Pleasure Beach, BBC Documentary

Morning all, just reading through the thread about the bomb at television centre reminded me of a 6 part documentary on the BBC in the late 90s focussing on a season at Blackpool Pleasure Beach.

It was fly on the wall and dare I say a little dramatised but offered a good insight in the day to day operations of the park. In one of the episodes there was a bomb scare phoned through to the park around 10pm one night when it was at full capacity during the illuminations.

The park called Blackpool Police who basically told the Pleasure Beach to deal with it themselves and make a judgement on whether or not to evacuate. They didn’t. Unthinkable now.

Of course, nothing happened but it could have been so different. Weird to think back to those days and how there would even be a warning of an attack. These days the first you’d know is when the bomb detonates. Scary stuff indeed.

Certainly worth a watch if you haven’t seen it. It’s available on YouTube but make sure you don’t pick the version ripped from UK Horizons (remember that?) as it is cut to ribbons. Someone has also uploaded the original BBC One airings that are uncut running for the full 30 mins per episode.

Be good to hear anyone else’s thoughts on the show and the topic discussed above 😊

Not seen that episode, but remember any programme, either observational, constructed reality, or dramatised will always be edited to remove at least one important part of any unplanned evacuation or the setting of an emergency cordon procedure out.

Because if you show how it exactly works, and easy it is to close a place down with a fair number of general public around - it would give the lunatic element in society a lot of ideas, when boredom strikes.

Code words would be used in genuine calls - a random crazy making a threat wouldn't be taken seriously (and wouldn't have had the know-how or desire to really kill people).

There's always an element of artistic licence when you see things on TV. Mythbusters used to say if you mix blur and blur together, it generates blur aka something toxic/dangeous/lethal/stupid to handle.

But of course:
http://www.picshag.com/pics/072011/be-careful-when-doing-something-stupid.jpg
(from the Mitchell and Webb book)

IIRC, the warning did provide a genuine code word but for some reason, they didn’t think it was credible. Interesting show though, although the current owner, Amanda Thomson, doesn’t come across particularly well in it. Very bratty and diva-ish with her staff

I'm pretty certain said threat was fictional. If it wasn't, the shots of the manager sat in his office looking tense in the minutes leading up to 10pm and then immediately fine once the second hand passed over the top of the hour definitely was.

The bomb scare was staged. They actually received a threat but it was on a weekend when the film crew was not present, so they recreated it.

Very interesting. I guess it would seem completely unacceptable to do that these days. Using a bomb threat to add drama to what is supposed to be a documentary would definitely cross the line given real world events since this aired. I wonder how faithful the recreation was and how many cigs they went through on the actual night

Another highlight is the washing up liquid in the river caves causing all the park water rides and features to foam up. Priceless. Must take a bottle of fairy next time I go

To take this slightly away from the topic (apologies), this thread reminds me of an infamous late-90s fly-on-the-wall documentary around St Paul’s Cathedral.

I’ve never seen this programme, nor even established which channel it was shown on, but it was still spoken about by staff when I worked there a few years ago, 20 years after the programme was made. Apparently, it was full of these shady 90s-style documentary practices, some of which showed St Paul’s in an extremely poor light, with the cathedral saying that the footage had been edited out of sequence to cause controversy. It was clearly made in a very ‘gritty’ style, with the cathedral authorities feeling duped by the producers, and they had no say over the final edit.

I worked at St Paul’s when the more recent ‘Christmas at St Paul’s’ documentary was made (filmed in 2017, shown at Christmas 2018), and it was quite a big thing amongst the staff that this would be the first documentary filming that St Paul’s would have allowed since the aforementioned incident in the 90s. The production team had to really reassure the management and the staff that they were making a programme that had the intention of showing the establishment in a good light, rather than stitching people up.

It struck me that documentary making had moved on a bit, and there is more of a demand now for ‘nice, warm and fluffy’ documentaries, filled with lots of nice shots of St Paul’s with Christmas lights and interviews with interesting and lovely people who work very hard to make all the events come to life - so, as somebody with an interest in TV production, I thought that the cathedral had nothing to worry about (and that proved to be the case), but it was clear that that experience of the 90s documentary was still really felt in the institution’s memory.

Amazing to think that these documentaries were so popular that a documentary about traffic wardens got Ray Brown a cameo in a James Bond movie, and Mo from Driving School got to release a single.

A quick search of Genome throws up this: https://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/e4352112858a4652a1537c28c29419ba

Sounds very much like it was in the docusoap style of the time.

Found this Independent article too.

Thanks for this, Phil. Indeed, the reason I brought it up was that some of the 'docusoap' production practices that were being discussed re the OP reminded me of what I had heard about this programme.