Butlins by Simon Heptinstall

Announcing you are off for a weekend in Paris sounds quite impressive, a short break in the Med is even better and a brief holiday in the Caribbean is like saying: “I’m really much richer than you are…”

But when I tried muttering behind my hand: “I’m going to, ummm, errr, excuse me, cough, Butlins,” my friends and relatives erupted with glee. Men ridiculed, women looked on with pity. I wished I’d said: “I’m off on a business trip, I can’t tell you where”. Anything to hide the stigma of a weekend at Butlins.

But is that reputation still fair? Butlins’ owners have spent years and around many millions revamping their three remaining sites. They’ve demolished old chalets, built tens of thousands of new ‘apartments’, hired thousands of new staff and even changed what they call their camps… but then they needed to something pretty drastic. There aren’t many other holiday options that can make you feel ashamed to mention it out loud in polite company.

Butlins, in true Redcoat style, put a brave face on this apparently uphill battle. They claim that the old holiday sites at Bognor, Minehead and Skegness have been “transformed” with ‘New England style accommodation’, ‘sub-tropical waterparks’ and ‘all-weather pavilions’. They even banned mother-in-law jokes.

Back in 2000, Butlins’ owners the Rank Group roped in armies of celebrities to promote the latest changes: Denise Van Outen, Coronation Street’s Angela Griffin and ex-Redcoat Darren Day helped launch a nationwide search for new Redcoats. If they got the job the new Redcoats found Jeff Banks had designed their uniform, and Trevor Sorbie and Maggie Hunt had been commissioned to devise their ‘grooming guidelines’. Anthea Turner unveiled new accommodation blocks at Skegness and Ronan Keating launched the new-look Bognor resort.

The name “holiday camp” has been discarded as too reminiscent of the bad old knobbly knees era, “holiday centre” has now been dumped for being too boring… so now they’re called “Family Entertainment Resorts”.

I set off for their oldest site, Skegness, to find out whether this latest Butlins would entertain me - a fussy middle-class travelwriter. It seemed unlikely.

The 75-year-old Lincolnshire site has been redeveloped but one thing that hasn’t changed is its sheer size. There are a staggering 9,200 beds on Skegness’s 200-acre site. In peak season all those guests consume a frightening 20,000 hamburgers, 13,000 packets of crisps and two tonnes of chips a week.

A huge swooping pavilion forms the centrepiece of all Butlins Resorts nowadays, creating an under-cover area of shops, bars and amusements. There’s a long list of attractions like monorail, funfair, pool, cinema, snooker club and ten-pin bowling, along with pubs, cafes and discos. There are three concert venues for audiences of up to 2,000 each. It looked so exciting from the road I began to think that even a snob like me could have some fun.

That was before I ate dinner. The meal in the huge Coral Beach restaurant was unlike any holiday experience I have ever had.

Up to 3,000 three-course dinners have to be served and cleared away in an hour. So there’s a mad blur of waitresses dishing out plates and collecting dirties. There’s no alcohol – “we don’t have time to serve it” my waitress explained as she rushed past.

Niceties like pepper are ignored but everyone does get a cup of tea before the meal. There’s a menu with choices but if you choose that long-lost starter ‘fruit juice’ an indication of the quality to come is that it arrives in a paper cup. If this is an improvement, the old meals must have been appalling. My school dinners were better.

It’s easier to see improvements in the new accommodation blocks compared to the one 50s chalet that still stands unused and ignored at the back of the car park. It survives as a Grade II listed building and was the most interesting thing on the whole site for me.

The tiny wooden chalet must have been an extraordinary place to spend your annual holiday: more like a concentration camp than a holiday camp. A family of four would be squeezed into tiny wooden bunks in a bare shed similar to those on sale for £100 at most garden centres today.

In comparison, of course, my new ‘deluxe’ half board accommodation was spacious, warm and clean. Yet despite the millions spent, it had all the charm of a B&Q window display. The carpets, curtains and furniture must have been the cheapest in the world – and you’d have to be drunk to sleep comfortably in the bed. But it did have one of the biggest TVs I’ve ever seen.

The walls were so thin I spent one night awake listening to mysterious grunting from the room next door. In the morning I was surprised to see a smart middle aged couple drive off in their Mercedes.

In fact, as the weekend progressed, Butlins turned me into a Hyacinth Bucket of travel writing, repeatedly peering out from behind the nylon curtain to see who was making all that noise outside.

I realised I was doomed to spend my weekend with 3,500 people who don’t give a toss about Butlins’ reputation but like the low prices and getting drunk en masse. When Resort Director Chris Baron told me he was providing the “chance to leave your pretensions at home,” he wasn’t joking.

Sadly my pretensions never recovered from the shock of walking into the pavilion for the first time and seeing a middle-aged dyed-blonde showing off her large breasts to a gang of cheering lads. I spent the rest of the weekend feeling like an outsider among fellow campers who ranged from portly pensioners in cardigans wearing Elvis wigs, wolf-whistling gangs in matching shirts and a trio of miniskirted girls who had their own wastepaper bin with them… to be sick into.

My weekend at Skeggie was “A Festival of the Sixties” with a line-up including The Tornadoes, Dave Berry, Edison Lighthouse, Brian Poole and the Merseybeats.

The new age Butlins run these weekends as special adult-only themed events with plenty of free entertainment. There are weekends of Motown at Minehead (Edwin Starr and George McCrae), and Disco at Bognor (Shalamar and Rose Royce). Seventies sessions feature groups like The Rubettes and Brotherhood of Man, and there are even Alternative Music weekends with The Damned and Dr Feelgood.

The Skegness sixties bands turned out to be a disappointing series of one-hit has-beens churning out pub rock. The best bit was when the Tornados, the first UK band to have a US number one, performed their one hit Telstar.

The thousands sharing the weekend with me were able to forgive any shortcoming because it’s so very cheap. Prices are from £27 per person for the whole three-night break. My top-of-the-range ‘deluxe gallery-plus apartment’ was less of a bargain, with half board costing £111 each.

I left Skegness thinking that surely more than 100 million people can’t be wrong? That’s the incredible number of visitors that have visited the site since it opened in 1936. Many of those millions may have been bowled over by Butlins but I’d never felt more like the odd one out.