 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 Butlin's or Pontins
holiday camps with the legendary redcoats replaced in the series
with yellowcoats (Perry had indeed once served as a Butlin's 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.
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