When I was a student I had a summer job at the Butlins holiday camp in Minehead. I hasten to add I was not a redcoat. Redcoats were not popular with other members of the workforce. While maintaining a superior air to everyone else, nevertheless they had to smile all the time at the campers. This seemed to the rest of us to be too high a price for the privilege of wearing a polyester blazer. I sold ice creams.

Shortly after I started the job an army of decorators arrived at the camp, along with several men carrying a piece of optical equipment on a tripod. The men would set up the tripod in a particular place, look through the optical device, then confer with the works foreman who would, in turn, go and talk to the decorators. After a few days I began to see they weren’t redecorating everything, just the parts that were visible from these standpoints. I was told this was because they were preparing for the company who were going to take the photographs for the new brochure.

On the big day when the company arrived, there was a buzz in the air. Certain parts of the centre of the camp were roped off: the pool, the funfair, the monorail… I stationed myself as near to the pool area as I could get. Inside the enclosure, lots of important looking people milled around. Make up artists attended one of the most beautiful and yet normal families I have ever seen, while technicians adjusted huge lighting arrays and positioned reflectors. There were also two redcoats I didn’t recognise wearing suits that could have been fresh from the box and fitted perfectly. The rest of the world stood outside the perimeter. Crowds of campers looked on with excitement while various officials kept them from pressing forward into shot. Several redcoats (our redcoats) tried to engage the production team in conversation, but they too remained outside the barrier. As the lights were switched on it was as if the sun had come out. Then, after only a few minutes, the dismantling process began and our normal day resumed.