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Glimpsing La Dolce Vita: Cultural Change and Modernity in the 1960s English Cabaret Club

Although the arrival of television in 1950s Britain weakened some traditions of live entertainment, an active culture of live performance developed in the 1960s in the clubs of the English north and midlands. Focusing on the commercial “cabaret” or “theatre” clubs offering “mainstream” entertainment for largely working- and lower-middle class audiences, this study begins by examining the clubs’ origins within the context of the new “affluence,” structural change within the entertainment industry and liberalizing government legislation relating to gambling and late-night drinking. It then explores the clubs’ cultural significance. It argues that eating out, gambling, and enjoying physical proximity to star entertainers provided ways for patrons to feel “modern” and to experience activities previously associated with more privileged social groups. At the same time, however, clubs were skillful in maintaining a balance between tradition and modernity by establishing notions of restraint and ensuring that club culture remained tied to some degree to previous cultural habits. This tension demonstrates the problems inherent in attempts, common amongst historians studying the 1960s, to weigh cultural “changes” against “continuities”’ and to assess the level and nature of social and cultural change. The essay suggests that clubs, if hardly transgressive, offered a quiet permissiveness, an undermining of aspects of the 1950s moral consensus from within the culture of “ordinary” people.