The Millionaires' Holiday Club

The Millionaires' Holiday Club. BBC 2. Director Simon Draper. There is a travel agent in the north of England where the starting salary for employees is £18,000. They are organising holidays that may cost per person that amount for one week. The program shows three of these young women on a work visit to see some of these luxury premises so that they will be good at selling the holidays. It also followed two couples who go on them. One were off on their travels several times a year. They wanted to see the staff as friends and kept hugging them. One of the staff explained to camera that there was in fact quite a social gap between them. The man of this couple was a quiet thoughtful person, his wife was described as being the party, and was dedicated to enjoying her holidays with some serious shopping. The other couple worked all year on their fruit farm business and took one week off to do nothing in style. The husband was prone to making heartless jokes at his wife's expense which she tolerated longsufferingly in silence. The rich holiday makers and the travel agent visitors were all shown as if they rarely had a serious thought in their heads, constantly playing their parts as happy hedonists. The staff were unfailingly playing theirs as ever devoted servants. If you've ever been to a poor world country on holiday you've experienced being many times better off than the beggars who live on the streets - which feels an insurmountable gulf which you can't alter. This is similar but on a vaster scale - these trippers keep well insulated from the poorest inhabitants, rarely leaving the hotel complex or luxury cruiser. The whole thing is nauseatingly watchable. It presents the white holiday makers and their black servants almost as if it's just a fact of nature that this huge gap exists. It shows us how enjoyable such a holiday can be - and therefore how anything that threatens this vast gap of wealth will be likely to be resisted - not as a cunning political plot but as an instinct to preserve this separate realm of wealth which the filthy rich can tell themselves is kindly giving employment to the poor, who they admire for working hard. Like a man convinced the woman he pays to pretend she fancies him isn't acting - they can imagine the hospitality staff are their faithful friends rather than the worker-dogs whose tails wag. Oh workers of the world unite.