The best thing to watch, if you can’t go anywhere indefinitely, if you can’t even go to a store or restaurant or library in your own neighborhood because lockdown is eternal, is a show about people going on vacation and having a terrible time. I’m not sure how I wound up clicking on “Benidorm,” as it’s not the sort of Britbox I’m normally drawn to, but I did and am now positively begging Britbox to add the remaining seasons. UPDATE: they literally did this in the days since I began this post. I’m in Season 7 of 10.
“Benidorm” is about British (mainly Northern English) vacationers at a lowbrow all-inclusive resort in Spain. Actual Spanish people make few appearances, and are mainly represented by barman (and, with each season, more ageing lothario) Mateo, portrayed by an actor who is at least Italian which by these standards, close enough. The Solana resort serves British food (when not offering up dessicated hamburgers), as by all accounts do all the places in town anyone staying at the resort ever ventures to, and there aren’t many. Authentic Spain is avoided out of xenophobia and cost: One episode has a posh British couple trying and failing to stay at a small bed-and-breakfast type hotel near Benidorm that is very much off the beaten path. This is an upscale route neither accessible nor of interest to the Solana guests.
There’s a moment in any vacation, particularly any family one, where everyone has absolutely had it. A sustained version of that moment is personified in the Garvey family, who sort of anchor the whole show, with its big, rotating cast. It’s mostly too difficult to describe the arguments, because they’re intensely petty squabbles: Janice, the wife, is being too nosy, or husband Mick too stingy. Everyone’s had enough of everyone else, as can happen after air travel followed by a bus followed by all being in the same hotel room, possibly with a spot of food poisoning.
There’s also the occasional family drama — teen daughter Chantelle has been wearing a winter coat on their summer vacation in Spain and somehow no one picks up on her doing this because she’s enormously pregnant, or, many seasons later, now-teen son Michael gets a cheesy (but correctly spelled) tattoo of “Benidorm” across his forearm. There are the occasional other men and women, respectively, crossing Janice and Mick’s middle-aged radars, memorably an early-20s man who becomes creepily fixated on Janice. Mostly, though, there’s money drama, money owed, money lost. For most of the series the Garveys have no discernable source of income, but there’s always the prospect of coming into some money, or of being pursued by a mobster or grifter of some kind.
And there is Janice’s mother Madge, the greatest and truest to life character of all time, always ready with a cutting remark, but otherwise defying description, which is my way of saying anything I could say about her would undersell this performance.
And there is the understated fact that Mick, played by actor/writer Steve Pemberton, has a certain quality. Just throwing it out there.
There are the Stewarts, Donald and Jacqueline. Jacqueline is played by Janine Duvitski aka Jane from “Waiting for God.” Where Jane was superego, Jacqueline is id. She and Donald are bisexual swingers, and tend to assume everyone else wants in on their lifestyle (and them personally) until otherwise spelled out.
There are so many other characters: a gay couple, one of whom (Gavin) would rather be at museums in Florence but this is where life has taken him. A rotating couple of young or young-identified straight women from Liverpool who led me down the “Scouse” Wikipedia sinkhole. The staff of the in-house Solana hair salon, “Blow and Go,” but especially Kenneth, a character I half-adore, half just identify with. The guests tend to think they’re too good (too posh, too cool) for the Solana, but also, why leave? It’s all inclusive.
It’s mainly a show about money and class, which is odd because it’s a show about leisure. Vacation suggests privilege! Well not this vacation. There’s the constant drumbeat of concern over that which is not part of the all-inclusive, namely anything purchased outside the resort itself. The Solana has everything you could want, assuming you want to sit by a swimming pool of dubious hygeine standards, or in your unairconditioned room, or at the one nightclub, Neptune’s, where the entertainment is karaoke. In the later seasons it gets to be a bit more a show about the Solana as a workplace, but the heart of it is “it’s me holiday,” a refrain constantly coming up as justification for bad behavior or just a demand to be left alone.
The show isn’t mad at the guests for being tacky or incurious about their surroundings. For being tourists rather than travelers. Nor is it pitying of them. They simply are who they are and it’s their holiday, not field research. With the notable exception of Donald and Jacqueline, they seem pretty miserable, but they also get to go have dinner and drinks and do karaoke in an enclosed space in a country that isn’t their home. It’s January 2021, it’s freezing, no one can do anything, I’m having trouble picturing ever seeing anything that isn’t Canada, that isn’t West Toronto. I’ll trade. Send me to “Benidorm.”