Back in the early 60’s no-one had colour tv, in fact a lot of folk had no tv at all, and we were all stuck with valve driven am radios.
Add to that there was very little youth music outlet at all, radio Luxemburg was not on the air at the time, nor Radio Caroline so all teens had was the BBC Light Service, and the good old ‘Beeb’ was not called ‘Auntie’ for nothing.
The only outlet for teen culture was one hour per day of ‘the pops’ for the vast majority of teens, and many of those pop songs were croony ballads by Perry Como, Slim Whitman and the like, you certainly heard very little rock’n’roll.
The only other places you could go to take part in teen culture were the very few coffee bars, lots in London but few elswhere, the local greasy spoon cafe with its jukebox, or the local Palais de Danse.
At the time places that had R&B jukeboxes were of pretty low repute, I don’t even remember any pubs having them, pubs were full of old men drinking mild beer except on Thursday and Friday when they switched to bitter beer and spent all their weeks pay.
Remembering how it was then, all I can say is that it was quiet, everything closed after 4pm Saturday in main cities (local shops closed even earlier) and stayed like that until Monday, there was nothing on the tv during that time except black and white weepies, and ‘Sunday’ appropriate stuff.
The cultural atmosphere for most Britons was absolutely stifling, about the only thing you could do was go to the pictures, and since it was also in colour it was like what a trip to Disneyland is to a seven year old.
Teenagers as a demographic had hardly been invented, there was no targeted marketing, fashionalbe clothes amounted to maybe sports jackets, or if you were an out and out rebel you wore Drapes, but that put you at the extreme edge of society, or you could wear leather jackets.
For any teen being allowed to see something that the board of censors deemed fit for you and actually had teenagers in it as central charactors was completely revolutionary.
Authorities were very wary of ‘youth’ media output following the reaction to a film called ‘The Blackboard Jungle’ when there had been a small amount of vandalism in cinemas, the film nowadays is extremely tame.
‘Summer Holiday’ should be placed in a context of a pretty authoritarian and nannying nation state, the plot was completely unimportant it was an incredibly rare experience for most kds at the time, a film made and aimed solely at them, and it made them realise that you didn’t just leave school at 14 and start work without anything in between.
It gave teens something to be interested in that everyone else was not, it gave them an exclusive identity.
Ok so there were many steps along the way to a more liberal society but this was one that just about every youth of the day was exposed to, so it was a common experience.