form of mass entertainment in Britain, particularly for working-class urban audiences.
The 1920s saw the construction of purpose-built “picture palaces” — large, ornate cinemas designed to offer audiences a glamorous escape from everyday life. By the mid-1930s, the United Kingdom had around 4,300 cinemas with a combined weekly attendance of approximately 18-20 million. Going to the pictures was a regular weekly habit for millions of British people, particularly for young adults and courting couples.
The talkies arrived when the American film The Jazz Singer was released in 1927, featuring synchronised speech and song. British cinemas quickly converted to sound equipment, and audiences grew even larger. The 1930s were the golden age of British cinema attendance.
British Cinema in the 1930s and 1940s
Hollywood dominated, but British cinema had its own identity. Ealing Studios produced a distinctive strand of British comedy and drama from the late 1930s onwards, culminating in the classic Ealing comedies of the late 1940s and early 1950s — films such as Passport to Pimlico (1949), Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), and The Lavender Hill Mob (1951). These films reflected British culture, humour and social anxieties in ways that American films could not.
Cinema attendance peaked in Britain in 1946 at approximately 1.64 billion tickets sold in a single year — equivalent to an average of about 31 visits per person per year. This figure illustrates how central cinema had become to British social life in the immediate post-war period. The cinema was warm, cheap, and offered two hours of escapism from the austerity of post-war Britain.
The BBC launched the world’s first regular public television service from Alexandra Palace in November 1936. The service was suspended during the Second World War and resumed in June 1946. Television ownership grew slowly at first because sets were expensive. The 1953 coronation of Queen Elizabeth II was the decisive moment that drove mass television adoption: an estimated 20 million people watched it in Britain, most on sets owned by neighbours or in public venues.
ITV (Independent Television) launched in September 1955, breaking the BBC’s monopoly and introducing commercial broadcasting. Competition improved programming quality and drove up television ownership. Colour television was introduced on BBC2 in 1967 and on BBC1 and ITV in 1969. By 1971, colour licences outnumbered black-and-white ones for the first time.
Cinema’s Decline and Television’s Dominance
The relationship between cinema and television was initially competitive, and cinema lost. British cinema admissions fell from 1.64 billion in 1946 to around 501 million in 1960, and to approximately 194 million by 1970. Hundreds of cinemas closed; many were converted into bingo halls. Television, free at the point of use (after the initial set cost and licence fee), available at home and increasingly offering a wide range of content, was simply more convenient.
Cinema survived by differentiating itself: large screens, better sound, and ultimately blockbuster films that could not be replicated at home. The invention of the VCR (video cassette recorder) in the late 1970s and its mass adoption in the 1980s seemed to threaten cinemas further, but in fact the two co-existed as the appetite for screen entertainment grew. Cinema admissions have broadly recovered since the 1990s, driven by multiplex development, blockbuster franchises and digital presentation.
The late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries brought further transformation. Digital recording, the DVD, and then broadband internet changed how people consumed screen entertainment again. Streaming services such as Netflix (available in the UK from 2012) and later Disney+ and Amazon Prime Video changed viewing habits fundamentally. By the early 2020s, streaming had overtaken traditional broadcast television as the primary way many younger viewers consumed screen entertainment.
The shift to on-demand, personalised viewing represents a significant break with the shared experience that had defined cinema and television from the 1920s to the 1990s. Instead of a nation watching the same programme at the same time, audiences fragmented into millions of individual choices. The social experience of “going to the pictures” or gathering round the television for a shared broadcast became rarer, though blockbuster cinema events retained their communal appeal.
The 1953 coronation of Queen Elizabeth II was watched by approximately 20 million people in Britain and was the decisive moment that drove mass adoption of television. Cinema admissions had already peaked in 1946 at around 1.64 billion, and the rise of television accelerated their rapid decline through the 1950s and 1960s.