Seaside Swingers! The British Holiday Camp in 1960s British Film*

The beauty contest in Every Day's A Holiday (1964)

As British society became increasingly affluent at the end of the 1950s and beginning of the 1960s, the holidaymaker was confronted with more choice about where to spend their annual vacation. With the increase in people choosing to go abroad for one or two weeks, holiday camps had to target new types of consumers, apart from families that had flocked to the camps in the previous decade (as represented in the film Holiday Camp 1947). Butlin’s for example, encouraged honeymoon couples and teenagers to visit his camps, with promotional films targeted at both consumer groups in 1959 – 1960[1].

The lengthy honeymoon sequence filmed at Butlin’s, Bognor Regis in The Leather Boys (1963), gives us a good idea of what the camps were like at this time. As had become increasingly common in British social realist films of the 1960s, the scenes are shot on location, rather than studio mock-ups, although the black and white photography tempers the gaudy colour schemes of the camp’s interiors. 

Butlin's Bognor Regis - The Leather Boys (1963)

In the film Bognor Butlin’s is still populated by people of all ages, and there is old-time dancing in the ballroom, although this gives way to the Twist as the evening wears on and the dancers lose their inhibitions.

Dot (Rita Tushingham) does the Twist

The camp’s chalet gives Reggie (Colin Campbell) and his new wife, Dot (Rita Tushingham), the opportunity to be completely alone together for the first time, and on their third day, Dot complains that she hasn’t seen anything of the camp since they arrived. 

Reggie (Colin Campbell) and Dot in their chalet

As we might expect from this genre of film, there is a grim undercurrent to the jollity of the camp. As Dot becomes accustomed to its attractions, she becomes increasingly loud and brassy, represented by the bleaching of her hair into a back combed, candyfloss peroxide. 

Dot in a Butlin's hair salon

She is determined to enjoy herself and gets drunk in a typical Butlin’s Beachcomber bar – replete with tribal masks and palm tree decorations. Reggie sulks in their chalet, and when Dot returns, all giggly and tipsy, he chastises her for telling ‘dirty jokes’ to strangers. 

Dot asks Reggie to tell a joke

She considers this all part of the holiday fun, but he reminds her that they are on their honeymoon, rather than their holiday. This highlights the difference in attitudes that a holiday and a honeymoon appear to invite, with Reggie not wishing Dot to share their fun with anyone else. The disagreements that they have during the honeymoon are the beginning of the problems which eventually drive their marriage apart.

By the fountains at Butlin's, Clacton, Every Day's A Holiday

In contrast to the relatively miserable experience described above, the appeal of holiday camps for teenagers is best exemplified in the rock ‘n’ roll musical Every Day’s A Holiday (1964), which goes some way to cashing in on the success of Cliff Richard’s Summer Holiday (1963), but without the exotic locations. This film was shot at Butlin’s, Clacton, in widescreen and Technicolor, and unlike The Leather Boys, the holiday camp setting is celebrated as a place where communities are constructed rather than undermined. The film also appears to be an invitation to teenagers to either visit the camps for work, or for their holidays, and therefore captures some of Butlin’s intentions of the time. As Read points out:

The ‘Swinging Sixties’ brought a new breed of holidaymaker, single teenagers. They had money and the freedom to go on holiday without their parents. They leapt onto their Lambrettas and into their Ford Cortinas and they headed for Butlin’s, where there was free entertainment during the evening and free activities during the day (Read, 1986: 170).

In order to attract the teenage market, Butlin’s incorporated rock ‘n’ roll ballrooms, juke boxes, coffee bars, and special teenage chalets which could sleep four in double bunks. ‘During the summer months it wasn’t unusual to find 3,000 single young people at one camp in any one week’ (Read, 1986: 170). 

Mike Sarne, John Leyton and Grazina Frame

This was the era in which Every Day’s A Holiday was released. The film follows the exploits of a group of youths who take summer jobs at Butlin’s, their romantic encounters, and their involvement in a talent contest which is televised from the camp. The film’s cast includes pop stars such as Mike Sarne (who had previously had a hit with the single ‘Come Outside’), John Leyton (of ‘Johnny Remember Me’ fame), Freddie and the Dreamers (as the camp’s chefs), and The Mojos as themselves.

Freddie and the Dreamers sing 'What's Cookin'?'

The Mojos performing in the South Seas Bar -
note the window into the swimming pool behind them

The film makes full use of the Clacton camp’s location, with scenes around the pool, the infant’s playroom, the South Seas Bar, and the Crazy Horse Saloon. Timely references are made in the film to the burgeoning ‘free love’ of the 1960s, and its consequences. In the opening scene the camp’s secretary, Miss Slightly (Liz Fraser) is seen reading a book entitled Sex and the Unmarried Girl. 

Liz Fraser

Later on the identical twins Susan and Jennifer (Susan and Jennifer Baker) are working in the camp’s nursery where they tend to the children’s bath time, and sing ‘Romeo Jones’. The scene offers an ideological representation of a woman’s place in the home as the twins tend to the toddlers and sing lyrics that highlight the importance of looking for an ordinary man ‘to hold forever’.

The Baker twins sing 'Romeo Jones'

Butlin’s introduced an Every Day’s A Holiday competition to tie-in with the film, with prizes to the value of £1,500 including 95 holidays and £100 cash [2], (ABC Film Review, January 1965: 24 – 25). Entrants had to list ten advantages of taking a Butlin’s holiday in the correct order, in what appears to be a thinly disguised exercise in market research: did entrants prefer the ‘variety concerts and repertory shows’ above ‘separate ballrooms for Modern, Rock ‘n’ roll and Old Time dancing’ for example? (ABC Film Review, January 1965: 24 – 25).

Kinematograph Weekly commented that ‘practically every known ingredient of success has been mixed into this jolly film, and it should extend its appeal well beyond the wide fringe of “pop” stardom. Good musical attraction for all but stuffed shirts’ (Kinematograph Weekly, November 5, 1964: 8). Whilst The Daily Cinema’s review highlighted the appeal of the youthful cast but also referred to the holiday setting as if this was a now well-established formula in film:

The film follows the time-honoured routine of getting together a bunch of attractive youngsters, dumping them down in a holiday setting and providing just enough complications to delay the inevitable happy ending for ninety odd minutes …It’s all good family fun with loads of teenage appeal and most filmgoers should find it a sure cure for the January blues (M.H. The Daily Cinema, October 30, 1964: 6).

Monthly Film Bulletin was less favourable, but appreciated the director’s quiet ‘laughs at the real-life camp…notably during an amateur beauty contest’ (Monthly Film Bulletin, December 1964: 176).

Mass catering in Every Day's A Holiday

This youthful representation of the British holiday camp was relatively short-lived: Billy Butlin’s son, Bobby, took over the responsibility for the camps in 1968, and decided to no longer take bookings from teenagers. By this time Butlin’s had a reputation for being ‘a glorified knocking shop’ (Read, 1986: 171). Bobby wanted to bring families back to the camps, and by 1971, figures were up again, with the company taking record bookings (Read, 1986: 172). Butlin’s peak year was 1972, when six million holidaymakers visited the camps (Barker: 2005).

*Seaside Swingers was the American title given to Every Day’s A Holiday. The film's release date is sometimes given as 1965. It was released at the end of 1964 / beginning of 1965.

Bibliography & Further Reading:

ABC Film Review, January 1965: 24 – 25

Barker, Jonathan (Producer and Director), 2005, Coast, BBC/Open University

Butlin, Billy, 1982, The Billy Butlin Story, A Showman to the End, London: Robson Books

Kinematograph Weekly, November 5, 1964: 8

M.H. The Daily Cinema, October 30, 1964: 6

Monthly Film Bulletin, December 1964: 176

North, Rex, 1962, The Butlin Story, London: Jarrolds

Read, Sue, 1986, Hello Campers! Celebrating 50 Years of Butlin’s, London: Bantam Press

Information on Butlin's, Bognor Regis

Information on Butlin's, Clacton

[1] BFI database: Butlin’s By The Sea Campaign: Honeymooners 1 (1959), and Honeymooners 2 (1960), and Butlin’s By The Sea Campaign: Teens 1 – 5 (1960). Winter breaks were also promoted in similar films.

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[2] Butlin’s kindly offered to refund deposits to any winners who had already booked a Butlin holiday and also give them £5 spending money.

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A Little Strollette With Kenneth Williams

On a recent visit to London, between doing a bit of Christmas shopping and meeting my brother for a drinkette I decided to troll around the St Pancras area and retrace some Kenneth Williams haunts.

This isn’t the first time I’ve done this. In September 1993 I made a film with a group of friends called Extracts From The KW Diaries. It was shot on super 8 which gave the KW film a convincing retro feel, bringing life to the recreations of passages from Williams’ diary extracts from the 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s.

Scene from Extracts from the KW Diaries (1993)

For our film we visited a number of KW residences for establishing shots including Farley Court in Allsop Place and KW’s final apartment block, Marlborough House in Osnaburgh Street that is now demolished. (A photo of the latter flat, mid-demolition appears in Butters & Davies, 2008: 270). For my recent walk I didn’t have time to visit the site of every KW residence, but the following is a list of the places I did stop and photograph. I’m sharing them here in case anybody else wants to look them up whenever they’re in London. I’ve also included some screen shots of locations from my KW film from 1993 at the end of this blog post.

Starting at Judd Street off Euston Road I turned into Hastings Street. Williams lived in no. 80 Alexandra Mansions in the early 1970s where the woman in the flat below playing the piano drove him to distraction (Stevens, 2011: 253).

Queen Alexandra Mansions on Hastings Street

Argyle Primary School (formerly called Manchester Street School) on Tonbridge Street is literally a stones throw away from Alexandra Mansions. Williams stands on the roof of his old school in the Comic Roots programme and recounts his rehearsal for the school play The Rose and the Ring.

Argyle Primary School

I then walked further up Judd Street and turned into Cromer Street. Here I found Cromer House where Williams lived as a child and The Boot pub, which features heavily in Comic Roots as the location where KW recreates the communal sing-a-longs that his family took part in.

Cromer House

KW standing outside Cromer House on Comic Roots

The Boot on Cromer Street

Next I walked along Lisle Street, past the Norfolk Arms, another pub where Louie Williams used to drink with her friend Edie Smith (Stevens, 2011: 11).

Norfolk Arms on Lisle Street

On to 57 Marchmont Street where Charlie Williams had his hairdressing business and where Kenneth’s blue plaque can be seen. This blue plaque replaces the one that was unveiled on Marlborough House in 1994 by Barbara Windsor and Norman Wisdom.

Blue plaque at 57 Marchmont Street

KW's old plaque at Marlborough House (now demolished)
photo from the Guardian, 9/5/1994

I then made my way to Upper Woburn Place to see Endsleigh Court, where Williams lived in flat 817, before catching the Tube at Euston into the centre.

This was the end of my St Pancras area walkabout. However, whilst in Covent Garden I walked past Stanford’s in Long Acre – the map company where Williams had a job as a draughtsman before taking up a career in acting.

Stanford's map shop in Long Acre, Covent Garden

On Shaftsbury Avenue I also saw the Apollo Theatre. The site of Williams’ greatest stage hit Pieces of Eight. In my vivid imagination I saw that Kenneth and Fenella were once again on the bill!

The Apollo Theatre (December 2011?!)

Other places where KW Lived:

Farley Court at Allsop Place (screen shots from The Extracts From the KW Diaries, 1993)

Marlborough House in Osnaburgh Street (screen shots from
Extracts From the KW Diaries, 1993)

Marlborough House (screen shot from Extracts From the KW Diaries, 1993)

Marlborough House (screen shots from Extracts From the KW Diaries, 1993)

Bibliography/Further Reading:

• Butters, Wes and Davies, Russell, 2008, Kenneth Williams Unseen, London: Harper Collins
• Davies, Russell, 1993, The Kenneth Williams Diaries, London: Harper Collins
• Stevens, Christopher, 2011, Born Brilliant, The Life of Kenneth Williams, London: John Murray
• Williams, Kenneth, 1993, Just Williams: An Autobiography, London: Harper Collins

The Caravan Park and The Best Pair of Legs in the Business

Reg Varney as Sherry Sheridan in The Best Pair of Legs in the Business (1973)

Britain in the early 1970s was a place of moral panics, strikes and power cuts. Stuart Hall comments that 1972 was a year of ‘sustained and open class conflict of a kind unparalleled since the end of the war’ (1978: 293). Terry Staples also points out that the miner’s strike of 1973 had a direct influence on the film industry in early 1974 when the ‘restrictions on the non-domestic use of electrical power’ during the ‘three-day week’ meant that cinemas had to ‘reduce the number of shows they put on’ (1997: 229).

British cinema itself was heading for a crisis. Most of the debt-ridden Hollywood companies had withdrawn funding from British films at the end of the 1960s. Filmmakers had to resort to tried and tested formulas, such as movie spin-offs of TV sitcoms, or sex comedies, in order to sustain a living. Although Best Pair is not based on a sitcom, it is a film adaptation of a TV play, both of which star Reg Varney in the central role of Sherry Sheridan. During this period there were a number of films released which looked back nostalgically to the traditional British holiday such as Holiday On The Buses (1973), That’ll Be The Day (1973) and Carry On Girls (1973). However, Best Pair appears to evoke the mood of the time more successfully, exposing the holiday on a cheap caravan park for the dismal experience it could be.

A lot of the action in the film takes place at night. This darkness adds to the gloomy atmosphere. It’s as if the lights have literally been turned off – pre-empting the blackouts of the early 1970s. As the campsite’s only resident entertainer, Sherry attempts to construct some sense of community in the half-empty clubhouse of Greenside Caravan Park, by starting sing-a-longs such as ‘Oh I Do Like To Be Beside The Seaside’, but the merriment appears to be forced. The atmosphere is like the aftermath of a party where the guests have stayed too long – a hangover, perhaps from the affluence and optimism of the late 1950s and 1960s. It’s as if the decade before hasn’t lived up to its expectations, and the decade that has followed has seen both an economic and spiritual slump.

Sherry in the holiday camp club house

The caravan holiday in Britain had originally been a middle-class pursuit in the 1920s and 1930s, as part of the fashion to ‘get back to nature’, just as the original pioneer holiday camps had been. Camping in a Romany style van had been a rare novelty for Bohemian types who wanted to get away from it all, the whole point of the holiday (as Angeloglou, 1975: 49-50, explains) was to ‘rough it’, by digging your own toilet, cooking over an oil stove, and by looking after the horse, which most city folk were not used to. The static caravan parks of the post-war era, however, had little to do with the origins of middle-class camping, instead providing a cheap alternative to the holiday camp, with cut-price accommodation. As Walton points out, the number of people taking caravan holidays at the end of the 1960s had more than doubled to 4.5 million in comparison to the 2 million who took a similar holiday in 1955, and ‘The coastline of Lindsey (Lincolnshire) saw caravan numbers increasing at 1,000 per year throughout the 1950s and 1960s from the 3,000 already present in 1950’ (2000: 43). The rows of static caravans were seen by some traditionalists to be an eyesore. In his 1974 poem, ‘Delectable Duchy’ Betjeman expresses a wish for them to be swept ‘out to sea’ by a ‘tidal wave’ (1974: 21).

The crisis of the central character in The Best Pair appears to embody the crisis of Britain at the time the film was made. As an entertainer who has just been dropped by his agent, Sherry’s future job prospects look very bleak. In one scene he announces his options as “the Labour Exchange, National Assistance, and very shortly the old-age pension”, and as a last resort, he pessimistically hopes for death. Sherry belongs, suddenly, to another era. He sings Flanagan and Allen songs and does a terrible drag act that allows him the freedom to fill his gags with innuendo, when in actual fact he disapproves of the sexual revolution – in one particular scene he decries the world as a ‘filthy, dirty’ place, after discovering that his wife is having an affair. Not only has Sherry been stripped of his masculinity, but he has also lost his authority as head of the household. His son, Alan, for whom he paid to have a private education and then go on to university, is now effectively middle class and Sherry feels threatened by this. Sherry believes that Alan is also ashamed of his father for ‘making a living by being a lady’, even though his act is ‘good enough for Royalty’, as Sherry points out.

 

Sherry in drag

Sherry is a monarchist. His ‘idea of England’ as Stuart Hall refers to, is an imperial one, with ‘a commitment to what Britain has shown herself to be capable of, historically…rooted in ‘feelings about the flag, the Royal Family and the Empire’ (1978: 147). The film was made at a time when the Royal Family was relatively free from scandal, and it could be argued that the strong Royalist sentiments of the time were a reaction again to the crisis of the period. Princess Anne’s wedding was celebrated in the year of the film’s release, and the Jubilee came four years later. These celebrations were part of a trend of nostalgia, as Britain desperately looked back to the Coronation; a time when it was coming out of a period of austerity and rationing and was looking forward to better times.

Sherry constructs part of his national identity around his monarchist values, and name-drops the Queen at any given opportunity, his brief meeting with her, being the highpoint of his career, and a boost to what little ego he has left. He stretches the story, however, beyond credibility, telling two young campers that his Royal command performance was by special request from her Majesty, and that his job at the caravan park is merely a ‘paid holiday’. Later, we get a glimpse of a photograph of the occasion. The Queen is greeting a group of entertainers after their performance, but Sherry is on the back row, and not in close proximity to the monarch, which puts paid to his later claim that he’s shaken hands with her.

The argument that ensues is triggered by Sherry’s not knowing the proper way to eat cake during middle-class ‘tea’. The vicar’s Georgian silver tea service, handed down from his grandmother is a symbol of inherited wealth. Mary expresses her admiration for it – she sees it as a symbol of ‘family’, whereas, Sherry is intimidated by it. He tries to go one better by saying that he has eaten off gold plates with the Queen. The claim is so ludicrous that no one believes him for a minute, and the lie is further compounded by Sherry’s saying that it happened first at Buckingham Palace, then Windsor Castle. Sherry wrongly believes that an association with Royalty gives him ‘class’, not realising that those who do have class might not necessarily give a damn whether he has met the monarch or not. He also attempts to speak of his relationship with the Queen in ‘show business’ terms by saying she has ‘warmth and star quality’. This is an attempt by Sherry to exclude the vicar and underline his allegiance to the Queen, and in turn demonstrate her supposed loyalty to entertainers.

The Garden Party

Sherry’s façade then slips. He stops speaking in Received Pronunciation, throws down his pastry fork and eats the cake with his hands, much to the disgust of everyone else. By trying to break their pretence by disregarding the rituals of eating with a fork, plate and napkin, he reduces eating to its most basic function and makes it grotesque. He then also admits to his working class status by arguing that he has ‘slaved himself into the ground to make a gentleman’ of Alan. When his lie about having eaten with the Sovereign fails to convince, he desperately claims that he has ‘shaken hands with her’. Even this is a lie, and one which his wife refuses to back him up on. The bitterness of Sherry, and his lack of identity is fore-grounded in a scene which could have come as light relief, set as it is in an English country garden, away from the bleak and depressing campsite. The setting, however, throws Sherry’s inadequacies into relief. He doesn’t fit in with the middle-class traditions of the past, and without the support of his family, and uncertain job prospects, his future is uncertain too.

If earlier depictions of the holiday camp in films such as Sam Small Leaves Town (1937) and Holiday Camp (1947) attempt to construct an ideal working class community in the pre- and post- war, in The Best Pair community falls apart, prefiguring an emergent pessimism, expressed in the crisis of the three-day week.

Bibliography:

Angeloglou, Maggie, 1975, Looking Back at Holidays (1900-1939), EP Publishing

Betjeman, John 1974, A Nip in the Air, London: John Murray

Hall, Stuart, Critcher, Chas, Jefferson, Tony, Clarke, John, Roberts, Brian, 1978, Policing the Crisis, Mugging, the State, and Law and Order, London: Macmillan

Staples, Terry, 1997, All Pals Together, The Story of Children’s Cinema, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press

Walton, John K., 2000, The British Seaside, Holidays and Resorts in the Twentieth Century, Manchester: Manchester University Press

The Phantom Ride: Then and Now

The phantom ride was a popular genre or filming technique of silent cinema. For the production of these films a camera was attached to the front of a train or other vehicle in order to capture the excitement of speed and motion. These early films usually only ran for a minute or less and often appeared as a fairground or theatrical attraction. For example, the early film pioneer R. W. Paul made a film entitled On a Runaway Motor Car Through Piccadilly Circus (1899) ‘which showed the view from a car ‘speeding’ through the streets’, probably created by ‘under-cranking’ the camera during filming (Chanan, 1980: 286).

Of perhaps more interest here, however, is Paul’s film from the previous year, A Switchback Railway (1898), for which a camera was attached to the front of a rollercoaster. Barnes (1983) comments that ‘audiences in those days were not accustomed to such cinematic view-points [sic] and would have found the film much more thrilling than we do today’ (Barnes, 1983: 17-18). He goes on to say that it is ‘an interesting film and still entertains, but its appeal today is far different from that which was originally intended’ (Barnes, 1993: 18). It is a valid comment, but it could be argued that Barnes is considering the film in the context of it being a novelty and a contrast to the ‘complexities of modern-day cinema’ (Barnes, 1983: 18). What should be considered is that although the phantom ride disappeared as a subject matter in its own right, due to the ‘narrativization of cinema’ and longer running times, it became incorporated into the narrative as a momentary ‘attraction’ (Elsaesser, 1990: 60; 56).

As Charles Musser suggests, as early as 1899 phantom rides ‘became incorporated into the travel narrative, enabling the showman to literalize the traveller’s movement through time and space…G. A. Smith made a one-shot film of a couple kissing in a railway carriage – a gag which had comic-strip antecedents. He suggested that showmen insert Kiss in the Tunnel into the middle of a phantom ride, after the train had entered the tunnel’ (Elsaesser, 1990: 128).

In an echo of R. W. Paul’s ‘switchback’ film, an exciting rollercoaster ride scene appears in the Blackpool Pleasure Beach sequence in Hindle Wakes (1927). The camera shots cut between point of view (POV) shots from the front of the rollercoaster, and shots of the main protagonists Fanny Hawthorn (Estelle Brody) and Allan Jeffcote (John Stuart) reacting to the thrill of the ride. Other Pleasure Beach ride POV shots appear in Sing As We Go (1934) and the documentary Holiday (1957), again combined with reaction shots from the holidaymakers in order to construct a thrilled reaction from the cinema-going audience. 

 

 The Big Dipper sequence from Hindle Wakes (1927)

In later years, the phantom ride also reappeared elsewhere in a different guise. One such example was the ‘Cine 2000’ at Alton Towers theme park which attracted visitors between 1980 – 1992. This was a large dome-shaped cinema which the audience stood inside, immersed in POV shots being projected on the concave ceiling of the dome. As the author of the Alton Towers Almanac website comments:

The Cine 2000 was a must have attraction in the early eighties, with many other parks around the country also installing them at about the same time… The movie itself was made up of specially filmed scenes on roller coasters, racing cars, and such like. The idea worked well, and many times I can remember people falling over, as they completely lost their sense of balance while watching (Alton Towers Almanac).

Today, phantom rides also appear as a marketing tool on the Blackpool Pleasure Beach website and on the Pleasure Beach YouTube channel, which features POV videos from the front of the Pepsi Max Big One, Infusion, and Revolution rollercoaster rides, for instance. Similarly, there are numerous amateur videos uploaded on YouTube by thrill-seeking holidaymakers who have either filmed their POV of the rides, or else, turned their cameras onto themselves to capture their faces as they scream. The phantom ride may have faded as a cinema genre or subject, but these examples prove that it still lives on today in some form, with marketing teams and amateur filmmakers considering the POV shots from these rides as worthwhile content for sharing on the internet.

POVs from 'The Big One' from the Pleasure Beach YouTube channel

Bibliography & External Links:

Barnes, John, 1983, Pioneers of the British Film, London: Bishopsgate Press

Chanan, Michael, The Dream That Kicks, The Prehistory and Early Years of Cinema in Britain, 1980, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul

Elsaesser, Thomas, (eds) Early Cinema, Space, Frame, Narrative, (1990), London: BFI

www.towersalmanac.com/areas/rides.php?id=47

www.blackpoolpleasurebeach.com

The Holiday and British Film

 

From the cover: ‘Using the history of the British holiday as a framework, Matthew Kerry offers a refreshing insight into a previously neglected area of popular British cinema – the holiday film. Looking at key films from the silent period to the recent past, Kerry considers how these representations may reinforce feelings of national identity. The book includes production histories and textual analyses of films such as A Seaside Girl (1907), Holiday Camp (1947), Summer Holiday (1963), and Bhaji On The Beach (1993), and provides an exploration of their social function.’

Well, the books finished and out at last. Very pleased with the results. I’ve already heard that wisecrack “what’s next?” from a couple of folks… but never mind. Sometimes you need to stand still and enjoy the moment. They don’t come round too often. In coming weeks I’ll blog a few entries on the contents of the book here and also some extra thoughts that didn’t make it to the final draft.

Here’s a break down of the contents:

Introduction – Here I consider the analogy between film and the holiday. Jeffrey Hill considers that holidays are ‘imagined events’ claiming succinctly that holidays  ‘exist in the mind’ and are ‘capable of generating immense pleasures of anticipation and remembrance’ (Hill, 2002: 86). In some respects the idea of the holiday as an ‘imagined event’ is what links the holiday to cinema. Kuhn argues that a common feature of 1930s cinemagoers’ accounts of their visits to the pictures is a pattern of ‘anticipation, transportation and elevation’ with audience members looking forward to-, then being ‘carried away’ by the films, and subsequently hanging onto this feeling until their next visit (Kuhn, 2002: 229, 230 and 233).

Chapter 1: The British Holiday Film and Its Audience – In this chapter I offer a speculative analysis of the ways in which the holiday film might engage with society, and consider whether it reflects or critically engages with it.

Chapter 2: Theorising the Holiday – I look at the ways in which the holiday has been theorised including Urry’s ‘tourist gaze’ (2002) and theories of national identity (Anderson, 1991 and Billig, 1995) and consider how these might be linked to ideas about the British holiday film.

A patriotic advert for Blackppol Pleasure Beach

Chapter 3: The Postcard Comes To Life: Early British Film and the Seaside –

This chapter focuses on representations of the seaside holiday in postcards and films of the late Victorian and Edwardian period. Films under analysis include Landing at Low Tide (1899) and A Seaside Girl (1907), the latter being one of the few surviving films that Cecil Hepworth made in Bognor Regis.

A Seaside Girl (1907)

 

Chapter 4: Holidays With Pay: The Working Holiday of the 1930s – This chapter is themed around the idea of the working holiday on film, and I analyse the Fields film Sing As We Go (1934) and Formby’s No Limit (1935), to support my arguments. I also refer to the little-seen Sam Small Leaves Town (1937) and Bank Holiday (1938).

Chapter 5: Reconstructing the Family Holiday: The Holiday Camp in Postwar British Film  – In this chapter I consider how Billy Butlin appeared to capture the postwar mood with his large commercial camps, and how this idea was represented in the film Holiday Camp (1947). I examine how the film’s narrative works to ideologically reconstruct the family unit, and its traditional gender roles which had been deconstructed in the Second World War.

Chapter 6: From Austerity to Affluence: Holidays Abroad in Postwar British Film – In this chapter I investigate the foreign holiday in the latter postwar period. Films under analysis include Innocents In Paris (1953), Doctor At Sea (1955), Carry On Cruising (1962) and Summer Holiday (1963).

Cliff Richard in Athens for Summer Holiday (1963)

Chapter 7: Grim Nostalgia and the Traditional British Holiday of the 1970s – In this chapter anxieties concerning British identity in a period of cultural and economic crisis are examined by looking at the representation of the traditional British holiday in the 1970s. The films I analyse to support my arguments include Carry On At Your Convenience (1971), The Best Pair of Legs in the Business (1973), That’ll Be The Day (1973), Carry On Behind (1975) and Confessions From A Holiday Camp (1977).

Chapter 8: Interrogating Representations of National Identity in the Recent British Holiday Film – In this chapter I consider if there is a sense of Britishness that accommodates multiculturalism through the use of the holiday in Bhaji on the Beach (1993) and Last Resort (2000). I also look at other representations of the holiday film of the past few decades including Guest House Paradiso (1999), Kevin and Perry Go Large (2000), A Room For Romeo Brass (2000), Venus (2004), Somers Town (2008) and Never Let Me Go (2010).

The book’s conclusion summarises all of the above, and the Select Filmography lists all of the films mentioned in the book. I will post a more comprehensive list of Holiday Films elsewhere on this Blog.