Appendix 2.2: PG, KW, MPH; Annual assessments of UK box office
hence, perhaps, the concentration in this group of new categories
on things the domestic television screen could not offer such as
•best horror’, 'best series', 'best straight Х-certificate',
'super special long run', 'hard ticket giants∕block busting
exploitation offering'.
For the purposes of my comparison of the assessments made
annually by different types of source (KW, MPH, Picturegoer) I
needed categories with maximum consistency of appearance. My
primary interest is in the box office popularity of specific film
titles, so the 'biggest box office attraction' category is useful
to me and I have also taken account of the 'runners up' and
'other notable attractions' categories. The categories naming
individual stars are the only ones occurring across all three of
my sources: two such categories appear in every year of the KW
surveys, 'best individual performance' and 'most popular and
consistent star' and I have used these, though I have not used
the equally consistent category 'most promising newcomer' since
there is no point of reference in my other sources.
Before the detailed tabulation of this information which follows
it is worth making some general observations about the
implications of the breakdown of categories used in the KW
survey. Categories concerned with the UK industry, for example,
appear mainly at the beginning of the period, in the later
forties, and with only a few exceptions ('best British film' was
used in 51, 53, and 57, and 'best British double bill' in 1960)
disappeared thereafter. Clearly the category was not a useful
one in the 1950s: was this because there were no British films
of note - no UK industry - or, perhaps, because the industry was
so successful it had no need for a special category? It is
noteworthy that the category 'best American film' appeared
throughout the latter part of the period, in fact slotting into
the gaps in appearance of the 'best British film' category. They
never appeared in the same year. The category 'most successful
continental film' also appeared at this time, co-existing with
either the British or the American 'best film' categories. All
the categories concerned with sales methods appeared after 1950,
implying a greater degree of concern with attendances in the
fifties than in the forties; of these categories the 'double
bill' listing was clearly the most useful since it appeared in
every year from 1951-60 except 1952. Amongst the genre
categories the most consistent were 'most successful musical'
which appeared every year and was thus clearly perceived as an
important generic definition at the box office, as was also the
'best western' which appeared first in 1950 and every year
thereafter except 1954. The categories 'documentary' and
'interest' were not used after the forties, and their demise may
account for the presence of the short lived categories 'artistic'
and 'comedy'. It seems surprising that comedy was hardly used as
a generic category - perhaps because it was perceived as the
production of individual comedians? The category 'comedy team',
naming actors, was a frequent one through the fifties (1951-60).
There were several attempts at new generic descriptions in the
late fifties of which only 'horror' and possibly 'series'
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