The Entertainment Industry: Holidays

It was a sort of Joe Loss And His Orchestra. I'm pretty sure it was. Not that I paid a great deal of attention. I was more interested in my "Football Monthly" special devoted to the World Cup.

The year was 1966. The place was Hastings. The hotel was called the Yelton. The smell of beef or pork dinner clung permanently to the walls, the floors and the air of the hotel. Following dinner, there was rarely anything specifically arranged, except for the occasion when this band turned up in a function room dominated by thick velvet, to which the stale smell of lard was able to attach itself with particular efficiency.

Holiday entertainment did exist at the English seaside, but it was rarely in-hotel. The following year, the "summer of love" and hippies ringing bells around the streets of Bournemouth, I was dragged off to the Winter Gardens to see The Rockin' Berries and Mrs Mills. Things hadn't advanced greatly by the time I was able to go off for a drunken week with friends to the Gower and ended up at a caravan site where the evening's entertainment was a drums-trumpet-organ combo. If you've ever seen "The Inbetweeners" one where they go to a Caravan Club meet at Camber Sands, you'll realise that things still haven't moved on.

At some point in the history of holidays, entertainment ceased to be the only very occasional, the truly abysmal and the optional and became the regular, slightly less abysmal and obligatory. But when was it? It certainly wasn't on the first occasion I set foot on Mallorcan soil - 1969. There was no hotel entertainment and of what there was outside, the best that can be said about it was that no one had the bright idea to ship Mrs Mills out.

We used to make our own entertainment and all that. Yet, by the 1960s we were no longer making our own entertainment. Not in the normal course of events anyway. We were supplied with entertainment, and I use the word with caution, and it did of course comprise Gladys Mills, plonking away on the old Joanna before giving way to some absurd Scots singer in a kilt. Yep, that was entertainment, folks. On the telly. But whereas we had become used to not making our own entertainment, when it came to holidays, we were forced to, though it mainly seemed, where I was concerned, to consist of having to sit outside a pub with a lemonade and a bag of Cheeselets.

One can come up with any number of reasons as to why holiday entertainment has become the essential that it now is. But perhaps the greatest single reason is familiarity and the absence of the new. In 1969, it wouldn't have made a scrap of difference whether there were kids' club, in-pool aerobics, Abba, bingo, sports competitions or not. And of course there weren't, and nor were they necessary. There was something very new that was all that was needed, and it was the thing up in the sky.

Holiday, holiday to a Mediterranean resort that is, has lost its sense of the new. Holidaymakers expect things to be laid on. The appeal, for example, of an all-inclusive lies in part in its convenience and its lack of stress, and the all-inclusive, the origins of which are much older than you might think, was instrumental in fostering the contemporary demand for entertainment at hotels, regardless of the type of board. The charge levelled at the all-inclusive that it creates a holiday that could be anywhere ignores the fact that holidays in the Med of whatever sort could be anywhere. A trib act or an entertainment team is much the same whether it's Alcúdia or Antalya. Or is it?

The importance of entertainment for today's holidaymaker has been the subject of an investigation by the Spanish tourism journalist Ignacio Gil via the "Hosteltur" magazine's online community. The results of this are a 50-page eBook. A key message that comes out of this investigation is that entertainment is vital to a hotel's ability to differentiate itself, and given the homogeneity of holiday across the Med, differentiation is crucial. Entertainment is not a cost, it is an investment. It is not obligatory so much as it is absolutely fundamental. And this fundamental demand goes beyond the grounds of a hotel. It is one made of entire resorts.

Gil's report is timely, because it confirms much of the dynamic that is behind the transformation of Magalluf. This is largely one to do with entertainment. It confirms also the Balearic Government's thinking in allowing hotels to expand their range of offer; they will become all-inclusives without necessarily offering an all-inclusive board arrangement, and this all-inclusivity will be one with entertainment firmly in mind.

It's not too much of an exaggeration to suggest that holidays are no longer part of a tourism industry but of an entertainment industry. One can look back and think wasn't it all rather more exciting in the days when everything wasn't laid on, but then one can forget that what little that was laid on was some rubbish band or Mrs Mills.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.