A History of the Ministry of Information, 1939-46
II. The cinema audience
From the information given in the previous section it is possible to build up a picture of the civilian cinema audience and to calculate roughly the average number of visits to the cinema per month for each group in the population.
In making these calculations the following estimates of the number of visits per month were used.
| Answer | Attendances Per month |
| More than twice a week | 10 |
| Twice a week | 8 |
| Once a week | 4 |
| Once a fortnight | 2 |
| Once a month | 1 |
| Less than once a month | 5 |
| Not now, never | 0 |
TABLE 9
Average Number of Visits to Cinema per Month
The diagrams and percentages below describe the adult (aged sixteen or over) cinema audience. The figures were arrived at by expressing the number of attendances per month for each group studied as percentages of the total attendances. Estimates of the proportion of the adult civilian population in different groups are given for comparison.
It will be soon that in the cinema audience women are somewhat better represented than men when comparison is made with the population as a whole.
| Analysis by Age | ||||||
| (Adult civilians) Cinema Audience | 16-19 | 20-29 | 30-39 | 40-49 | 50-59 | 60+ |
| 9% | 28% | 25% | 20% | 11% | 7% | |
| Population | 16-19 | 20-29 | 30-39 | 40-49 | 50-59 | 60+ |
| 7% | 17% | 21% | 19% | 16% | 20% | |
The preponderance of young people in the cinema audience is very evident. 62% of the cinema audience are under forty as compared with 45% of the population, and 37% are under thirty as compared with 24% of the population.
| Analysis by Occupation | ||||||
| (Adult civilians)Cinema Audience | Factory Operatives | Other Manual Workers | Clerical and Distributive | Professional and Managerial | Housewives | Retired and Unoccupied |
| 14% | 23% | 14% | 5% | 38% | 6% | |
| Population -/ | Factory Operatives | Other Manual Workers | Clerical and Distributive | Professional and Managerial | Housewives | Retired and Unoccupied |
| 11% | 22% | 11% | 6% | 41% | 9% | |
The distribution of the cinema audience by occupation does not differ much from that of the population as a whole. 56% of the cinema audience are workers as compared with 50% of the population. The retired and unoccupied are under represented in the cinema audience. This might be expected as although people in this group have more time to go to the cinema they have less money.
CHILDREN
It is estimated that children still at school and below school age form about 21% of the civilian population and about 25% of the total cinema audience.