The British seaside holiday did not end on the train home. For a mill town family in 1950s Blackpool, the last day of a British seaside holiday began at breakfast on a Saturday, with a suitcase that would not close and a room that already belonged to somebody else.

This documentary follows that one morning, hour by hour. Blackpool, Saturday 12 July 1952: the last breakfast in a boarding house off the promenade, the rooms given up by mid-morning, the slow walk along the front in travelling clothes, the wait at Blackpool Central station, and the evening a whole Lancashire town came home at once. Along the way it explains the Wakes Week calendar that decided when a holiday ended, the savings clubs that paid for it, and the Saturday changeover that gave a landlady a few hours to turn her house around.

But the last morning held something that is easy to miss, and it is the reason the sadness was bearable. It was said on the doorstep, as the suitcase was lifted. When the station closed in 1964 and the package holiday to Majorca came within reach, families gained guaranteed sun and lost that one thing. The film is about what it was.

It is also honest about who never had a last morning at all: the families who could not afford to go, and the Black British families who could legally be refused a room at a boarding house door until 1968.

If your family took these holidays, or you grew up hearing about them, this is for you. The central family and landlady are composites drawn from documented accounts of Lancashire holidaymakers; the dates, the station, the holiday calendar and the law are verified.

More films on the boarding houses, piers, promenades and holiday trains of Britain between 1920 and 1980 are on the channel. Subscribe to follow the series, and tell us in the comments what your family did in the last hour before the train.