`Programmes. Only 10 bob," quipped the tin-hatted old-timer rattling a collecting box marked "War Effort" attached to his Home Guard webbing. Every Wednesday night during the summer season, Dad's Army comes to life in Weston-superMare. Mondays, it's The Good Old Days; Tuesdays, Songs From The Shows; tonight, We'll Meet Again. All of them trips down memory lane for the OAPs who make up the bulk of the resort's summer visitors these days.

Although the toe-tapping audience loves every minute of it, the evening's entertainment at the Winter Garden is by no means a sellout and a far cry from the star-studded pre-television summer shows I remember from childhood holidays in Blackpool when each of the three piers - not to mention the other theatres in the network of streets behind the promenade - fought the battle of the stars, their weapons being the cream of English comedy and glamour: the Beverley Sisters, Morecambe and Wise, Dickie Valentine, Hilda Baker, Frankie Vaughan, Frankie Howerd, Max Bygraves, Alma Cogan and the inevitable chorus of high-heeled, highkicking beauties, the Tiller Girls.

I know because I still have their autographs, scrawled signatures on photographs stuck onto pastel coloured paper in a green fake-leather book.

Unlike most of my school friends for whom a seaside holiday meant one or two weeks' bucket-and-spading somewhere wholesome like Devon or Cornwall, my father worked in "variety" as it was then called, and summer meant a rented house in Blackpool - England's answer to Las Vegas. In the place of blackjack and roulette there were fruit machines and assorted other-ways-to-take-your-money automata.

Although the beach had its share of families huddled around billowing wind-breaks, the real life of Blackpool was played out on the piers. This was where the wooden boarding rattled and groaned as matrons pushed prams and pushchairs, old gents in wheelchairs held onto their hats, children whined and pale-chested muscle-men and buxom young women in floral dresses eyed each other up.

Everyone idled away the days on dodgems and donkeys, eating candy floss, ice-cream, chips and Blackpool rock. The boarding houses that ran from Fleetwood in the north to Lytham St Anne's in the south were strict. Rooms were to be vacated by 10 a.m., lunch was at 12.30 p.m. sharp and you were not to be back before 5 p.m. At 7 p.m., with the evening meal over, the Prom was alive again, women with cinched-in waists, men in suits and ties. It was show time.

Until the coming of cheap package deals to the costas, this was what a week by the sea meant to the vast majority of the English, a pattern repeated around the coast, each resort having its own niche in the social hierarchy: Blackpool, Skegness and Margate (brash) Scarborough, Brighton and Torquay (posh), Eastbourne, Morecambe and Ilfracombe (genteel).

Although Weston-super-Mare was never in that league, until 10 years ago it always had at least three shows, according to Ted Shepherd, veteran comedy star of We'll Meet Again. This is his eighth year at the Winter Garden, and the programme never changes, he admits, bar the updating of a few jokes. But as he explained, "If you're doing a Max Miller routine, it doesn't do to extemporise". He was in the last show ever staged on the North Pier in the late 1970s. "They said we'd never break even, but we were sold out. There were 180 people who couldn't get in." The building now lies derelict, waiting for money - private or lottery - to revive it.

The Pavilion Theatre still survives as a touring venue and in the summer hosts weekend "Specials": this year Bobby Davro, Joe Brown, Ken Dodd, interspersed with weekly regulars - That'll Be The Day (homage to the 1960s), Jethro, a Cornish stand-up ("A record-breaking nine appearances on the Des O'Connor Show") and the local amateur operatic society.

The competition, Ted Shepherd believes, is not the free entertainment offered by pubs but television itself. "The old days of the shared TV lounge are gone. To be competitive every B&B and guest house must offer TV in every room. Some even have satellite and cable."

Yet Weston-super-Mare's shadow of a show is enough to ensure its inclusion in the fast-shrinking list of resorts that offer live entertainment at all. Blackpool still tops the list, but at Great Yarmouth, for example - centre of the Norfolk Broads with a claimed 17 million visitors a year - there is nothing.

Cromer, 30 miles along the coast, however, is keeping the tradition alive. An Edwardian resort clinging to a north-facing cliff, Cromer is famous for its pier, voted Pier of the Year by the National Piers Society. The current structure is nearly 100 years old, and is home to the local lifeboat and the Pavilion Theatre, which has hosted summer seasons since the 1930s.

The night I go to see Seaside Special Retro 2, it is blowing a gale with winds of 40 miles per hour and horizontal rain to match. When I ask whether the show might be cancelled, the box office staff just laugh. It had never happened yet, though one confesses that a friend, playing in the pit, had felt the pier shudder one stormy night. Had I booked a ticket? Well they would see what they could do.

I couldn't believe that more than a handful of people would possibly venture out on such a night. But it is packed - only 10 seats empty in a theatre with a capacity of over 300, and this was a Monday. So how do they do it? No household names from the world of television to lure holidaymakers from their sets, but sheer energy and professionalism. The humour is just the right side of naughty, the girls are more sequinned than sexy and the singing is smart-cruise classy.

In traditional concert-party style, it is studded with speciality acts - the trumpet player, the trick cyclist, the juggler - all performed by members of the company. The ventriloquist - usually an excruciating spectacle - is frankly brilliant, and someone ought to sign up Jasper the politically incorrect bustard immediately. Only the finale, with tap-dancing guardsmen (There'll Always Be An England) oversteps the acceptable face of camp.

Although the pier never feels unsteady, the roar of the wind is a constant reminder of where you are and how bloody stupid it is to be sitting feet above a boiling sea that claims lives on a regular basis. Emerging at the end of the show (two-and-a-half hours long, but the audience yelled for more) it is a struggle to walk the 100 yards or so across the open plankway, the wind doing its best to buffet you over the handrail into the churning black beneath.

While we were cocooned in the theatre, it seemed there was "a shout". The Cromer lifeboat had been called out and the road between the pier and the cliff face is littered with cars abandoned by the lifeboat crew of butchers, electricians and guest-house owners. There is no saying when they would be back.

I look at my neatly parked car aghast. Utterly boxed in, and my bed is 30 miles away. No matter. The Hotel de Paris still has lights on, and perhaps a room with a view. As somebody once said, it's an ill wind.