New Robe moving light packages totaling half a million pounds have been supplied and installed to the three separate venues - Centre Stage, Reds and Skyline - within all three of Butlins UK holiday resort sites - at Minehead, Skegness and Bognor Regis.

The ball started rolling when Bourne Leisure’s technical director Mike Godolphin, visited the Robe stand at PLASA 2005. He spent time with Robe UK’s Bill Jones discussing ideas for the refurbishment and lighting upgrades of all three Butlins sites.

Jones then visited Godolphin and Minehead technical manager Dirk Peace at the group HQ in Bognor Regis, and an ideal lighting spec was drawn up by Peace and Woodrow "Woody" Peterkin, Head of Lighting at the Minehead site – to cover the three separate venues at each of the three UK sites.

The installation contract went out to tender and was won by Birmingham-based sound and lighting installation specialists, Cloud One.

Minehead Centre Stage is typical of all the sites, with a massive capacity of 2,800 and in use 7 days a week, 49 weeks of the year, with a hectic schedule and a huge variety of productions, ranging from their own large in-house cast shows, visiting productions and artists of all types, comedy and cabaret acts, panto and kids entertainment.

They also host conferences and corporate events which utilize all the facilities. The diversity of the event programme "Gives us a chance to get very inventive with the lighting and it means we have to be able to lighting literally anything” says Woody.

Any equipment going into this environment has to be super-tough because it gets a real good hammering!

As soon as they had seen the Robe demo, Woody and Peace were convinced that Robe was the right moving light brand for them. They acted decisively and immediately ordered 8 ColorSpot 1200 ATs and 4 ColorWash 1200 ATs – initially installed at Minehead’s Centre Stage – with the other sites following in quick succession.

These are divided between being hung in the roof and used on the floor at Minehead, which has a wide stage aperture and very low ceiling height – so they are great for moody backlighting and blasting out into the audience – which goes down a storm!

“They are bright, fast and have loads of nice colours and gobos” Woody declares “I love them!”.They are run, along with the venue’s conventional lighting from a GrandMA lighting console.

Woody says that having the Robes has greatly expanded his lighting repertoire, and he comments that the CMY system is exceptionally smooth and allows nice subtle colour ‘ripple’ and other similar effects which he uses a lot.

Some of the visiting shows to Butlins also bring their own LDs for the set up and programming, leaving the house operators to then run the show. Woody reports that they have also all been suitably impressed with the new Robes.

For the Reds club venue at each site, Robe UK supplied four circular trusses each rigged with two Color Spot 250ATs, two ColorWash 250ATs and a 1200 Dominator effect in middle.

The Skyline main tented venues are also now benefiting from Robe – with four Color Wash 1200E ATs in Minehead and six each at Bogor and Skegness.

For more press information contact marketing department ROBE Show Lighting on e-mail: marketing@robe.cz