He burped before collapsing more heavily than the original Colossus, one of the Seven Wonders of the World until it was flattened by an earthquake. While heeling forward, our Colossus — a lard mountain from Romford, Essex — knocked over a tray of beer and squashed a Greek waiter under a stomach more monumental than the Parthenon. Girls nearby, dressed as if clothes were too last season, barely batted a fake eyelash.

Welcome to Faliraki on the tourist hot spot of Rhodes, considered possibly the most dangerous holiday destination in the world — with apologies to downtown Baghdad. Last week a young Briton died here, possibly from a drugs overdose, and scores of others awoke with hangovers — perhaps wishing they had died but lucky that they had not.

In the past year two English tourists have died in drink- related incidents and 10 women have been raped, eight of them British. During the next jolly holiday season David Blunkett, the home secretary, is to send 25 British bobbies to help the local police.

Ibiza, Ayia Napa, Sodom and Gomorrah: they are mere monasteries, we are told, compared with the organised bonk and boozathon that is Faliraki, where drunken damsels from the home counties are said to roll in the street and beg for sex from men rampaging in togas.

Critics say the debauchery was whipped up by British club reps, who had a habit of organising bar crawls where teenagers slurp their way through “fishbowls”, an orange concoction of seven bottles of spirits costing £100 and most of your brain cells. You do not need to be Socrates to predict the result of bacchanalian excess but it has not deterred the punters. Recent television programmes chronicling Faliraki’s seamy cultural delights merely sparked a 30% increase in bookings, leaving locals wondering what has hit their island.

The city walls of Rhodes have survived for two millenniums, seeing off the Romans, Turks and Richard the Lionheart. Can they withstand the barbarian hordes of Club 18-30? Early last week the authorities started a crackdown on the excesses. There was only one way to find out if it was having an effect.

As I found myself being conveyed to a holiday in Faliraki, I looked around the plane and, perhaps tastelessly at 26,000ft, thought: if God decided to down this 767, would the world be much poorer? It was a tough call.

My concern was not so much for my fellow passengers’ social status as their human status. I have not seen anything like it since visiting the hippo enclosure at the zoo.

Indeed, so weighed down were the passengers by gold jewellery and beer bellies (“Any excess baggage, sir?”; “Yes, six Big Macs and 12 pints before takeoff”) that it seemed a miracle the plane managed to get airborne.

“Been ’ere before, love?” I was asked by a middle-aged woman in her best shell suit. “You’ll love it. And the best thing is there ain’t many f****** foreigners.” She pealed with throaty laughter that revealed a lifetime’s attachment to John Player Specials, then returned to her three teenage daughters, kitted out in bottle-blonde hair, who were downing rum and Coke.

A pretty young air stewardess rolled her eyes. “It’s worse on the way back,” she whispered. “Then they are really in holiday mode.” What happens? “Oh, fights have been known to break out when we tell passengers that they have had enough to drink. We’re dreading it.”

Strangely, there is no mention of this in the brochure. Still, with holidays as cheap as £147 for a fortnight, it was clearly going to be a more eclectic crowd than would be found at Bayreuth or St Barts. With more than 105,000 braving a Club 18-30 holiday last year, giving the company a turnover of £35m, this was tourism on a scale matched only by the beer bellies.

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