Secret Lives (Channel 4, Wednesday)
Timewatch (BBC 2, Tuesday)
True Lives (RTE 1, Monday)
Brit Girls (Channel 4, Saturday)
Well, hi-de-bleedin'-hi, Billy Butlin's final resting place looks like an enormous double bed. "It's appropriate," sniggered his relative, Colin Pither. The "holiday camp king" was this week's victim of the revisionist biography series Secret Lives. Far from being a happy camper, Billy Butlin, it appears, was a paranoid, gangsterish, womanising, social climber.
According to Billy, a man should have four drives in his life: "women, money, ambition and power". The fact that his prescription for a worthwhile life made him sound like a barbarously blunt blueprint of Freudian man didn't emphasise Billy's normality. No, Billy Butlin, as presented, or rather, disembowelled, by Nick Goodwin's documentary was an old-fashioned showman with new-fangled notions of how to give punters a cut-price version of the delights he wanted for himself.
Butlins by the sea, you see, was an empire based on sex. Early versions of the notorious "Wakey, wakey" reveille sometimes included the only semijokey injunction to campers to "go back to your own chalets". Heh, heh, Bill was a card, all right, who didn't always make it back to his own chalet - or mansion, in his case. His first wife was Dolly, one of 10 sisters. Billy, the programme claimed, almost certainly slept with the other nine. Ah, the golden age of happy families!
According to former Redcoats, one drive permeated their gig: sex. Certainly, it wasn't the money which kept the smiles on their faces because Bill wasn't keen on paying decent wages. But long before pretentious yuppie-guff about "remuneration packages", Redcoats knew that they could always get a bit extra in their work. How they sweated in pursuit of the coveted Ram's Head trophy for the award of Redcoat of the Week.
"It really was a title for Shagger of the Week," said a former male Redcoat. "We used to give points: 10 points for the Holiday Princess; 15 for the Glamorous Granny and 20 points for the general manager's wife." Knickers were required as verification for claims made. Doubtless, some fiddling took place within the system and some Ram's Head recipients will take their deception to their graves, which should, I suppose, look like well-worn bunk beds.
Fiddling was always one of Billy Butlin's great fears. From his time as an operator of hoopla stalls, he kitted out staff in trousers which had no pockets. He also used a small army of spies to report back on his workers, a tactic which he continued after he opened his first holiday camp at Skegness, Lincolnshire on Easter Monday, 1936. Trusted families were offered free holidays to snitch for Bill. Mind you, like most showmen, Bill knew a thing or two about fiddling: he used to dye wrens and pass them off as canaries to hoopla winners.
Born the child of fairground folk in Cape Town, in 1899, Billy Butlin served as a stretcher-bearer and bugle-boy (hence the reveille) in the first World War. He made his first fortune by paying £2,000, in 1928, for the European rights to the American invention of dodgems. "Billy got a cut on every ride thereafter," said one smirking contributor, who added that the great man used to carry a cut-throat razor in his breast pocket "and it wasn't for shaving".
Most contributors agreed that Bill had the air of a gangster about him. When he visited his camps, he sailed by like Al Capone with his overdressed entourage. Staff were, allegedly, terrified of him. Still, it is for holiday camps that he will always be remembered. The British armed forces occupied them during the second World War and Bill made an enormous killing in the post-war period - the golden age of Butlin's, when nine camps catered to 60,000 punters every week for six months of the year.
Shortly before opening his Irish camp at Mosney, Bill sent a minion to Dublin with a locked suitcase. Inside was £500,000 in cash. There was an exchange control "problem" at the time. In 1968 he retired to Jersey, where he died in 1980. His wives, Dolly, Nora (Dolly's niece) and Sheila were unable to control him. Dolly and Nora took to the bottle. Sheila was a 19-year-old barmaid at Butlin's when 50-yearold Billy decided she was suitable for other work.
This was rough biography and though it rang true, it's always easy to shaft yesterday's heroes by today's standards. Sure, Billy Butlin was something of a gangster. But his vision (even if he did steal the idea of holiday camps from Harry Werner of Devon) had a kind of transcendental naffness which was unique. "Glamorous Granny", "Knobbly Knees", "Beauty Queen" - they have an elemental gaucheness which reflect not just tawdriness. They have also an unsettling touch of fairground Freud. Billy Butlin was a cute hoor, all right.
Charges of racism were also levelled against South African-born Butlin, although his attitude to black people seemed like small beer beside the double brandy of the slave trade. Timewatch: The African Trade looked at the roots and reality of the transatlantic slave trade, concluding that whites, blacks and Arabs were, all told, just about equally guilty for the shameful enterprise.
Revisionist history, like revisionist biography, runs the risk of abusing hyperbole to make its point. But, on the evidence presented by this documentary, the extent of native involvement was shocking. Humans were traded for rum and guns. As tribes fought each other, the demand for guns became intense, which led to more trading of slaves, which led to a demand for more guns. A vicious circle was consolidated.
Though conscious (just about!) not to minimise white cruelty, Timewatch focused primarily on black culpability. Accounts, some with still pictures, told of certain black rulers' fondness for decapitating captured slaves. One session saw 127 men beheaded "to fill a gap" in a village's defensive wall. Another black king had two slaves decapitated every morning "to give his thanks for a good night's sleep". A picture showed a female slave crucified "to fix a hole in a roof". Barbarous is, perhaps, an overused word, but it's nowhere near strong enough to describe this level of inhumanity.
The Arabs bought boys to turn into eunuchs. Apparently, nine out of every 10 boys castrated would die. Women, of course, were sold for sexual reasons. The unquestioning acceptance of the notion of humans as a commodity seems obscene now. But a slave market in Ghana was trading as recently as 1906. "Racism was not an issue at the time," said a black professor. "Many slaves returned home to become slave-traders."
This was not the Roots version of history. The slave trade, as explained here, was certainly not a black and white issue. It was much more complex than that, although the fact that merchant-class whites made the Billy Butlin-size financial killings ought to have been stressed more. Slavery, internal and external (only about 5 per cent were exported to North America) destroyed Africa. In 1500, the relative development and prosperity of Europe and Africa were quite similar. By 1900, there were centuries between them.
Some tribal kings and chiefs continue to regret slavery's passing. However, if you look at the Third World, you can see that, even today, First World exploitation is as efficient as ever. Many American blacks cry when they are told of African involvement. Still, for all the blurring of the picture, they know that the more ruthless elements of the European aristocracy and bourgeoisie - the "entrepreneurs" of their day - must not be let off lightly. Timewatch raised dangerously exploitable excuses.
Back on RTE, True Lives (a series title halfway between Secret Lives and PR) screened In Production: Joe Dowling At The Guthrie. As documentary, this was suspiciously strong on PR and at one hour in length, it rather delayed its curtain call. Still, Dowling, the former artistic director of the Abbey, seemed so genuinely good-humoured and decent that even Albert Goldman or Kitty Kelly would probably blunt their biographer's hatchets on him.
Flitting between scenes shot in a Dublin taxi (as Dowling headed for the airport to fly to Minneapolis to take over as artistic director at the Guthrie Theatre) and rehearsals of Philadelphia, Here I Come!, the art imitating life (and/or vice versa) theme was strong. As a device to tell the story, this had obvious advantages. Certainly, Dowling's hopes and fears as he headed off had a human - and thankfully, untheatrical - resonance.
But, for all but theatre buffs, there was too much rehearsal once the action switched to Minneapolis. Dowling, whose brief includes PR, administration and fundraising, as well as directing, said that he didn't particularly like the PR and publicity aspect of the job. Fair enough. But he certainly got a big dollop of it from Fastnet Films, who made this documentary for RTE. The only time we saw a hint of tension between himself and an actor, Dowling asked the crew to stop recording. They did. Now, that's a director in action, don't you think?
Finally, Brit Girls. Saturday's edition focused on Cilla Black, who was an early form of British girl power when the Spice Girls were nothing more than a glint in the eye of some Billy Butlin of the pop industry. Born Priscilla White, Cilla was a professional Liverpudlian who nicked some great songs from Dionne Warwick before turning into British television's chummiest sister and later, chummiest aunt.
Enduring through the 1960s, '70s, '80s and '90s, Cilla Black has been an old-fashioned show-woman. Long before Michael Jackson decided to turn himself into plastic, Cilla had a notorious nose job. Still, the professional noses of Fleet Street have never found much dirt on Cilla. Clearly, she has a streak of steel which sometimes flashes through the chumminess. But, on the evidence of this, Secret Lives will have its work cut out if it ever tries to blacken Ms Priscilla White.