Adrian Bingham's fascinating, scholarly, and in places droll account of the British popular press in the “short” twentieth century offers a much needed overview of the role of the daily and Sunday papers in British popular culture. In demonstrating that the popular press both reflected and shaped British sexual cultures, this study offers a coherent and succinct introduction to the field of twentieth-century media history, set alongside an overview of the changes in public discussions of sex, intimacy, venereal diseases, and sexuality. This sets the scene for the more narrowly focused chapters, which thematically divide the established genres of popular newspaper reporting. Many of the techniques of attracting readers are found across the entire sixty years of this study and offered the readers of the popular press a heady mixture of crime, celebrity gossip, and titillation. This mix of topics was not, however, historically static, and Bingham traces the growing public acceptability of discussions of sex, alongside the evolution of “a more ‘vulgar,' irreverent, authentically working-class voice” (265).
At its conceptual core, the book is about the “eternal ambiguity” (116) of claims to represent “family values” made by papers that aimed to entertain and, increasingly, to titillate their readers. Bingham charts the evolution of the pin-up, the eroticized cartoon strip, and the “page three girl” as visual images came to dominate the content of popular newspapers and women became ranked according to physical attributes. The claim to be “family newspapers” was increasingly hard to sustain. It had signaled a “discreet” approach to sexuality, characterized by condemnation (yet prominent reporting) of “immorality” such as divorce, homosexuality, and prostitution. Bingham repeatedly makes clear the negative elements to the “voices” of the popular press—reminding us that its journalists were predominantly male, heterosexual, metropolitan, and middle aged and wrote within a worldview that reflected the prejudice and misogyny of their social milieu. Yet occasionally, “family values” might sometimes be yoked to fairly progressive agendas; this book builds on Bingham's previous work in Gender, Modernity, and the Popular Press in Inter-war Britain (Oxford, 2004) in exploring the progressive elements within the popular press. One of Bingham's achievements is to take seriously the idea that the popular press made a significant contribution to the pace of the changes in postwar British society that have been termed “progressivism.” “Family values” was not simply a backward-looking populist discursive space. However, by the 1970s, “family values” was “reworked into a critique of the excesses of ‘permissiveness’ and the unwarranted demands of ‘radicals’ and special interest groups” (266) and came to speak for the contradictory moral values of Thatcherism. It became increasingly difficult to integrate with the divergent values of the different generations within the readerships of popular papers and declined in significance as Britain became more polarized by generation and region in the 1980s. Bingham offers tantalizing glimpses of the popular press in this decade, and the scope of the book is broader than the time period of the title suggests. Tracing the evolution and persistent power of family values within British society helps to revise simplistic accounts of how everything changed in the permissive 1960s and is a major contribution of this book.
Family Newspapers also helpfully distinguishes and contextualizes the different modes of popular media, highlighting the distinctiveness of individual papers at certain historical moments. The Mirror, for example, innovated by launching a new self-consciously modern and scientific style of representing sex, with its strong commitment to public sex education in the 1940s. Later in the century, the Sun offered another distinctive line of innovation in its more consumerist, sexualized, and celebrity-obsessed formula. Diversity also emerges within the miscellany of articles found within individual newspapers, which might offer readers a number of competing perspectives. The attempt to disaggregate different voices within the popular press and to highlight the contributions made by individual editors, journalists, and proprietors offers a lasting contribution to scholarship. Bingham's work reminds those who aggregate the popular press, or indeed “popular culture,” that there it represents a highly complex and diverse set of institutions, populated by distinctive individuals. There are also fascinating glimpses within Family Newspapers of the divergent media products offered in different regions of the United Kingdom, with Scotland and Ireland/Northern Ireland being much less permissive in the acceptability of sexual content, reflecting both public opinion and their distinctive legislative contexts. The popular press was not wholly a national production, and this subnational narrative clearly merits further research.
Bingham never lets the reader forget the commercial orientation of the popular press, despite his exploration of other less tangible goals of public education or efforts to democratize British institutions. But he delves beneath the surface of commercialism to reveal the different options on offer within a marketplace. He usefully reminds historians of the origins or initial publication within the popular press of sources that are frequently taken to be scholarly or aimed at the book market—mass observation studies, the work of Geoffrey Gorer, and Sheila Patterson's Dark Strangers, for example. It is to be hoped that Bingham's focus on the daily and Sunday popular press as the initial publishing context for these texts will motivate more contextual historical readings of their impact and reception.
Reception history, however, proves to be a difficult task for the popular press. Bingham attempts to trace out the responses of readers and offers snippets of evidence, although acknowledging that the source material is very limited. Letters pages, agony columns, and polls do offer some indication of what the public thought, and this is woven into the book, although it could occasionally have been given a higher profile. Given the strongly gendered formulas of titillation and conservative family values, it would have been fascinating to know how the large numbers of female readers and the smaller numbers of female journalists regarded the later incarnations of the popular press.
In his conclusion, Bingham offers a schematic division of the sixty years that Family Newspapers covers into three loosely defined eras: sexual caution (interwar), democratizing sex (World War II to the late 1960s), and a new combination of reworked “family values” and more intense titillation (from the late 1960s). This is a helpful overview, although it should not disguise the complexity and diversity of the voices established by the popular press. Although Bingham leaves them relatively implicit in his analysis, there are more general conclusions that might be drawn from this study: periodization seems an obvious area. Other historians of Britain might have hazarded the interwar decades as a period in which psychoanalytic thought was popularized and during which, through the influence of Marie Stopes and other sex reformers, we can see a gradual lessening of the stigma of sexual matters; Bingham, however, points to the 1950s as a period when popular culture began to integrate these influences. Family Newspapers marks this decade as deserving of more attention as a turning point than the better known “progressive sixties.” The substance of Family Newspapers has deep potential implications for the historical “master frames” used to understand twentieth-century Britain and offers an intriguing reworking of the history of sexuality through the novel perspectives offered by media history.
