Leisure, Culture, and Class
This chapter discusses how workers spent their limited leisure time in the war years, examining reading, cinema, radio, and traditional pastimes like the pub and sports. It also focuses on growing state involvement in organizing recreational programmes for workers and wartime debate about popular leisure: including the ‘Holidays at Home’ entertainments organized by local municipalities and the music, drama, and variety entertainment provided to war factories by CEMA and ENSA. Discussions, within CEMA especially, about appropriate programming and workers' responses offer insights into contemporary concerns about mass commercial culture, efforts to upgrade popular taste, and discussion of whether a national culture existed.
Keywords: ENSA, CEMA, BBC in wartime, ‘Holidays at Home’, ‘The Challenge of Youth’, leisure in wartime
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