Gervase Phinn: Punch in the eye of a storm

I loved making sand castles on the beach, the donkey rides, steering the chugging, smelly little motor boats on the boating lake, listening to the music at the Spa, walking along the promenade, lips sticky with candy floss, and the sweet pink sticks of rock which lasted for hours and hours.

I loved the climb up to the castle and, later, hungry from the walk, fish and chips with bread and butter and a pot of tea in the caf on the front.

Recently, I visited Scarborough to appear at the Spa theatre and took a nostalgic walk along the beach recalling the happy days I spent in the town with my parents all those years ago. Not a great deal had changed over the years but one thing was missing – the Punch and Judy show.

I do hope that Scarborough hasn't gone down the politically correct road of banning this wonderful children's entertainment. I guess today the drama of wife beating, child abuse, perverting the course of justice and murder, the likes of which Mr Punch has been getting away with for centuries, is regarded by some as far too violent for small children, hence its demise as a seaside attraction.

For me, the Punch and Judy should be preserved; the show is a part of the childhood of so many of us, and we were never frightened by the gruesome content of the performance nor did we emulate the antics of Mr Punch. After all, we knew they were puppets up there, manipulated by a man behind the curtain.

I can still remember the jostling crowd of noisy, excited children gathered around a white striped wooden booth topped with a proscenium arch. Parents would cluster at the back, reminded of their own childhoods when they heard the familiar rasping squawk (created by the swazzle, the metal reed in the puppeteer's mouth) of "That's the way to do it!"

With his hunched back and gigantic curved nose, Mr Punch was naturally bad-tempered, argumentative, un-cooperative and no respecter of authority. He was the anarchist of the puppet world, laying into the policeman with his truncheon, hitting the baby, clunking his wife and sorting out the crocodile. When he appeared, he would be greeted by wild cheers from the children. How we loved launching into the pantomime refrains:

"He's behind you!"

"Oh, no he isn't!"

"Oh, yes he is!"

We would shriek with laughter as the hooked-nosed harlequin threw the baby down the stairs, beat his wife with a stick and had his "swassages" snapped up by the greedy crocodile.

I was pleased to see that the Punch and Judy show is still very much alive and kicking in some seaside resorts. When I visited Llandudno last summer, I was drawn to the beach by the screams and shouts of children to the familiar white striped wooden hut, and there was Mr Punch outwitting the forces of law and order in the form of the fat little policeman and evading Jack Ketch the hangman (whom he hangs).

Professor Codman's Wooden Headed Follies, the longest-running Punch and Judy Show in the country, which has been going since the 19th century, had a large and appreciative audience. A woman tut-tutted.

"It ought to be banned," she said. "It gives children ideas."

As they say in Yorkshire, "There's nowt as queer as folk".

YP MAG 3/7/10