‘Just Another Day: The Seaside’ was filmed in Walton-on-the-Naze and reflected a typical day in Walton in the 1980s. The Radio Times entry from April 1983 sets the scene:

‘It begins early in the morning when Eileen Fowler, the 'First Lady of Keep Fit' can be found on the beach, still practising what she started preaching back in the 50s. She-first visited there as a child in 1921 and returned to retire. We meet the Punch and Judy man, the family who run a Wild West show at the back of the car park and Brian and Charlie, resident entertainers, who love doing the season "because we get just as much enjoyment here as we would at the Palladium or Las Vegas”.

Just Another Day was a BBC documentary series that followed John Pitman behind the scenes of places that are considered part of the British way of life. Three seasons were aired on BBC2 between 1983 to1986. ‘Just Another Day: Seaside’ was the final episode of season 1. Other episodes in the first series visited Battersea Dogs Home, Traffic Wardens,  Selfridges, Waterloo Station and Soho.

'The Seaside' episode was directed by English filmmaker Adam Curtis at an early point in his career but has some of his later visual trademarks. Curtis also directed the ‘Just Another Day: Selfridges’ from the same series.  Starting out as a ‘relatively conventional’ documentary filmmaker for the BBC in the 1980s he developed a styles of filmmaking that uses collage of archival footage with voiceover and creative soundtracks to explore multi-layered perspectives on social and political history. He has directed many acclaimed and controversial documentaries including Pandora’s Box (1992), The Century of Self (2002), HyperNormalization (2016) and Can’t Get You Out of My Head (2021).