Interrogating National Identity in the Recent British Holiday Film

Abstract

In Chapter 7 I considered how holiday films of the 1970s ideologically reconstructed a sense of Britishness through their representation of the ‘traditional’ holiday at the seaside, in holiday camps and at caravan parks, in a period of economic and cultural crisis. Representations of the British embarking on foreign holidays can also be found in this period, for example in Carry On Abroad and Are You Being Served? These films — although ‘sending up’ their British characters by depicting them as comedy stereotypes — arguably construct a sense of Britishness by emphasising cultural or racial difference between the holidaymakers and the peoples of the country they are visiting. This is a theme I explored earlier, for instance, in the problematic encounter between the young British men and the Yugoslav characters in Summer Holiday. When cultural and racial difference is treated crassly for comic effect, racial stereotypes can be constructed, and, as Cliff Richard and director Peter Yates found, offence can be felt by an entire nation (and voiced by the government of that nation), who are represented by a small number of characters on screen.