Hi-De-Hi

1 9 8 0 - 1 9 8 8 (UK)
58 x 30 minute episodes

A British sitcom written by Jimmy Perry and David Croft, set in a typical British holiday camp in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The show was quite obviously modelled on Butlins or Pontins holiday camps with the legendary redcoats replaced in the series with yellowcoats (Perry had indeed once served as a Butlins Red Coat).

The pilot episode set the scene, with the entertainers returning for the 1959 holiday season only to find that the Maplins holiday camp  at Crimpton-on-Sea is now being run by a former college professor, the well-meaning but dreamy academic Jeffrey Fairbrother. 

He is a character in stark contrast to his team: the bluff, ale-guzzling working-class comic Ted Bovis, and his hapless understudy Spike; the dipsomaniacal, child-hating Punch And Judy Man, Mr Partridge; the snooty ballroom dance instructors Barry and Yvonne Stuart-Hargreaves; the diminutive, sour-faced jockey Fred Quilly; and the gormless, nervy Peggy, a lowly chalet maid with a burning ambition to become a Yellowcoat. 

Fairbrother was a Cambridge archaeologist who decided to seek pastures new when his wife left him. Fairbrother's assistant was valleys girl Gladys Pugh who also served as Radio Maplin announcer (rousing campers from their slumbers with a lilting "morning campers"). Fairbrother instantly warmed her frigid heart, although her smouldering advances were never welcomed.

Always in the background, issuing edicts (but never showing his face) was the all-powerful but illiterate boss, Joe Maplin.  In later shows, ex-RAF man Clive Dempster replaced Fairbrother in the entertainments hot seat. Two years later, Kenneth Connor joined the regular cast as the children's entertainer Uncle Sammy, who seemed to have a strange hold over Joe Maplin, but otherwise things continued much as before, with the 1959 holiday season eventually giving way to the 1960 holiday season. 

Unfortunately for real-life holiday camps who were trying to live down their primitive past, the series - filmed at a real camp in Clacton - was a huge hit and ran for eight years. Nostalgia was the prime key to its success, but so was authenticity. Plots became somewhat outlandish during the latter episodes - there was even a murder mystery when Mr Partridge was found dead in the camp - and by the time the BBC called it a day in 1988, it is arguable that the series had already outstayed its welcome by a good couple of years.