He wears a red hat, carries a stick, and laughs as he beats almost everyone he meets.
This episode tells the odd, violent story of Punch and Judy, the puppet show that began in Italy and became a British seaside symbol.
It looks at how Mr Punch survived for over 300 years, and why many now question whether he still belongs on the beach.
[00:00:05] Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English, the show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today it's the start of another three-part mini-series, this time on unusual British traditions.
[00:00:31] In today's episode, part one, we are going to be talking about Punch and Judy, the strange, violent, and originally Italian puppet show that became one of Britain’s best-known seaside traditions.
[00:00:46] In part two, we turn to fox hunting, a very different type of tradition that is technically illegal, but still goes on up and down the country.
[00:00:57] And in part three, we are going to be talking about the rise and fall of the British seaside holiday.
[00:01:04] OK then, let's not waste a minute and get right into it.
[00:01:11] Let me start this episode by teaching you a completely pointless piece of English vocabulary. It's a word I almost guarantee you've never heard, and that applies even if you are a native speaker.
[00:01:28] That word is a swazzle. S-W-A-Z-Z-L-E.
[00:01:36] It's a small metal device you can put in your mouth that turns your voice into something so unusual I don't think I'm even going to try to describe it.
[00:01:47] I'll just play it for you:
[00:01:54] That is the voice of a character called Mr Punch, the star of the strange British tradition of the Punch and Judy show.
[00:02:04] Now, Punch and Judy is one of those things that feels deeply, perhaps even quintessentially, British. A small red-and-white striped booth on a beach.
[00:02:16] A hook-nosed puppet with a squeaky voice, a stick in his hand, and a crowd of children laughing along.
[00:02:25] It feels about as British as fish and chips, wet deckchairs and disappointing summer weather.
[00:02:33] It is also, in its origins, not really British at all; it's Italian.
[00:02:39] So, let's start with where it comes from, and how it got to Britain.
[00:02:45] In the early seventeenth century, in the streets and squares of Naples, something called commedia dell'arte was flourishing. Now, commedia dell'arte was a kind of improvised street comedy, performed by travelling players who would arrive in a town, set up a stage, and entertain crowds with rude jokes, slapstick music, and stock characters that everyone in the audience already knew.
[00:03:15] One of those stock characters was a man called Pulcinella.
[00:03:21] He was a Neapolitan invention, and he had a hooked nose and a hump on his back.
[00:03:29] He wore a white costume, a black mask, and he spoke in a strange, squawking voice, a bit like the one you heard a minute ago.
[00:03:40] He wasn't a nice man. He was cunning, lazy, greedy, and easily upset. He hit people. He insulted figures of authority. He was the sort of character someone in seventeenth-century Naples wasn't meant to admire, but would laugh at anyway.
[00:04:00] The name Pulcinella is thought to have come from the Italian word "pulcino", which means "little chick", baby chicken, so it's a reference to his beaky, chicken-like face and funny, almost bird-like voice.
[00:04:17] Now, Pulcinella was a hit in 17th century Naples.
[00:04:21] And like all hits, he travelled.
[00:04:25] Italian performers took him to Paris, where he became Polichinelle. They took him to other European cities, where his name was tweaked or translated.
[00:04:36] And on the 9th of May 1662, he came to London.
[00:04:44] We know that date because of a man called Samuel Pepys. Pepys is one of the most useful figures in English history. For nearly a decade he kept a detailed personal diary that recorded everything he ate, drank, gossiped about, and went to see.
[00:05:04] And an extra little fun fact about Samuel Pepys is that he wrote one of the most detailed accounts of the Great Fire of London, which happened in 1666, and as the flames approached his house, he dug a big hole to protect his most prized possessions, the first of which was his parmesan cheese.
[00:05:27] And as one more side note, we do have an episode on The Great Fire of London. It's one of our member-only ones, and it's episode number 115.
[00:05:37] Anyway, back to the story.
[00:05:40] On that particular Friday in May 1662, Samuel Pepys walked through Covent Garden in central London and stopped to watch a puppet show.
[00:05:52] The puppeteer was an Italian known as Signor Bologna. He was performing a marionette show, which is a show with stringed puppets, and one of his characters was a hook-nosed troublemaker called Punchinello, the Anglicised version of Pulcinella.
[00:06:14] Pepys was impressed. He described the show as "very pretty, the best that ever I saw, and a great resort of gallants."
[00:06:24] A great resort of gallants is an unusual phrase, and not something you'd hear nowadays, but it just means a fashionable crowd. In other words, it was a show for adults, not children.
[00:06:37] Within months, Pepys had seen the show again. And he was not the only fan. Later that same year, King Charles II, the recently restored king of England, asked Signor Bologna to perform for him at his palace. The king was so delighted that he gave the puppeteer a gold chain and medal worth twenty-five pounds, which works out at something like five thousand Euros in today's money.
[00:07:10] That date, the 9th of May 1662, is now traditionally treated as Mr Punch's UK birthday. There is even a small festival held in Covent Garden each May to mark it.
[00:07:25] But the character that Pepys saw that afternoon was still, in every meaningful sense, an Italian visitor. The journey from Italian puppet to British icon would take the best part of two centuries.
[00:07:40] The first thing that needed to change was the puppet itself.
[00:07:46] The original Mr Punch, Pulcinella, was a marionette: a puppet on strings, operated from above.
[00:07:54] Putting on a marionette show requires a large stage and quite a lot of kit.
[00:08:00] A glove puppet, on the other hand, sits directly on the performer's hand. The puppeteer stands hidden inside a simple vertical fabric booth, holds his hands above his head, and operates the puppets from below. The booth can be a single striped canvas sheet thrown over a frame.
[00:08:22] The whole thing is very light, and can be set up and packed away in a matter of minutes.
[00:08:29] Whatsmore, glove puppets move in a completely different way to marionettes.
[00:08:36] Marionettes move gracefully, slowly, like they're floating in the air.
[00:08:42] Glove puppets are different. Everything is more physical. You can throw them around. You can have one whack another over the head with a thud. You can throw a baby out of a window. You can fight a crocodile, slapping it with a stick.
[00:08:59] In fact, the word "slapstick" comes from this world, as in "slapstick comedy", the style of exaggerated comedy where people bang into walls or pretend to hurt themselves.
[00:09:13] So at some point in the eighteenth century, Punch made the leap from one form to the other, from marionette to glove puppet. And this is when things really started to take off.
[00:09:29] A glove puppet show could be set up at the corner of a busy street, performed for an hour, and packed away in a wheelbarrow. The whole thing was portable, cheap, and perfectly suited to street performance. This new kind of show needed a new kind of performer. And it could all be operated by one person, who would stand inside the booth and operate the puppets with both hands.
[00:10:01] He became known as a "professor".
[00:10:04] Why "professor", nobody is quite sure.
[00:10:08] It seems to have been a slightly grand, slightly playful title, given to a man who had mastered a craft that was difficult and not entirely respectable.
[00:10:20] The professor also had a secret weapon, and it was the same secret weapon that Italian Pulcinella had used a century before. A small metal reed, held against the roof of the mouth, that gave Punch his unmistakable, ear-piercing, squeaky voice.
[00:10:39] In English, this device became known, as you now know, as a swazzle.
[00:10:51] Now, I have to confess that I have never tried it, but it does appear that the swazzle is not an easy piece of kit to use.
[00:11:01] You need to shape the words clearly while forcing air through the reed, switching between Punch’s voice and your normal voice, all while making sure you don’t accidentally swallow the thing.
[00:11:14] But if you manage it, if you master it, you'll be able to produce something that sounds like a chicken arguing through a child's toy whistle.
[00:11:25] Punch professors trained for years to use one properly, and even today the swazzle is considered the badge of a real Punch and Judy performer. If you cannot do the voice, you are not accepted as a real Punch man.
[00:11:42] Punch also got a new wardrobe. The plain white Italian costume was dropped, and by the middle of the eighteenth century Punch had taken on the red and yellow colours of the English jester, with a tall pointy hat and a stick in his hand. He looked, in other words, less like a Neapolitan street performer and more like a figure from a medieval English court.
[00:12:10] He also gained a cast, supporting actors, or rather, supporting puppets.
[00:12:16] And this is where the story gets a bit complicated. For a long time, there was no fixed script.
[00:12:24] Each professor performed his own version of the show, with his own characters, his own jokes, and his own running order.
[00:12:33] The most famous surviving version comes from the late 1820s, when a writer called John Payne Collier recorded, or claimed to record, the performance of a Punch performer named Giovanni Piccini.
[00:12:49] The book was illustrated by a celebrated caricaturist and it was given a wonderful title: "The Tragical Comedy or Comical Tragedy of Punch and Judy".
[00:13:01] This 1828 book became the canonical version of the show. It is what most people today think of as the "traditional" script.
[00:13:12] There is, however, a slight problem with it.
[00:13:16] John Payne Collier was one of the most prolific literary forgers in English history. He spent much of his later career inserting fake notes and fake documents into early Shakespeare editions, and getting caught doing so.
[00:13:33] So historians today are not entirely sure how much of what he wrote down in 1828 was a faithful record of what Piccini actually performed, and how much was tidied up, polished, or simply invented.
[00:13:50] What is clear is the cast list, because most of these characters appear again and again in earlier descriptions.
[00:13:59] There is Punch himself. There is his wife Judy, hence the name, "Punch and Judy".
[00:14:06] There is their baby. There is Toby the dog, who in earlier shows was an actual live, performing dog who sat on the front of the booth. There is the policeman. There is a clown called Joey. There is Jack Ketch, the hangman. There is a hungry crocodile, who is usually interested in Punch’s sausages, which Punch has for reasons that aren't entirely clear.
[00:14:30] And in many versions, there is the devil himself, who arrives at the end to drag Mr Punch off to hell.
[00:14:38] The plot, what actually happens in a Punch and Judy show, is famously violent.
[00:14:46] A typical show goes something like this. Punch is left to look after the baby. The baby cries. Punch loses patience and throws it out of the window.
[00:14:58] Judy returns, understandably furious. She attacks Punch, Punch attacks Judy, and before long she too has been knocked aside.
[00:15:08] Then society starts arriving to restore order.
[00:15:13] A policeman comes to arrest Punch. Punch beats the policeman.
[00:15:17] A hangman comes to execute Punch. Punch tricks the hangman into putting his own head in the noose.
[00:15:25] A crocodile appears and tries to steal the sausages. Punch fights the crocodile. And in some versions, when even the devil comes to drag him down to hell, Punch beats the devil too, cackling while all of this is going on.
[00:15:41] After each successful act of violence, Punch leans forward and shouts his catchphrase to the audience through the swazzle: "That's the way to do it!"
[00:15:51] And the audience, at least most of the time, roars with laughter.
[00:15:57] Now, by the early nineteenth century, Mr Punch was already a familiar street character in London and other large English cities. The booth could be set up on any corner, the show drew in a crowd, and the professor passed a hat at the end for tips.
[00:16:16] It was rough, urban, working-class entertainment — no longer the preserve of Samuel Pepys and his beloved parmesan.
[00:16:24] Then came two big changes.
[00:16:27] The first was the railway. From the 1840s onwards, the British railway network exploded.
[00:16:36] For the first time, working people in industrial cities had cheap, fast access to the coast. Small fishing villages turned into booming holiday resorts, as we'll be talking more about in part three.
[00:16:51] And what did the new day-trippers want at the seaside, alongside sand and ice cream? They wanted entertainment.
[00:17:00] Punch professors were perfectly placed to provide it.
[00:17:05] The booth, with its tall stripes of red and white, was already portable. The show was already short, loud, and easy to follow.
[00:17:14] All a professor had to do was pack up his cart, get on a train, and set up shop on the beach.
[00:17:22] By the late Victorian period, the red-and-white striped puppet booth had become one of the most recognisable images of the British seaside.
[00:17:33] The second big change was a magazine.
[00:17:37] In July 1841, two journalists in London started a new weekly satirical publication.
[00:17:46] They needed a name, and they needed a mascot. They settled on the most famously anarchic, disrespectful, authority-mocking character they could think of, and they called their magazine "Punch", after Mr Punch himself.
[00:18:03] The full title was "Punch, or the London Charivari", and on its cover, week after week, Mr Punch and his dog Toby looked out at the reader.
[00:18:16] The magazine started small. But by the 1850s it was selling forty thousand copies a week, and by 1910 over a hundred thousand.
[00:18:27] For Victorian Britain, this gave Mr Punch a kind of double life.
[00:18:33] On the beach, he was a cheap, knockabout puppet act for children.
[00:18:37] In a smart London club, he was the cover star of the country's most prestigious satirical magazine. The same hook-nosed troublemaker stood for both. He had become a kind of national symbol of British misrule: the small voice that mocks authority, breaks the rules, and gets away with it.
[00:18:59] But the world that had made Punch and Judy famous did not last.
[00:19:05] In its heyday, there were an estimated 400 Punch men, or professors, in Britain.
[00:19:12] In 1939, a survey counted only forty-four professional Punch men.
[00:19:19] And by the end of the twentieth century, that number had fallen to around twelve.
[00:19:26] There are some obvious reasons. From the 1960s onwards, cheap flights and package holidays meant that British holidaymakers increasingly jetted off for the south of Spain rather than sitting on a windy beach in northern England. With fewer day-trippers, there was less work for Punch professors, and fewer young people willing to spend years learning the swazzle for a shrinking audience.
[00:19:52] There is also the argument that the style of the show, what was happening on stage, was simply losing its appeal.
[00:20:01] The most obvious problem is the violence against women.
[00:20:06] It is a violent show with a violent male protagonist who beats his wife with a stick, throws his baby out of a window, and then cackles "That's the way to do it!".
[00:20:17] To a lot of people, that was increasingly not funny, not something they wanted to watch.
[00:20:24] Domestic abuse charities have argued that the show makes light of violence in the home. Women's rights campaigners have questioned what message it sends to small children.
[00:20:37] And in some places, perfectly understandably, this argument has won.
[00:20:43] A town council in South Wales removed a Punch and Judy show from a local festival on the grounds that it was, in their words, "too violent and contained inappropriate hitting".
[00:20:57] And there was a recent survey of two thousand British parents that found around forty per cent thought the traditional Punch and Judy was too violent for their own children.
[00:21:09] The defenders of the show have their own arguments. They say it is satire, not instruction.
[00:21:16] They say Punch has always been a wicked character, and that the joke is on him, not on his victims.
[00:21:24] They point out that he ends up in hell in many versions of the script, which is hardly an endorsement of his behaviour. They also argue that children do not read puppet violence in the same way adults do: the violence is stylised, ridiculous, and obviously unreal.
[00:21:45] They suggest that this is nothing compared to many video games, where characters do much worse.
[00:21:53] And they argue that taking the violence out of Punch and Judy is a bit like taking the wolf out of Little Red Riding Hood. You can do it, but at the end it's not really the same story.
[00:22:06] This being said, there have been attempts to modernise, creating less violent versions of the show, or versions where Judy hits Punch as much as he hits her.
[00:22:18] The thing is, there really isn't a pure, original version. It has always changed. Punch looks different, what happens in the show has evolved, it has never been a single, fixed text. It is a tradition with a core set of characters, bent and rewritten in every generation that has performed it.
[00:22:40] So, what does the future hold for Punch and Judy??
[00:22:44] Well, it is hard to imagine the show returning to the centre of British popular culture. There are fewer professors than there used to be, and no great national movement to bring it back.
[00:22:57] If you are lucky, or unlucky, and you find yourself at a British seaside town, you might still stumble across the telltale red-and-white striped canopy of a Punch and Judy show, and hear the inimitable sound of the swazzle.
[00:23:14] If you ever see one, stop for a moment and have a look at Mr Punch.
[00:23:20] He has lasted three and a half centuries. He has outlived the king who first applauded him in 1662. He has outlived the magazine that borrowed his name in 1841. He has outlived generations of children who once stood on the sand, staring up at that striped booth, laughing at a puppet who did everything he was not supposed to do.
[00:23:42] Whatever happens to him next, that is, by any standard, a pretty remarkable run.
[00:23:50] OK, then, that is it for today's episode, the first part of our three-part mini-series on unusual British traditions.
[00:23:58] Next up we'll be moving into fox hunting, a very different type of entertainment that many people would say is not entertainment at all.
[00:24:06] And in part three, we'll tell the story of the rise and fall of the British seaside holiday, the place where Punch and Judy really became a cult tradition.
[00:24:16] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English.
[00:24:21] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[00:00:05] Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English, the show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today it's the start of another three-part mini-series, this time on unusual British traditions.
[00:00:31] In today's episode, part one, we are going to be talking about Punch and Judy, the strange, violent, and originally Italian puppet show that became one of Britain’s best-known seaside traditions.
[00:00:46] In part two, we turn to fox hunting, a very different type of tradition that is technically illegal, but still goes on up and down the country.
[00:00:57] And in part three, we are going to be talking about the rise and fall of the British seaside holiday.
[00:01:04] OK then, let's not waste a minute and get right into it.
[00:01:11] Let me start this episode by teaching you a completely pointless piece of English vocabulary. It's a word I almost guarantee you've never heard, and that applies even if you are a native speaker.
[00:01:28] That word is a swazzle. S-W-A-Z-Z-L-E.
[00:01:36] It's a small metal device you can put in your mouth that turns your voice into something so unusual I don't think I'm even going to try to describe it.
[00:01:47] I'll just play it for you:
[00:01:54] That is the voice of a character called Mr Punch, the star of the strange British tradition of the Punch and Judy show.
[00:02:04] Now, Punch and Judy is one of those things that feels deeply, perhaps even quintessentially, British. A small red-and-white striped booth on a beach.
[00:02:16] A hook-nosed puppet with a squeaky voice, a stick in his hand, and a crowd of children laughing along.
[00:02:25] It feels about as British as fish and chips, wet deckchairs and disappointing summer weather.
[00:02:33] It is also, in its origins, not really British at all; it's Italian.
[00:02:39] So, let's start with where it comes from, and how it got to Britain.
[00:02:45] In the early seventeenth century, in the streets and squares of Naples, something called commedia dell'arte was flourishing. Now, commedia dell'arte was a kind of improvised street comedy, performed by travelling players who would arrive in a town, set up a stage, and entertain crowds with rude jokes, slapstick music, and stock characters that everyone in the audience already knew.
[00:03:15] One of those stock characters was a man called Pulcinella.
[00:03:21] He was a Neapolitan invention, and he had a hooked nose and a hump on his back.
[00:03:29] He wore a white costume, a black mask, and he spoke in a strange, squawking voice, a bit like the one you heard a minute ago.
[00:03:40] He wasn't a nice man. He was cunning, lazy, greedy, and easily upset. He hit people. He insulted figures of authority. He was the sort of character someone in seventeenth-century Naples wasn't meant to admire, but would laugh at anyway.
[00:04:00] The name Pulcinella is thought to have come from the Italian word "pulcino", which means "little chick", baby chicken, so it's a reference to his beaky, chicken-like face and funny, almost bird-like voice.
[00:04:17] Now, Pulcinella was a hit in 17th century Naples.
[00:04:21] And like all hits, he travelled.
[00:04:25] Italian performers took him to Paris, where he became Polichinelle. They took him to other European cities, where his name was tweaked or translated.
[00:04:36] And on the 9th of May 1662, he came to London.
[00:04:44] We know that date because of a man called Samuel Pepys. Pepys is one of the most useful figures in English history. For nearly a decade he kept a detailed personal diary that recorded everything he ate, drank, gossiped about, and went to see.
[00:05:04] And an extra little fun fact about Samuel Pepys is that he wrote one of the most detailed accounts of the Great Fire of London, which happened in 1666, and as the flames approached his house, he dug a big hole to protect his most prized possessions, the first of which was his parmesan cheese.
[00:05:27] And as one more side note, we do have an episode on The Great Fire of London. It's one of our member-only ones, and it's episode number 115.
[00:05:37] Anyway, back to the story.
[00:05:40] On that particular Friday in May 1662, Samuel Pepys walked through Covent Garden in central London and stopped to watch a puppet show.
[00:05:52] The puppeteer was an Italian known as Signor Bologna. He was performing a marionette show, which is a show with stringed puppets, and one of his characters was a hook-nosed troublemaker called Punchinello, the Anglicised version of Pulcinella.
[00:06:14] Pepys was impressed. He described the show as "very pretty, the best that ever I saw, and a great resort of gallants."
[00:06:24] A great resort of gallants is an unusual phrase, and not something you'd hear nowadays, but it just means a fashionable crowd. In other words, it was a show for adults, not children.
[00:06:37] Within months, Pepys had seen the show again. And he was not the only fan. Later that same year, King Charles II, the recently restored king of England, asked Signor Bologna to perform for him at his palace. The king was so delighted that he gave the puppeteer a gold chain and medal worth twenty-five pounds, which works out at something like five thousand Euros in today's money.
[00:07:10] That date, the 9th of May 1662, is now traditionally treated as Mr Punch's UK birthday. There is even a small festival held in Covent Garden each May to mark it.
[00:07:25] But the character that Pepys saw that afternoon was still, in every meaningful sense, an Italian visitor. The journey from Italian puppet to British icon would take the best part of two centuries.
[00:07:40] The first thing that needed to change was the puppet itself.
[00:07:46] The original Mr Punch, Pulcinella, was a marionette: a puppet on strings, operated from above.
[00:07:54] Putting on a marionette show requires a large stage and quite a lot of kit.
[00:08:00] A glove puppet, on the other hand, sits directly on the performer's hand. The puppeteer stands hidden inside a simple vertical fabric booth, holds his hands above his head, and operates the puppets from below. The booth can be a single striped canvas sheet thrown over a frame.
[00:08:22] The whole thing is very light, and can be set up and packed away in a matter of minutes.
[00:08:29] Whatsmore, glove puppets move in a completely different way to marionettes.
[00:08:36] Marionettes move gracefully, slowly, like they're floating in the air.
[00:08:42] Glove puppets are different. Everything is more physical. You can throw them around. You can have one whack another over the head with a thud. You can throw a baby out of a window. You can fight a crocodile, slapping it with a stick.
[00:08:59] In fact, the word "slapstick" comes from this world, as in "slapstick comedy", the style of exaggerated comedy where people bang into walls or pretend to hurt themselves.
[00:09:13] So at some point in the eighteenth century, Punch made the leap from one form to the other, from marionette to glove puppet. And this is when things really started to take off.
[00:09:29] A glove puppet show could be set up at the corner of a busy street, performed for an hour, and packed away in a wheelbarrow. The whole thing was portable, cheap, and perfectly suited to street performance. This new kind of show needed a new kind of performer. And it could all be operated by one person, who would stand inside the booth and operate the puppets with both hands.
[00:10:01] He became known as a "professor".
[00:10:04] Why "professor", nobody is quite sure.
[00:10:08] It seems to have been a slightly grand, slightly playful title, given to a man who had mastered a craft that was difficult and not entirely respectable.
[00:10:20] The professor also had a secret weapon, and it was the same secret weapon that Italian Pulcinella had used a century before. A small metal reed, held against the roof of the mouth, that gave Punch his unmistakable, ear-piercing, squeaky voice.
[00:10:39] In English, this device became known, as you now know, as a swazzle.
[00:10:51] Now, I have to confess that I have never tried it, but it does appear that the swazzle is not an easy piece of kit to use.
[00:11:01] You need to shape the words clearly while forcing air through the reed, switching between Punch’s voice and your normal voice, all while making sure you don’t accidentally swallow the thing.
[00:11:14] But if you manage it, if you master it, you'll be able to produce something that sounds like a chicken arguing through a child's toy whistle.
[00:11:25] Punch professors trained for years to use one properly, and even today the swazzle is considered the badge of a real Punch and Judy performer. If you cannot do the voice, you are not accepted as a real Punch man.
[00:11:42] Punch also got a new wardrobe. The plain white Italian costume was dropped, and by the middle of the eighteenth century Punch had taken on the red and yellow colours of the English jester, with a tall pointy hat and a stick in his hand. He looked, in other words, less like a Neapolitan street performer and more like a figure from a medieval English court.
[00:12:10] He also gained a cast, supporting actors, or rather, supporting puppets.
[00:12:16] And this is where the story gets a bit complicated. For a long time, there was no fixed script.
[00:12:24] Each professor performed his own version of the show, with his own characters, his own jokes, and his own running order.
[00:12:33] The most famous surviving version comes from the late 1820s, when a writer called John Payne Collier recorded, or claimed to record, the performance of a Punch performer named Giovanni Piccini.
[00:12:49] The book was illustrated by a celebrated caricaturist and it was given a wonderful title: "The Tragical Comedy or Comical Tragedy of Punch and Judy".
[00:13:01] This 1828 book became the canonical version of the show. It is what most people today think of as the "traditional" script.
[00:13:12] There is, however, a slight problem with it.
[00:13:16] John Payne Collier was one of the most prolific literary forgers in English history. He spent much of his later career inserting fake notes and fake documents into early Shakespeare editions, and getting caught doing so.
[00:13:33] So historians today are not entirely sure how much of what he wrote down in 1828 was a faithful record of what Piccini actually performed, and how much was tidied up, polished, or simply invented.
[00:13:50] What is clear is the cast list, because most of these characters appear again and again in earlier descriptions.
[00:13:59] There is Punch himself. There is his wife Judy, hence the name, "Punch and Judy".
[00:14:06] There is their baby. There is Toby the dog, who in earlier shows was an actual live, performing dog who sat on the front of the booth. There is the policeman. There is a clown called Joey. There is Jack Ketch, the hangman. There is a hungry crocodile, who is usually interested in Punch’s sausages, which Punch has for reasons that aren't entirely clear.
[00:14:30] And in many versions, there is the devil himself, who arrives at the end to drag Mr Punch off to hell.
[00:14:38] The plot, what actually happens in a Punch and Judy show, is famously violent.
[00:14:46] A typical show goes something like this. Punch is left to look after the baby. The baby cries. Punch loses patience and throws it out of the window.
[00:14:58] Judy returns, understandably furious. She attacks Punch, Punch attacks Judy, and before long she too has been knocked aside.
[00:15:08] Then society starts arriving to restore order.
[00:15:13] A policeman comes to arrest Punch. Punch beats the policeman.
[00:15:17] A hangman comes to execute Punch. Punch tricks the hangman into putting his own head in the noose.
[00:15:25] A crocodile appears and tries to steal the sausages. Punch fights the crocodile. And in some versions, when even the devil comes to drag him down to hell, Punch beats the devil too, cackling while all of this is going on.
[00:15:41] After each successful act of violence, Punch leans forward and shouts his catchphrase to the audience through the swazzle: "That's the way to do it!"
[00:15:51] And the audience, at least most of the time, roars with laughter.
[00:15:57] Now, by the early nineteenth century, Mr Punch was already a familiar street character in London and other large English cities. The booth could be set up on any corner, the show drew in a crowd, and the professor passed a hat at the end for tips.
[00:16:16] It was rough, urban, working-class entertainment — no longer the preserve of Samuel Pepys and his beloved parmesan.
[00:16:24] Then came two big changes.
[00:16:27] The first was the railway. From the 1840s onwards, the British railway network exploded.
[00:16:36] For the first time, working people in industrial cities had cheap, fast access to the coast. Small fishing villages turned into booming holiday resorts, as we'll be talking more about in part three.
[00:16:51] And what did the new day-trippers want at the seaside, alongside sand and ice cream? They wanted entertainment.
[00:17:00] Punch professors were perfectly placed to provide it.
[00:17:05] The booth, with its tall stripes of red and white, was already portable. The show was already short, loud, and easy to follow.
[00:17:14] All a professor had to do was pack up his cart, get on a train, and set up shop on the beach.
[00:17:22] By the late Victorian period, the red-and-white striped puppet booth had become one of the most recognisable images of the British seaside.
[00:17:33] The second big change was a magazine.
[00:17:37] In July 1841, two journalists in London started a new weekly satirical publication.
[00:17:46] They needed a name, and they needed a mascot. They settled on the most famously anarchic, disrespectful, authority-mocking character they could think of, and they called their magazine "Punch", after Mr Punch himself.
[00:18:03] The full title was "Punch, or the London Charivari", and on its cover, week after week, Mr Punch and his dog Toby looked out at the reader.
[00:18:16] The magazine started small. But by the 1850s it was selling forty thousand copies a week, and by 1910 over a hundred thousand.
[00:18:27] For Victorian Britain, this gave Mr Punch a kind of double life.
[00:18:33] On the beach, he was a cheap, knockabout puppet act for children.
[00:18:37] In a smart London club, he was the cover star of the country's most prestigious satirical magazine. The same hook-nosed troublemaker stood for both. He had become a kind of national symbol of British misrule: the small voice that mocks authority, breaks the rules, and gets away with it.
[00:18:59] But the world that had made Punch and Judy famous did not last.
[00:19:05] In its heyday, there were an estimated 400 Punch men, or professors, in Britain.
[00:19:12] In 1939, a survey counted only forty-four professional Punch men.
[00:19:19] And by the end of the twentieth century, that number had fallen to around twelve.
[00:19:26] There are some obvious reasons. From the 1960s onwards, cheap flights and package holidays meant that British holidaymakers increasingly jetted off for the south of Spain rather than sitting on a windy beach in northern England. With fewer day-trippers, there was less work for Punch professors, and fewer young people willing to spend years learning the swazzle for a shrinking audience.
[00:19:52] There is also the argument that the style of the show, what was happening on stage, was simply losing its appeal.
[00:20:01] The most obvious problem is the violence against women.
[00:20:06] It is a violent show with a violent male protagonist who beats his wife with a stick, throws his baby out of a window, and then cackles "That's the way to do it!".
[00:20:17] To a lot of people, that was increasingly not funny, not something they wanted to watch.
[00:20:24] Domestic abuse charities have argued that the show makes light of violence in the home. Women's rights campaigners have questioned what message it sends to small children.
[00:20:37] And in some places, perfectly understandably, this argument has won.
[00:20:43] A town council in South Wales removed a Punch and Judy show from a local festival on the grounds that it was, in their words, "too violent and contained inappropriate hitting".
[00:20:57] And there was a recent survey of two thousand British parents that found around forty per cent thought the traditional Punch and Judy was too violent for their own children.
[00:21:09] The defenders of the show have their own arguments. They say it is satire, not instruction.
[00:21:16] They say Punch has always been a wicked character, and that the joke is on him, not on his victims.
[00:21:24] They point out that he ends up in hell in many versions of the script, which is hardly an endorsement of his behaviour. They also argue that children do not read puppet violence in the same way adults do: the violence is stylised, ridiculous, and obviously unreal.
[00:21:45] They suggest that this is nothing compared to many video games, where characters do much worse.
[00:21:53] And they argue that taking the violence out of Punch and Judy is a bit like taking the wolf out of Little Red Riding Hood. You can do it, but at the end it's not really the same story.
[00:22:06] This being said, there have been attempts to modernise, creating less violent versions of the show, or versions where Judy hits Punch as much as he hits her.
[00:22:18] The thing is, there really isn't a pure, original version. It has always changed. Punch looks different, what happens in the show has evolved, it has never been a single, fixed text. It is a tradition with a core set of characters, bent and rewritten in every generation that has performed it.
[00:22:40] So, what does the future hold for Punch and Judy??
[00:22:44] Well, it is hard to imagine the show returning to the centre of British popular culture. There are fewer professors than there used to be, and no great national movement to bring it back.
[00:22:57] If you are lucky, or unlucky, and you find yourself at a British seaside town, you might still stumble across the telltale red-and-white striped canopy of a Punch and Judy show, and hear the inimitable sound of the swazzle.
[00:23:14] If you ever see one, stop for a moment and have a look at Mr Punch.
[00:23:20] He has lasted three and a half centuries. He has outlived the king who first applauded him in 1662. He has outlived the magazine that borrowed his name in 1841. He has outlived generations of children who once stood on the sand, staring up at that striped booth, laughing at a puppet who did everything he was not supposed to do.
[00:23:42] Whatever happens to him next, that is, by any standard, a pretty remarkable run.
[00:23:50] OK, then, that is it for today's episode, the first part of our three-part mini-series on unusual British traditions.
[00:23:58] Next up we'll be moving into fox hunting, a very different type of entertainment that many people would say is not entertainment at all.
[00:24:06] And in part three, we'll tell the story of the rise and fall of the British seaside holiday, the place where Punch and Judy really became a cult tradition.
[00:24:16] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English.
[00:24:21] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[00:00:05] Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English, the show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today it's the start of another three-part mini-series, this time on unusual British traditions.
[00:00:31] In today's episode, part one, we are going to be talking about Punch and Judy, the strange, violent, and originally Italian puppet show that became one of Britain’s best-known seaside traditions.
[00:00:46] In part two, we turn to fox hunting, a very different type of tradition that is technically illegal, but still goes on up and down the country.
[00:00:57] And in part three, we are going to be talking about the rise and fall of the British seaside holiday.
[00:01:04] OK then, let's not waste a minute and get right into it.
[00:01:11] Let me start this episode by teaching you a completely pointless piece of English vocabulary. It's a word I almost guarantee you've never heard, and that applies even if you are a native speaker.
[00:01:28] That word is a swazzle. S-W-A-Z-Z-L-E.
[00:01:36] It's a small metal device you can put in your mouth that turns your voice into something so unusual I don't think I'm even going to try to describe it.
[00:01:47] I'll just play it for you:
[00:01:54] That is the voice of a character called Mr Punch, the star of the strange British tradition of the Punch and Judy show.
[00:02:04] Now, Punch and Judy is one of those things that feels deeply, perhaps even quintessentially, British. A small red-and-white striped booth on a beach.
[00:02:16] A hook-nosed puppet with a squeaky voice, a stick in his hand, and a crowd of children laughing along.
[00:02:25] It feels about as British as fish and chips, wet deckchairs and disappointing summer weather.
[00:02:33] It is also, in its origins, not really British at all; it's Italian.
[00:02:39] So, let's start with where it comes from, and how it got to Britain.
[00:02:45] In the early seventeenth century, in the streets and squares of Naples, something called commedia dell'arte was flourishing. Now, commedia dell'arte was a kind of improvised street comedy, performed by travelling players who would arrive in a town, set up a stage, and entertain crowds with rude jokes, slapstick music, and stock characters that everyone in the audience already knew.
[00:03:15] One of those stock characters was a man called Pulcinella.
[00:03:21] He was a Neapolitan invention, and he had a hooked nose and a hump on his back.
[00:03:29] He wore a white costume, a black mask, and he spoke in a strange, squawking voice, a bit like the one you heard a minute ago.
[00:03:40] He wasn't a nice man. He was cunning, lazy, greedy, and easily upset. He hit people. He insulted figures of authority. He was the sort of character someone in seventeenth-century Naples wasn't meant to admire, but would laugh at anyway.
[00:04:00] The name Pulcinella is thought to have come from the Italian word "pulcino", which means "little chick", baby chicken, so it's a reference to his beaky, chicken-like face and funny, almost bird-like voice.
[00:04:17] Now, Pulcinella was a hit in 17th century Naples.
[00:04:21] And like all hits, he travelled.
[00:04:25] Italian performers took him to Paris, where he became Polichinelle. They took him to other European cities, where his name was tweaked or translated.
[00:04:36] And on the 9th of May 1662, he came to London.
[00:04:44] We know that date because of a man called Samuel Pepys. Pepys is one of the most useful figures in English history. For nearly a decade he kept a detailed personal diary that recorded everything he ate, drank, gossiped about, and went to see.
[00:05:04] And an extra little fun fact about Samuel Pepys is that he wrote one of the most detailed accounts of the Great Fire of London, which happened in 1666, and as the flames approached his house, he dug a big hole to protect his most prized possessions, the first of which was his parmesan cheese.
[00:05:27] And as one more side note, we do have an episode on The Great Fire of London. It's one of our member-only ones, and it's episode number 115.
[00:05:37] Anyway, back to the story.
[00:05:40] On that particular Friday in May 1662, Samuel Pepys walked through Covent Garden in central London and stopped to watch a puppet show.
[00:05:52] The puppeteer was an Italian known as Signor Bologna. He was performing a marionette show, which is a show with stringed puppets, and one of his characters was a hook-nosed troublemaker called Punchinello, the Anglicised version of Pulcinella.
[00:06:14] Pepys was impressed. He described the show as "very pretty, the best that ever I saw, and a great resort of gallants."
[00:06:24] A great resort of gallants is an unusual phrase, and not something you'd hear nowadays, but it just means a fashionable crowd. In other words, it was a show for adults, not children.
[00:06:37] Within months, Pepys had seen the show again. And he was not the only fan. Later that same year, King Charles II, the recently restored king of England, asked Signor Bologna to perform for him at his palace. The king was so delighted that he gave the puppeteer a gold chain and medal worth twenty-five pounds, which works out at something like five thousand Euros in today's money.
[00:07:10] That date, the 9th of May 1662, is now traditionally treated as Mr Punch's UK birthday. There is even a small festival held in Covent Garden each May to mark it.
[00:07:25] But the character that Pepys saw that afternoon was still, in every meaningful sense, an Italian visitor. The journey from Italian puppet to British icon would take the best part of two centuries.
[00:07:40] The first thing that needed to change was the puppet itself.
[00:07:46] The original Mr Punch, Pulcinella, was a marionette: a puppet on strings, operated from above.
[00:07:54] Putting on a marionette show requires a large stage and quite a lot of kit.
[00:08:00] A glove puppet, on the other hand, sits directly on the performer's hand. The puppeteer stands hidden inside a simple vertical fabric booth, holds his hands above his head, and operates the puppets from below. The booth can be a single striped canvas sheet thrown over a frame.
[00:08:22] The whole thing is very light, and can be set up and packed away in a matter of minutes.
[00:08:29] Whatsmore, glove puppets move in a completely different way to marionettes.
[00:08:36] Marionettes move gracefully, slowly, like they're floating in the air.
[00:08:42] Glove puppets are different. Everything is more physical. You can throw them around. You can have one whack another over the head with a thud. You can throw a baby out of a window. You can fight a crocodile, slapping it with a stick.
[00:08:59] In fact, the word "slapstick" comes from this world, as in "slapstick comedy", the style of exaggerated comedy where people bang into walls or pretend to hurt themselves.
[00:09:13] So at some point in the eighteenth century, Punch made the leap from one form to the other, from marionette to glove puppet. And this is when things really started to take off.
[00:09:29] A glove puppet show could be set up at the corner of a busy street, performed for an hour, and packed away in a wheelbarrow. The whole thing was portable, cheap, and perfectly suited to street performance. This new kind of show needed a new kind of performer. And it could all be operated by one person, who would stand inside the booth and operate the puppets with both hands.
[00:10:01] He became known as a "professor".
[00:10:04] Why "professor", nobody is quite sure.
[00:10:08] It seems to have been a slightly grand, slightly playful title, given to a man who had mastered a craft that was difficult and not entirely respectable.
[00:10:20] The professor also had a secret weapon, and it was the same secret weapon that Italian Pulcinella had used a century before. A small metal reed, held against the roof of the mouth, that gave Punch his unmistakable, ear-piercing, squeaky voice.
[00:10:39] In English, this device became known, as you now know, as a swazzle.
[00:10:51] Now, I have to confess that I have never tried it, but it does appear that the swazzle is not an easy piece of kit to use.
[00:11:01] You need to shape the words clearly while forcing air through the reed, switching between Punch’s voice and your normal voice, all while making sure you don’t accidentally swallow the thing.
[00:11:14] But if you manage it, if you master it, you'll be able to produce something that sounds like a chicken arguing through a child's toy whistle.
[00:11:25] Punch professors trained for years to use one properly, and even today the swazzle is considered the badge of a real Punch and Judy performer. If you cannot do the voice, you are not accepted as a real Punch man.
[00:11:42] Punch also got a new wardrobe. The plain white Italian costume was dropped, and by the middle of the eighteenth century Punch had taken on the red and yellow colours of the English jester, with a tall pointy hat and a stick in his hand. He looked, in other words, less like a Neapolitan street performer and more like a figure from a medieval English court.
[00:12:10] He also gained a cast, supporting actors, or rather, supporting puppets.
[00:12:16] And this is where the story gets a bit complicated. For a long time, there was no fixed script.
[00:12:24] Each professor performed his own version of the show, with his own characters, his own jokes, and his own running order.
[00:12:33] The most famous surviving version comes from the late 1820s, when a writer called John Payne Collier recorded, or claimed to record, the performance of a Punch performer named Giovanni Piccini.
[00:12:49] The book was illustrated by a celebrated caricaturist and it was given a wonderful title: "The Tragical Comedy or Comical Tragedy of Punch and Judy".
[00:13:01] This 1828 book became the canonical version of the show. It is what most people today think of as the "traditional" script.
[00:13:12] There is, however, a slight problem with it.
[00:13:16] John Payne Collier was one of the most prolific literary forgers in English history. He spent much of his later career inserting fake notes and fake documents into early Shakespeare editions, and getting caught doing so.
[00:13:33] So historians today are not entirely sure how much of what he wrote down in 1828 was a faithful record of what Piccini actually performed, and how much was tidied up, polished, or simply invented.
[00:13:50] What is clear is the cast list, because most of these characters appear again and again in earlier descriptions.
[00:13:59] There is Punch himself. There is his wife Judy, hence the name, "Punch and Judy".
[00:14:06] There is their baby. There is Toby the dog, who in earlier shows was an actual live, performing dog who sat on the front of the booth. There is the policeman. There is a clown called Joey. There is Jack Ketch, the hangman. There is a hungry crocodile, who is usually interested in Punch’s sausages, which Punch has for reasons that aren't entirely clear.
[00:14:30] And in many versions, there is the devil himself, who arrives at the end to drag Mr Punch off to hell.
[00:14:38] The plot, what actually happens in a Punch and Judy show, is famously violent.
[00:14:46] A typical show goes something like this. Punch is left to look after the baby. The baby cries. Punch loses patience and throws it out of the window.
[00:14:58] Judy returns, understandably furious. She attacks Punch, Punch attacks Judy, and before long she too has been knocked aside.
[00:15:08] Then society starts arriving to restore order.
[00:15:13] A policeman comes to arrest Punch. Punch beats the policeman.
[00:15:17] A hangman comes to execute Punch. Punch tricks the hangman into putting his own head in the noose.
[00:15:25] A crocodile appears and tries to steal the sausages. Punch fights the crocodile. And in some versions, when even the devil comes to drag him down to hell, Punch beats the devil too, cackling while all of this is going on.
[00:15:41] After each successful act of violence, Punch leans forward and shouts his catchphrase to the audience through the swazzle: "That's the way to do it!"
[00:15:51] And the audience, at least most of the time, roars with laughter.
[00:15:57] Now, by the early nineteenth century, Mr Punch was already a familiar street character in London and other large English cities. The booth could be set up on any corner, the show drew in a crowd, and the professor passed a hat at the end for tips.
[00:16:16] It was rough, urban, working-class entertainment — no longer the preserve of Samuel Pepys and his beloved parmesan.
[00:16:24] Then came two big changes.
[00:16:27] The first was the railway. From the 1840s onwards, the British railway network exploded.
[00:16:36] For the first time, working people in industrial cities had cheap, fast access to the coast. Small fishing villages turned into booming holiday resorts, as we'll be talking more about in part three.
[00:16:51] And what did the new day-trippers want at the seaside, alongside sand and ice cream? They wanted entertainment.
[00:17:00] Punch professors were perfectly placed to provide it.
[00:17:05] The booth, with its tall stripes of red and white, was already portable. The show was already short, loud, and easy to follow.
[00:17:14] All a professor had to do was pack up his cart, get on a train, and set up shop on the beach.
[00:17:22] By the late Victorian period, the red-and-white striped puppet booth had become one of the most recognisable images of the British seaside.
[00:17:33] The second big change was a magazine.
[00:17:37] In July 1841, two journalists in London started a new weekly satirical publication.
[00:17:46] They needed a name, and they needed a mascot. They settled on the most famously anarchic, disrespectful, authority-mocking character they could think of, and they called their magazine "Punch", after Mr Punch himself.
[00:18:03] The full title was "Punch, or the London Charivari", and on its cover, week after week, Mr Punch and his dog Toby looked out at the reader.
[00:18:16] The magazine started small. But by the 1850s it was selling forty thousand copies a week, and by 1910 over a hundred thousand.
[00:18:27] For Victorian Britain, this gave Mr Punch a kind of double life.
[00:18:33] On the beach, he was a cheap, knockabout puppet act for children.
[00:18:37] In a smart London club, he was the cover star of the country's most prestigious satirical magazine. The same hook-nosed troublemaker stood for both. He had become a kind of national symbol of British misrule: the small voice that mocks authority, breaks the rules, and gets away with it.
[00:18:59] But the world that had made Punch and Judy famous did not last.
[00:19:05] In its heyday, there were an estimated 400 Punch men, or professors, in Britain.
[00:19:12] In 1939, a survey counted only forty-four professional Punch men.
[00:19:19] And by the end of the twentieth century, that number had fallen to around twelve.
[00:19:26] There are some obvious reasons. From the 1960s onwards, cheap flights and package holidays meant that British holidaymakers increasingly jetted off for the south of Spain rather than sitting on a windy beach in northern England. With fewer day-trippers, there was less work for Punch professors, and fewer young people willing to spend years learning the swazzle for a shrinking audience.
[00:19:52] There is also the argument that the style of the show, what was happening on stage, was simply losing its appeal.
[00:20:01] The most obvious problem is the violence against women.
[00:20:06] It is a violent show with a violent male protagonist who beats his wife with a stick, throws his baby out of a window, and then cackles "That's the way to do it!".
[00:20:17] To a lot of people, that was increasingly not funny, not something they wanted to watch.
[00:20:24] Domestic abuse charities have argued that the show makes light of violence in the home. Women's rights campaigners have questioned what message it sends to small children.
[00:20:37] And in some places, perfectly understandably, this argument has won.
[00:20:43] A town council in South Wales removed a Punch and Judy show from a local festival on the grounds that it was, in their words, "too violent and contained inappropriate hitting".
[00:20:57] And there was a recent survey of two thousand British parents that found around forty per cent thought the traditional Punch and Judy was too violent for their own children.
[00:21:09] The defenders of the show have their own arguments. They say it is satire, not instruction.
[00:21:16] They say Punch has always been a wicked character, and that the joke is on him, not on his victims.
[00:21:24] They point out that he ends up in hell in many versions of the script, which is hardly an endorsement of his behaviour. They also argue that children do not read puppet violence in the same way adults do: the violence is stylised, ridiculous, and obviously unreal.
[00:21:45] They suggest that this is nothing compared to many video games, where characters do much worse.
[00:21:53] And they argue that taking the violence out of Punch and Judy is a bit like taking the wolf out of Little Red Riding Hood. You can do it, but at the end it's not really the same story.
[00:22:06] This being said, there have been attempts to modernise, creating less violent versions of the show, or versions where Judy hits Punch as much as he hits her.
[00:22:18] The thing is, there really isn't a pure, original version. It has always changed. Punch looks different, what happens in the show has evolved, it has never been a single, fixed text. It is a tradition with a core set of characters, bent and rewritten in every generation that has performed it.
[00:22:40] So, what does the future hold for Punch and Judy??
[00:22:44] Well, it is hard to imagine the show returning to the centre of British popular culture. There are fewer professors than there used to be, and no great national movement to bring it back.
[00:22:57] If you are lucky, or unlucky, and you find yourself at a British seaside town, you might still stumble across the telltale red-and-white striped canopy of a Punch and Judy show, and hear the inimitable sound of the swazzle.
[00:23:14] If you ever see one, stop for a moment and have a look at Mr Punch.
[00:23:20] He has lasted three and a half centuries. He has outlived the king who first applauded him in 1662. He has outlived the magazine that borrowed his name in 1841. He has outlived generations of children who once stood on the sand, staring up at that striped booth, laughing at a puppet who did everything he was not supposed to do.
[00:23:42] Whatever happens to him next, that is, by any standard, a pretty remarkable run.
[00:23:50] OK, then, that is it for today's episode, the first part of our three-part mini-series on unusual British traditions.
[00:23:58] Next up we'll be moving into fox hunting, a very different type of entertainment that many people would say is not entertainment at all.
[00:24:06] And in part three, we'll tell the story of the rise and fall of the British seaside holiday, the place where Punch and Judy really became a cult tradition.
[00:24:16] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English.
[00:24:21] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
