Modern Times is a BBC series of films documenting life in contemporary Britain. One of these films is titled Club Expat featuring British expats living in Dubai. It’s from 1995 and 48 minutes long, and a mini walk down memory lane of life in Dubai back then, some of which has not changed at all.

A narrator at the beginning says the following:

Dubai is one of the oil rich gulf emirates that attract many foreign workers. For every native Arab, there are three expats living here. At least 20,000 are British. They started arriving from the UK in the 1960s and they still flock out here. Most with the dream of becoming rich quick. Its large British community is a world with clearly defined social types.”

The film features the following ‘types’ and their views on life in Dubai is very much from a privileged white and mostly male perspective. [Update: I found out through the Facebook Group “Dubai - The good old days!” some of the names of the people featured in the documentary. Click on the images above. Thanks to the people that replied.]

The Corporate Wife
The Entrepreneurs
The Old Colonial
The New Comers
The Self-Made Man
The Oil Millionaire
The Working Girls
The Government Adviser
The Bachelor
The Old Soldier

You find out why they came here, the tax free salary (alongside complaints about how it is expensive to live here), the men making more money than the women, the work hard and play hard mentality, and the old timers scoffing at the new arrivals who don’t take life in Dubai seriously and think it’s a holiday. There’s also golfing, wadi-bashing, dancing and more.

The interviews include observations about “the natives”, for instance, the Bachelor talks about gaining their trust which “takes about six to seven months”.

“Once they trust you and you trust them, then you get on pretty well, but it isn’t easy. And of course we do have a language problem, although mostly Arab people speak English and they’re very well-educated because they go to Oxford and Cambridge in England and various public schools. With the Indian and Pakistan population, then we have problems.”

The Government Adviser shared the following:

”When I came there were very few Arabs in the market. If you walked along the souq then, the standing joke was you come back to your house and say ‘Look, I saw an Arab today’…There’s a souk full of a Balochs, Iranis, Indians, Pakistanis, everything under the sun. The locals, the Arabs, were sitting underneath their barjeels keeping cool and doing the business. Now, there isn’t much change form that now.
You think it’s difficult to have 20,000 English and more of the others but no, not to them. They can cope with it perfectly happily. And it’s business and that’s it. Sometimes I feel that many of the tourists seem to get so angry that they can’t have permanent Bedouins running around on camels. Possibly if we got more sophisticated we may have permanent Bedouins running around on camels, but you know when they finish at 6 o’clock, they’ll get back into their Cadillacs and go off to their little palaces.
They don’t have to show you that they are tops. They know they’re the tops and that you may have 20,000 English people or so, but they don’t compete with a good local family. There’s no question about inferiority complexes in this place - no way. If anyone should have any inferiority complexes it should be the Britishers if they knew what they thought.”

The Old Colonial shared this anecdote:

“Dubai is very, very tolerant. You can get away with an awful lot. I mean now you see people in shorts where as when I first came, if any of us played tennis, we always had a skirt in the car and I would never dream of letting my daughter go into the bazaar in a sleeveless dress. Now they’re too polite to protest.
There was an occasion a little time ago, I’m not awfully brave at saying anything, I was with a friend and we saw a girl in one of the supermarkets in the miniest shorts I’ve ever seen and very little on her top and a bare waist. And my friend who is very brave went up and said, ‘Excuse me, I think you are probably new here, but they don’t really like you going dressed like this.’ And the woman turned and said ‘How dare you say that. We are here to help them, how can they object to what we wear?’
And I who never say anything normally went up and said ‘Come off it. No one is here to help them. They don’t need our help. You are here because it’s a lovely life and a nice salary.’ She didn’t say anything.”

Culture comes up once, and these words by the Corporate Wife made me laugh out loud:

”People probably would say the problem with Dubai is there’s no culture here. That’s totally untrue. Tom Jones is coming here very shortly. We’ve had Cliff Richards, Bryan Adams, The Gypsy Kings, all kinds of pop stars come to Dubai. Michael Jackson almost came but of course then he had a bit of bad publicity and didn’t come here after all. But really is everything available here.”

Club Expat feels both quaint and bothersome, but it is an important documentation of Dubai. You can watch the complete documentary by clicking on the play button below.

I miss this skyline of Dubai.

Hat tip to Austyn Allison via Alistair Crighton.

Modern Times - Club Expat in Dubai