First get a decent script

Strap to come herecome herecome herecome here

So you want to be a video star? Just turn up on the seafront at Weymouth any day, and take the lead role in a video postcard to your pals.

Like all good ideas, this one is simple. Weymouth tourist information centre has borrowed a video camera and recorder, and set it up on the promenade in the Dorset resort. Holidaymakers pay pounds 3.95, then preen themselves while Andy White, a professional photographer, sets up the studio-quality camera and starts it rolling.

When I turned up with my pounds 3.95, one of the staff diplomatically asked "Are you sure you want to record one in this weather?" The steely waters in the Channel were reflecting the increasingly murky clouds massing in the east: a typical autumn day at the British seaside. "Yes, please".

What may put you off more than the weather was what I had failed to grasp: that the whole experience takes place in full view of fellow tourists. So here's a tip: before you start addressing your mum, pals, lover or colleagues: get a decent script.

Though unprepared to speak, I had prepared a prop - cod and chips. While battling to keep the microphone and lunch apart, I stumbled through a "Weather terrible as you can see, bet you're glad you're not here" routine. Curious passers-by wandered in and out of shot. No one actually heckled, but their faces clearly asked "What is this fool doing?". When your two minutes of infamy are over, Andy White makes a gesture like someone cutting your throat, and stops the machine.

Your ritual humiliation is not yet over, though. The resulting video nasty is replayed immediately on TV monitors in the tourist office, "to make sure it's recorded all right".

Postage (first class 77p) is not included in the price of the videos, on the grounds that some people will want to post them abroad and others just take them home. At under pounds 4 a time, Weymouth is not going to make a fortune out of the deal. But the pay-off, as far as Weymouth is concerned, is that the recipient of your despatch has to sit through a 15-minute film extolling the virtues of the resort.

"We'd been looking at doing a promotional video for some time, but discounted the idea because of the cost and the fact that no one ever watches them," says Harvey Bailey of Weymouth & Portland Borough Council. "Then a couple of independent producers made films about the Cutty Sark and VE Day, and we used the material they'd shot to compile our video."

When Mr Bailey addressed the thornier problem of how to persuade people to watch the thing, he came up with the idea of the video postcard - having a blank two-minute space at the end for the sender's personal message. To get to the juicy (or, in my case, plain messy) bit, you watch an introduction to the resort where King George III began the fashion for sea bathing in 1789.

The video postcard is already spreading. Helen Caldwell, who runs the Independent Travellers World exhibitions, is planning to import the idea for her travel fairs in Bristol, London and Edinburgh next year. "We won't be needing the Weymouth promotional video - we're hoping to experiment with colour-separation overlays to give people a choice of backgrounds." This sounds like the hi-tech equivalent of putting your head through a cardboard mock-up of Charles and Di. Should you be tempted to take up the opportunity, remember not to wear blue. Otherwise you could find the Serengeti projected where your shirt should be, destroying the whole illusion of television. And start rehearsing that script right now.