Brits at Play Britain on Film

The soft, green countryside of Kent

with its apple orchards...

..and its hop farms.

Picking hops, that's the purpose of THIS outing.

The visitors live in corrugated iron sheds, which have to be made as much like home as possible.

So they've brought the spare-room lino

and a spot of fancy wallpaper.

Settled in - well, almost - with old friends from home.

And you remember the people who were here last year.

It's not long before supper's cooking.

Scrumptious!

The bigger families have their own kitchen where they cook...

and eat

and sit around listening to the wireless.

The hops grow like runner beans, climbing up strings.

You pull one down, and everyone sets too

to nip off the green flowers and toss them into the family bin.

Many of the hoppers are old.

But there are young ones too.

"Look what you're doing, can't you!"

Mm-hm, another hop garden romance on the way.

There's not been a specially large crop of hops,

but it's good-quality stuff.

In the three-week season, nearly 15,000 tons of hops

have been picked, and that's enough for 800 million pints of beer.

Before the hops go to the brewery,

they must be dried in the oast house.

Soon the hop gardens will be bare.

And the last trailer on its way to the oast house.

Then comes payday!

The head of the family presents the tally card to the farmer and receives the cash.

A happy time.

Yes, the time for celebration.

And, having picked so many hops, who can resist tasting a few?

Holidays with play...

The subject is always news.

Millions of us, all over Britain, start planning our holidays soon after Christmas.

We save up for them all of the year round. We take them in the summer

and then we're ready to talk about them for the rest of the year.

Can you wonder that the water's becoming more and more

part of the national way of life.

Just a quiet deckchair on the beach,

and there's plenty to do and, er...

plenty to look at!

Steady now! A chap gets short of breath watching all this exercise.

By the time the season's over,

about eight million people will have sat on Blackpool sands.

Many of them day-trippers, many of them from the town's 5,000 hotels and boarding houses.

If you're in the mood, you can do the shows,

which range from West End films and spectaculars,

to Punch and Judy.

THEY LAUGH

The Golden Mile and the funfairs

are Blackpool's own answer to the competition of the holiday camps,

and other resorts are meeting the challenge too.

If it's been a hard year's work you can unwind

and forget all about it among the sideshows. There's always something to do.

Today, in this restless world,

most of us have more money in our pockets than ever before

and there are a wider and wider choice of holiday to choose from.

Every year about 1.5 million people in Britain go to holiday camps.

Today there are camps to suit all tastes.

In the last ten years, the number of holiday campers has trebled.

The big attraction of holiday camps is undoubtedly the fact

that everything is laid on in one place. You can join in, or not, as you wish.

Most camps are near the sea, or a river.

And, even in a self-catering camp,

there are restaurants if you want a change from doing your own cooking.

The holiday camp is one place where you'll never see the sign

"no children allowed".

In these camps, children are catered for

probably better than in any other form of organised holiday.

From the moment they get up, bright and early,

until it's time to go to bed and leave their parents to spend

the sort of evening THEY want.

At the modern holiday camp, of this size,

there's every kind of entertainment,

from organised sports, to film shows.

There's dancing for as many hours as anybody could possibly want.

Events like mother and child contests

help while away a wet afternoon.

One of the big problems of British holiday camps is the weather

and alternative indoor programmes

are ready to be brought into operation whenever they're needed.

For those with a little more money to spend,

and who want to be sure of the sunshine,

there are now holiday camps around the Mediterranean.

Some of the new ones are British.

These holidaymakers are on their way to a camp, south of Naples -

one of 14 along the Mediterranean coast run by a French organisation.

This, of course, is a holiday camp with a difference,

with blue skies and golden beaches and a South Sea Island welcome.

At this kind of holiday camp, the accent is always on sunbathing,

despite all the other diversions.

And when the sun has set,

the evenings are warm enough to dance in the open air.

When you arrive at the camp, you buy yourself a necklace

and you pay for your drinks, and anything else you want, with a bead or two.

All this may seem a far cry from holiday camps in Britain,

though it's really the same mixture with a continental flavour.

Down the coast towards Rome, we come to Pisa,

with its famous leaning tower.

It really does lean,

more than 16 feet out of the perpendicular

but it's been leaning for 800 years,

so it's no good hanging around for it to fall.

Even if you don't understand the language, shopping is easy.

So easy, it's hard to say no.

The flower of Italy is Florence.

So full of art treasures it would take weeks to see them all.

Here's the Ponte Vecchio, one of the loveliest bridges in the word.

But we're bound for Rome

and we pass along the Assisi road, reminding us of St Francis,

the founder of the Franciscan Order of monks.

The warm Mediterranean at last.

And time for a paddle.

There's no doubt about it, it's warmer than Blackpool.

The great romantic Byron wrote,

"While stands the Colosseum, Rome shall stand.

"When falls the Colosseum, Rome shall fall.

"And when Rome falls, the world."

And so to the air ferry,

the fastest method of transplanting the motorist and his car

furthest away from it all.

Having booked several months in advance,

you drive to Southend, Lydd, or Bournemouth,

according to where you want to go.

Onto the ramp goes your medium-sized car,

up and into the plane's nose

to the Channel Islands, France, Switzerland or Holland.

At this moment, you, your partner and your car

are 50 minutes away from Le Touquet,

a trip that'll cost you, altogether, about £25 return.

You are also 75 minutes away from Rotterdam

for roughly double that cost,

and 2 hours 35 minutes from Geneva, at double the cost again.

You don't have to be a motorist trying to pass it

to realise this has become a familiar sight on Britain's roads.

In less than 20 years, caravanning has established itself

as one of the most popular ways of spending a holiday in this country.

Today there are nearly 75,000 touring trailer caravans,

about 10,000 motor caravans

and around 250,000 caravans which are permanently on sites.

This camp in Dorset is one of 4,200 up and down the country.

It's also one of the biggest.

There are more than 1,000 caravans here

and all kinds of amenities for all ages.

There are shops of one kind and another.

There's plenty of space for games...

and bicycles made for two.

There's even a miniature railway.

This kind of caravan accommodates the whole family comfortably.

You can buy a caravan today

for anything from £250 to more than £3,000.

Of course, you don't have to buy a caravan to put up for the night by the roadside.

You could, for instance, do this...

Up in the Highlands of Scotland,

they're saying, "There's no business like snow business."

Right across the Cairngorm mountains, the spine of Scotland,

towering more than 4,000 feet high,

the icy vastnesses are being turned into a skiers' playground

from the middle of December to April

and even into May on the higher ground.

It all adds up to a revolution,

to a business worth £500,000 a season.

It has all been created in the last few years.

Every weekend some 10,000 Scots make for the main skiing centres

to join tourists from all over Britain in some 70 hotels,

many of which used to close down for the winter.

Ski schools like this have been set up,

with experienced instructors from Norway, Austrian and Switzerland.

But not all learners make as successful a run as this.

And not many expert skiers, with their novice days long behind them,

can mamba like these aces.

This deep, crisp snow has brought new life to the Highlands

and a new light on the age-old problem

of how to make the most of this far north of Britain.

In a changing world, the people of the Highlands

are moving fast with the times.

They're out to make skiing as Scottish as haggis and whisky.

They're leaping into a prosperous future.

There's one golden rule for keeping fit nowadays - enjoy it.

It doesn't matter, say the experts, what exercise you do,

so long as you WANT to, then you'll get results.

This tough, muscle-pulling stuff, for instance,

is all very well, but for the likes of you and me,

perhaps it's better to try something that comes more naturally.

That's what the Central Council Of Physical Recreation says

and that's what they encourage at evening classes throughout the country

and at their three centres where, yearly,

more than 15,000 people spend a week's sporting holiday.

Experts are on hand to teach and encourage.

Maybe it's archery.

Weightlifters from all over the country

come to Bisham Abbey for instruction from Al Murray,

Britain's national and Olympic coach.

Remember - nothing to stop you trying so long as you want to.

What's this? A family of weight lifters?

Looks like it.

Hey! Take it easy, son.

Timber yard manager Jack Edmonds, of Mortlake, Surrey,

says it's the best exercise of all.

So he has his three sons out in the back garden every morning.

60lbs for Jackie, aged 8.

65lbs for Raymond, 11.

And, for Keith, who's only a three-year-old,

just 16lbs.

Here's more my idea of exercises,

rhythmical movements to music by the Keep Fit Association.

More movement to music -

the Margaret Morris technique of self-expression.

Given a subject to represent, each person expresses it in her own way

and gets plenty of exercise in the process.

After being solids, they now imagine they're liquids -

water, not beer - and weave all over the place.

A favourite is to imagine they're tied up in plastic bags.

Then they've got to claw their way out.

London businessman Albert Meltzer

has solved his problem of exercise by stopping off every morning

at Highgate Ponds.

He's been doing it for 15 years now, summer and winter.

He allows himself a ten-minute dip.

Then a good rub down and he's on his way to his King's Cross bookshop.

Cycling's another way.

Mr Murphy of Streatham rides for an hour every morning,

whatever the weather.

Oh, well, at least he gets the exercise!

Yoga exercises are practised today in homes up and down the country,

or at classes at a yoga centre,

where lectures are given on the meaning of the science.

Here, once or twice a week, students learn

the two kinds of exercise that form Hatha yoga -

the yoga of physical fitness and the control of mind and body.

First they must learn to control their breathing and their minds.

Next come the pure exercises.

There are 84 traditional postures in Hatha yoga

and they are variations of seven basic postures.

Yoga, say its teachers, is not a religion,

it's a way of life. The techniques taught at a yoga course

are claimed to keep the students fit

and to enable them to achieve perfect relaxation,

to remove tension and to balance body and mind.

For some people, relaxation means keeping perfectly still.

For others, it means just the opposite.

And, if you're between 4 and 14,

your idea of relaxing is never to relax for a minute,

like these children in some of London's playgrounds,

which have been specially designed for them to do just that.

The Greater London Council

began to think along adventure playground lines in 1959.

Now 28 parks all over the London area

have special play parks in them, like this one in Battersea Park.

Play parks open during the spring and summer school holidays all day,

and from 5:30pm to 8pm in term-time.

No two play parks are exactly alike.

Each reflects the outlook of its leader.

Free play is encouraged,

but it still needs unobtrusive leadership to be enjoyable.

Up and down the country, the idea of free, creative play

is being developed.

This playground, on the edge of a Birmingham housing estate,

was laid out by the Landscape section of the city's architects' department.

While this comprehensive playground was still being built

by the Nuneaton local authority,

it was invaded and occupied by the children.

The mounds have been made with rubbish from the site

and surfaced with concrete for bad-weather use.

Another new piece of equipment is the aerial ropeway,

which became a firm favourite in no time.

Good fun and good exercise too.

Even with free, creative play,

healthy competition can be stimulating.

Leader Murray Marks, of the Cumberland Play Centre in Camden,

decided to organise a soapbox derby

among the children in the area

and everyone entered into the spirit of the thing with a will.

The heats were run on a time basis

and there was what could be called "a soft finish".

This is the sort of contest in which it doesn't really matter who wins.

It's the adventure that counts.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd