It is August of 1891, and the English seaside town of Blackpool is enjoying peak summer gaiety.
Mill workers from Bolton, factory girls from Manchester, families from Blackburn: all have arrived in search of fresh air, sunshine, and seaside pleasures. They stroll along the promenade, ladies in high-buttoned dresses beneath lace-trimmed parasols, gentlemen in stiff collars and straw boaters—everyone in their Sunday best. The sea air carries the tang of salt, the smoke of coal from distant steamers, and the sweet scent of pink sugar spun onto sticks.
Children are everywhere—restless, sun-flushed, and irrepressibly loud—fingers sticky from ice cream and sticks of rock, as they splash through the shallows, dodge the donkeys, and weave between the crowds with wild delight.
And yet nothing captures the attention of our youngest holiday makers quite like the wooden booths lining the shore, each a little theatre of mischief with their familiar cries of: “That’s the way to do it!”
The Punch and Judy show is in full voice.
Behind the painted canvas, Mr Punch conducts his anarchic little world with gleeful abandon. Judy arrives, unimpressed and unyielding. The baby appears and disappears with alarming frequency. The policeman is perpetually outwitted. The crocodile waits patiently for its cue. Each scene unfolds with exaggerated violence and irrepressible humour, all delivered in a rapid-fire chorus of squeaks, thumps, and delighted shrieks from the crowd.
It is disorder made theatrical—anarchy safely contained within a striped booth.
The children adore it. The adults feign disapproval, but find themselves lingering before eventually leaving in search of a little Victorian spectacle all their own—a Punch and Judy cocktail.
At first glance, it is charmingly respectable with its clear, bright base of gin. But beneath that civility lies something far less predictable. A flash of Campari, red as stage paint, a bitter herbal note that lands like a well-timed slapstick blow. Citrus cuts through like a sharpness worthy of a collective gasp from the audience.
It is a drink of contrasts: sweet and sharp, polite and unruly, elegant and just a touch wicked. And much like the show itself, it refuses to behave with any lasting sense of decorum. For this is no ordinary seaside tipple—one sip invites another, the performance gathers pace, and before long, propriety has been fully dispatched and drinkers are raising their glasses, throwing back their heads, and screeching with glee: “That’s the way to do it!”