The Secret Life of the Holiday Resort
CHANNEL 4, 8.00PM
Spain hosted 10million British holidaymakers in 2016, two million more than in the previous year. With the package holiday one of the main beneficiaries of this apparent rekindling of Anglo-spanish love in the wake of the EU referendum, Katherine Patrick’s documentary travels to Holidayworld, the biggest all-inclusive resort on the Costa del Sol, where three-quarters of the 3,000 guests are from the UK. There, we meet three four-person families seeking brief respite from the gruelling jobs that generally keep them apart, and some of the 500 heroic staff.
The Secret Life of the Holiday Resort is rather harmless, unenlightening stuff, propped up by an exhausting procession of vague statistics and meaningless survey results (“a third of parents say the most frequent rows abroad are between them and their kids”, that sort of thing) reeled off by narrator Blake Harrison (of The Inbetweeners).
All the expected boxes are ticked – techniques for bagging sunbeds, the artery-clogging buffets, the pros and cons of families spending a week in such proximity – but it’s good-natured throughout, even during the inevitable and perfunctory drift into Brexit chat. Gabriel Tate