BBC Time Shift – The Great British Seaside Holiday (2003)

Timeshift presents a bank holiday celebration of the British seaside holiday experience from its Victorian origins and heyday in the 1950s to its slow decline and attempts at reinvention since.
Interviewees including Jonathan Meades, Martin Parr and Bill Pertwee explain the way that the seaside has always been the place we all visit to lose our inhibitions and reveal a different side to ourselves. We look at how our different experiences of the seaside – end of the pier shows, fearsome landladies and holiday camps – have given rise to different traditions and a nostalgia, both working-class and middle-class, for a time when life’s pleasures were simpler and foreign holidays were the preserve of the very rich.