GREASE The Musical The 1950s

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Teenagers were liberated in the 1950s after years of subtle oppression. Almost overnight they had their own music, their own clothes, their own way of talking, their own culture.

As the memories of war receded, so the young generation rose up and claimed the peace, just as they had done 30 years earlier in the 1920s. Only this time round everyone was afforded a slice of the cultural cake, regardless of class or income.

By 1959 an age of unbridled affluence and consumerism - "You've never had it so good", as Harold Macmillan coined it - was firmly established, paving the way for the profligacy and abandon of the swinging 60s.

The new entrepreneurs of mass market consumerism on both sides of the Atlantic ensured that a week didn't go by without some new craze hitting the shops or the media, preferably both at one. Hula hoops, popsicles, 3D cinema, Davy Crockett hats, bubble cars, motor scooters, transistor radios, pyjama parties, the list is endless.

Some endured, most fizzled out in time. But the greatest innovation of 1950s popular culture, and the one with which it is forever associated, was rock 'n' roll, which evolved out of a synthesis of various types of American folk music - rhythm and blues, gospel and what the British know as country and western. The term itself had been used among the black community for some time as slang for sex.

The first significant rock 'n' roll record was 'Rock Around The Clock', recorded by Bill Haley and the Comets in 1954, which didn't exactly set the world on fire, but it was used for the credit sequence of an explosive film about juvenile delinquency, The Blackboard Jungle. This was one of the reasons rock 'n' roll quickly became associated in the disapproving middle-aged mind with wildness and criminality.

Compared with black r&b, Bill Haley was pretty tame, and even though the subsequent film, Rock Around The Clock (1956), became a worldwide hit, Haley himself never attained the superstar status of his cinematic peers, Marlon Brando and James Dean. There was, however, another singer on the way up who did. His name was Elvis Presley.

Sam Phillips, the first man to record Elvis, had worked out that the quickest way to become a millionaire was to find a white singer who sounded black. From his early childhood in Mississippi, Elvis had absorbed the blues and gospel sounds, as well as country and western. Even without his singular talents, he had the perfect credentials to be the world's foremost rock 'n' roller.

The suggestiveness and sensuality of Presley's singing - he wasn't nicknamed Elvis the pelvis for nothing - plus the fast, pounding rhythms of his songs, only served to confirm every God-fearing parent's worst fears Rock 'n' Roll was the devil's work. As the 1950s rock 'n' rolled on, the generation gap widened perceptibly. Music was the catalyst for many a child-parent bust-up.

That's not to say there weren't adults around to exploit the newly-minted teen market with a constant flow of records, films and clothes. It became, and remains, the most lucrative field of popular culture.

When Warner Brothers were offered Rebel Without A Cause (1955) they saw it as a perfect vehicle for Tab Hunter and Jayne Mansfield, their contract players with the most teen appeal. But the director, Nicholas Ray, insisted on the actors of his choice - James Dean and Natalie Wood. Dean's death even before the film was released sparked off the 'live fast, die young' teenage creed, seen as a natural reaction to living under the constant threat of atomic oblivion.

Every aspect of the teenage phenomenon was exploited as box office fodder. The success of Rock Around The Clock unleashed a tidal wave of movies in which the plot came a poor second to the rock 'n' roll soundtrack In Elvis Presley's second film, Jailhouse Rock (1957), rock 'n' roll was again linked to violent, antisocial behaviour, as it was in High School Confidential (1958), which had juvenile drug abuse as its theme and a title track by Jerry Lee Lewis.

The lurid advertising for America's teen films did little to reassure anxious parents. 'Murder at 120 miles per hour' screamed the poster for Dragstrip Riot (1959). 'Savage truth stabs from the juke box jungle' roared the blurb for Running Wild (1955).

We tend to think of the commercial exploitation of the young as a fairly recent phenomenon, but it all started in the 1950s. By 1958 70% of all American records were bought by teenagers. So lucrative was the teenage market that manufacturers couldn't wait for childhood to be over and the build-up to adult consumerism to begin.

Girls were targeted in particular by television advertisers as the domestic consumers of tomorrow. They were encouraged to ape their mothers and older sisters with children's cosmetics. At a time when bountiful bosoms were regarded as a woman's greatest asset - think of Monroe, Mansfield, Loren, Ekberg, Lollabrigida - the pre-teen bra was in great demand.

But the sexual revolution was still some way off and most boys had to be doggedly determined, and patient, to get the girl of their dreams into bed.

In the words of one of the songs from the show: "Look at me I'm Sandra Dee, Lousy with virginity, Won't go to bed 'til I'm legally wed, I can't, I'm Sandra Dee".