The camping has carried on for 50 years now at the Mosney holiday camp near Laytown in Co Meath. Still known to many as Butlins, even though the holiday camp supremos sold it to its present Irish owner back in 1983, the camp occupies a unique place in Irish social history. Eight out of 10 Irish families have had some contact with Mosney over the past half-century, and their reminiscences - alongside some fascinating early film work of families at play in Mosney - form the basis of the cleverly titled documentary, Faith, Hope and Chalet Key which goes out in the True Lives slot next Monday on RTE 1.
Written and produced by Marion Cullen and directed by Shay Healy - the same team behind last year's Phil Lynott documentary for RTE and BBC - the programme is narrated by broadcaster Mike Murphy, who owes the holiday camp a debt in that he earned his Equity card there as a member of Brendan Smith's Mosney Repertory Players back in the late 1950s. The team spliced contemporary footage (Mosney still in existence) with archive footage of Irish people at play in the 1950s, the latter material filmed at the time on 16-mm by Butlins management. These impossibly innocent and garishly technicolour images were recovered from The Butlins Museum at Minehead in Britain and also from the Irish Film Archive at the IFC. Under vivid sunshine, a cast of colourfully attired campers grin their way through the footage, as if they had discovered their own private Nirvana on the Co Meath coastline. Adding a distinct Hi-de-Hi type flavour to the archive footage are the hilarious accounts of the entertainment on offer to campers, young and old.
Apart from the all-singing, all-dancing Redcoats - who included Sonny Knowles and Des Smyth - there was a series of competitions which ranged from the thoroughly post-modern (even back then) "Lovely Ankle Competition" to the "Lovely Hair Competition" to the "Lovely Lady" competition. It's all as pre-lapsarian as it comes. One of the most popular competitions was the "Miss Che Che" competition, which to put it bluntly was for the fattest person at the camp, but even then the winner was always a "Lovely Fat" person. Sadly, or perhaps not, the "Miss Che Che" competition fell foul of political correctness and is no longer a fixture at Mosney. Male campers were also catered for, in particular with the "Gurning Gala" where the most impossibly twisted face won first prize. Watching the documentary you get the feeling that if the archive footage was edited together, you could sell it to Channel 4 as a ready-made alternative comedy programme.
The camp first opened its doors in 1948, when camper-in-chief Billy Butlin brought his tried and tested holiday formula across the water from Britain where the numerous Butlin camps had proved to be a big success with the post-war, post-austerity population. All of Butlin's camps were designed to exactly the same specifications, and all had to include a boating lake - something he had a mild obsession about. Although the site in Mosney was smaller than its British counterparts, it still included the trade-mark tin-roofed chalets, huge dining hall, amusement arcade, theatre and swimming pool. In a surreal touch, the opening night of Butlins in Ireland featured a performance of Verdi's Rigoletto - which got the highbrow stuff out of the way for the next 50 years. After all, who needed opera when you could have Sonny Knowles? Billy Butlin's proud boast was that his camps offered "A week's family holiday for a week's wages", and the company never stinted in offering achievable and affordable glamour for a mainly working-class clientele. Although an immediate hit with people from all over the country, the Catholic Church went into a state of near apoplexy when the camp opened.
The Catholic Standard newspaper stated quite unequivocally that: "Holiday camps are an English idea and are alien and undesirable in an Irish Catholic country . . . outside influences are bad and dangerous." The Irish people blithely ignored the Church's concern for their moral welfare but Butlin, wary of how people actually used to listen to the Church back then, built a Catholic Church in his camp to placate the hierarchy. The contemporary side of the documentary includes a look at how Mosney recruits its Redcoats (all of whom seem terrifyingly happy and enthusiastic - about everything), interviews with local "celebrities" who once worked at the camp and follows the fortunes of a young singer from Kilkenny, Lorraine Owens who is making her debut as a professional singer at Mosney.
Nothing, though, can beat those faded chroma-colour images and distant sunny memories of a time when lovely ankles ruled supreme.
Faith, Hope and Chalet Key is on RTE 1 at 8 p.m. on Monday