Craig Tara holiday park: Good morning, campers

Single-lane roads lead to dead ends and turning circles. Children's toys and discarded bicycles lie on the grass, waiting to be tidied away. Some of the caravans are bordered by mini picket fences, pots of geraniums and clay cherubs by their front doors. It's a world that values the familiar, where relaxation takes precedence over adventure. For more than 60 years, Scottish holidaymakers have come here for a week or two of summer respite. And today, for the 3,500 people who stay in the 900 caravans each week, it is still a magic kingdom, a place where order is imposed on the chaos of everyday life.

It's change-over day at Craig Tara, and 1,500 people are arriving and departing within a couple of hours. Cars crawl up the ten-mile-an-hour driveway and double-decker buses hiss to a stop outside the reception building. Couples carrying suitcases and plastic bags filled with food queue to collect the keys to their vans and struggle to keep impatient children under control.

It's ten years since caravans replaced the old prefab chalets at what used to be called Butlins. The Ayr site, one of the nine original Butlins camps, opened in 1940. It was used in the Second World War as a naval training base, HMS Scotia, but when the navy left it was transferred back to Butlins and opened as a holiday resort in 1947, offering a new kind of freedom to Scots families. The promise of all-in-one entertainment and activities, foodcourts and shopping arcades, ballroom dancing and three meals a day, all for the price of one week's pay, was a winning formula, and Butlins boomed throughout the 1950s and 1960s.

The arrival of the caravans heralded many other changes at the site. Many of the original attractions were demolished or decommissioned, including the ballroom, miniature railway and chairlift. In their place are burger bars, quasar courts and cash machines. Everything has a funky name. The swimming pool is a splashzone, the amusement arcade a funworks area.

Designed to appeal to the modern family, this renaming is part of a concerted rebranding, eliminating the jaded, old-fashioned and working-class associations of Butlins and replacing them with something shinier, more colourful and with more inherent pester-power. But can they pull off the delicate balancing act required to retain the good old-fashioned charm and authenticity of the traditional holiday camp while appealing to a generation that has been brought up with sophisticated technology and entertainment on demand?

As well as the holiday high jinks and unashamedly cheesy entertainment common to the other UK camps, Ayr had an added layer of kitsch. The redcoats often wore kilts in place of the traditional white pressed trousers, and campers were woken by two patrolling pipers instead of the "hi-de-hi". Happy campers were keen to travel for the added tartan trimmings and the camp was served by its own railway station, which brought guests from Leeds and Newcastle, as well as the "locals" from Glasgow, directly into the park. A chairlift was built at the camp in 1959, along with an indoor swimming pool and a miniature railway line.

But these delights weren't enough to stem the turning holiday tide. The camp lost much of its appeal in the 1970s and 1980s as foreign travel became affordable to more British families, who demanded something a little more sophisticated and much less Hi-de-Hi! than anything Gladys Pugh and co could offer.

The rebranding exercise on the part of Haven, which took over the park in 1999, has led to an increase in guests over the last few years. This summer's bookings have soared, thanks to a combination of the popularity of holidaying at home and a 400 package offering seven days for a family of four – including evening meals, all-you-can-eat breakfasts and entrance to many activities.

"Credit crunch? What credit crunch?" asks deputy park manager Richard Bradford. "Our bookings are up by seven per cent. We may be seeing a different type of customer, one that's more used to holidaying abroad, but we're seeing the same level of disposable income as ever."

Every holiday is an attempt to get away from everyday pressures but the park's combination of security and familiarity has added attractions. Here, you can enjoy yourself without struggling to speak a foreign language, grapple with a different currency or worry about missing the football on TV. Just like Butlins in its heyday, the camp is a self-contained and highly ordered universe, comfortingly familiar yet free of the stresses of daily life.

People's reasons for coming here have changed little over the last 60 years.

"There's no country in the world like Scotland," says Mary Caldwell from Cumbernauld, folding her washing outside her caravan. "When the sun's shining, there's nowhere to beat it."

She and her husband George have been holidaying here for decades. He remembers the camp in its previous incarnation as a wartime naval training base. The retired couple foster young children and have bought a caravan on the site. "We'll spend most of the school holidays here," says George, almost tripping over a blue tricycle at his feet. "The kids love it, getting to run around free all day. I came to Butlins when I was a boy, now our grown-up kids bring their kids here."

George stands on the white decking outside the van and gazes at the distant peaks of Arran. "I'll pop back to Cumbernauld next week to pick up the mail and do a few things about the house. Then I'll be back here and that will be us until the kids start school in August."

There are kids everywhere at Craig Tara – shrieking on the funfair's lime-green rollercoaster, rolling down the grassy hills or playing the slot machines in the head-bangingly loud amusement arcade. Modern-day redcoats, known as funstars, run organised kids' events. Usually in their late teens and early twenties, these perky, bright-eyed entertainers perform to both children and adults throughout the week.

Part of Butlins' appeal for hard-pressed parents was the knowledge that their children could be safely taken off their hands and entertained. In the evenings a chalet patrol service allowed parents to escape to the ballroom or showbar while their kids remained asleep in bed. Nursery staff would patrol the chalets, noting any sounds of crying babies or misbehaving children, and report back to their parents over the tannoy system. Since the disappearance of Madeleine McCann two years ago, this is unimaginable.

"It would be irresponsible for us to encourage parents to leave their kids alone in their caravans today," says Bradford. "We simply wouldn't want to do that."

But something of the old ethos remains. The grounds of the park are under constant surveillance, with security guards making regular patrols. Special on-site licensing laws mean that children can stay in the camp's pubs and clubs, accompanied by their parents, until 12:30am. Separate, funstar-organised kids events run well into evening in the Bonga Wonga room, adjacent to the adult Atlantic Showbar.

"It would be very difficult to do this job if you didn't like kids," says entertainments manager Neil Angus. "I say it's a job that requires 500 smiles a day, and I don't think any of us would do it if we didn't love it."

Like the other funstars, Angus wears tracksuit trousers and a T-shirt in bright primary colours. In place of the redcoats' polished leather shoes he wears bouncy white trainers. "Your face is your uniform as a funstar," he says. "Even when you're off duty you are still on stage because someone is always watching. You can't let the kids or the guests see you without a smile."

Just like the redcoats before them, funstars exist to host and entertain everyone at the park, children and adults alike, and to maintain the fantasy of the camp; it's a world just like home but you don't have to work and everyone smiles all the time. But Bradford, who as a teenager did a few seasons as a redcoat himself, insists that in the Butlins days people were happy to be entertained by redcoats with little or no talent. Des O'Connor might dispute that – he worked as a redcoat in Ayr in the 1950s. During the same era, Jimmy Tarbuck entertained guests as a redcoat in Wales. Michael Barrymore, former Steps singer Ian "H" Watkins, Ted Rogers and comedians Charlie Drake and Dave Allen, all spent the early days of their careers as redcoats – or bluecoats at Pontin's.

It's still a good way to get an equity card. Today's funstars, Bradford says, are aspiring singers and dancers who want to show off their talents and hope to be discovered. Many move on to working on cruise ships and in pantomimes, with a lucky few landing jobs as television presenters.

Like their Butlins predecessors, the funstars live on site. Lesser mortals might quake at the very thought of such total immersion in the holiday-camp lifestyle, but funstars are made of sterner stuff. Some actually get withdrawal symptoms out of season. "It's like being a pop star or a celebrity in your own little world," says Angus. "You get attention 24/7 and that takes a lot of getting used to. As soon as you step outside your front door, you are on show. But out of season, when I'm at home, it's strange. For the first couple of weeks you wake up and all you can think about is what would be going on at the camp just now. You go from being surrounded by this constant audience, being in front of 800 people, to nothing. Most of my friends have kids, wives, mortgages. I don't have any of that. But I don't see this as a job. It's a role, a lifestyle that I've chosen."

In the late afternoon the camp quietens down in a brief lull. The funcoats take showers and prepare for the evening entertainment shift. Seagulls settle on the mounted tannoys, no longer used for wake-up calls, but to pump gentle music or make emergency announcements.

By five o'clock the "streets" fill up with hungry families, heading to the camp's foodcourts and burger bars for dinner. Teenage girls strut in luminous mini-skirts and spikey heels, their faces fully made-up under the still-bright sun. Sammi and her two friends, both called Megan, and all from Glasgow, escape their parents and head to the beach in their high heels, dissolving into giggles every couple of steps. Tired-looking couples seem relieved that they don't have to cook and that their kids can only get into a very limited amount of trouble in such a controlled environment.

In the Atlantic Showbar a solemn bingo-caller reads out numbers. Forgotten helium balloons stick to the rafters and a glitterball turns in front of the stage, its light falling flat on the swirly carpet. Babies are rocked to sleep in pushchairs by mums with one hand on the buggy, one on the bingo ticket. Someone wins 41. Kids wander into the red-lit room from the amusement arcade, trailing the smell of fish and chips behind them. The bingo ends and a DJ plays late-1980s hits: Robert Palmer, the Pet Shop Boys. Couples gather at the sticky tables and check the entertainment guide. Later there might be comedy, karaoke with a live band and funstars-led party dancing. Although Haven, like Butlins, prides itself on the range of activities its camps provide, in reality choice is limited – but that's an unspoken part of the appeal. Decisions are limited to chicken tikka or lasagne for dinner. Bingo or dancing in the evening.

Overhead, a plane takes off from Prestwick, arcing over the sea and the pebbly beach below, no doubt heading for someplace brighter, warmer and more sophisticated. Nobody here notices. Foreign travel, and all the hassles it represents belongs to the world outside the gates of the camp. Here it's time to sit back and be entertained by an 18-year-old aspiring pop star in a tracksuit. And there's nothing wrong with that.