Tuesday morning on Weymouth seafront and the gulls are making little headway against a brisk westerly breeze. Early sun has given way to looming grey clouds and I'm soon ducking into one of those shelters where pensioners sit gazing out to sea in all weathers. Emerging after a short, sharp shower, I haven't strolled 50 yards down the prom when I bump into Mr Punch - or at least his alter ego, "Professor" Mark Poulton.
We'd met briefly the night before when my train journey to the south coast had finally come to an end, just in time to catch his one-off Monday evening Punch and Judy showdown on the beach. For the rest of the week, he appears thrice daily for about 20 to 30 minutes at a time throughout the summer. Children outnumber adults at the daytime shows; last night it seemed to be about 50-50 among the crowd of about 200.
There were enough children to shriek admonishment at Mr Punch for his negligent babysitting and enough adults to chortle knowingly when Judy revealed a penchant for S&M. "This is outrageous, but I like it," she trilled while having her bottom smacked. That's as close to wife beating as this interpretation of the timeless puppet show allows itself to veer - although the policeman takes a crunching whack on the head from Mr Punch's stick, which makes him endlessly repeat the phrase "Never done me any harm."
Punch and Judy shows in this country date back long before the time of George III, whose colourful statue graces a Weymouth traffic island. "The first official mention was on May 9, 1662," says Poulton. How can he be so specific? "Because it's in Samuel Pepys' Diary."
Ah, so that explains why Punch and Judy men call themselves professors; they like a bit of scholarly research. "Not really," he says. "Most of us know something about the tradition that we come from, but we're really about as academic as a school of dolphins. Apart from history, art and woodwork, I hated school." He left before doing any exams, mainly because he'd already secured his first summer season at Llandudno, when he was just 16.
Here on another section of the British coastline, we've avoided the next morning shower by delving into a cafe across the road from the beach. We're sitting near a heavily tattooed man, an Arsenal shirt stretched across his beer gut, who's tucking into a jumbo breakfast despite the absence of several front teeth. Not a pretty sight.
Poulton himself looks slim, tanned and a little hippyish, with a stumpy ponytail behind temples that, at 36, are beginning to grey a little. "Last year I had dreadlocks halfway down my back," he confides before taking another swig of much-needed coffee.
It was 1.30 this morning when he finally got to bed at his caravan, seven miles out of town. What's more, rain was hammering on the roof for most of the night. "At times like that," he muses, "you ask yourself, 'What am I doing here?' I miss my wife [Dawn, a hospital sister] and daughter terribly. Kaya's only three. I manage to get home to Paignton to see them only very occasionally between May and September. And sometimes they can get down here on a Saturday, but not often enough. I have to keep telling myself that it's the nature of the job."
One aspect of the job is the need to count the takings, which partly explains last night's late bedtime. Poulton's is one of the last seaside shows to rely on the honesty of the audience to part with 80p a head. That's his income for the summer, apart from the bit of extra money that comes from selling key rings, fridge magnets and colouring sets after the performance. But at least he no longer has to sift the silver and copper from shards of broken glass, as Punch and Judy men did once upon a time. "The collector used to be called a 'bottler' because the coins used to be tossed into a bottle," he explains. "At the end of the show, it had to be smashed to get at the cash."
There were two collectors at last night's show. One was Renee Smith, who also worked for Poulton's predecessor, Professor Guy Higgins. "I always tell the audience," says the current Prof, "that this show has been on Weymouth beach since 1880 and we've still got the same collector. Mind you, Renee gives as good as she gets."
The other woman shaking a slotted box was Poulton's mother, Mary, who's come for a week's holiday. A primary school teacher from Stroud in Gloucestershire, she always had a good idea of what her son wanted to do for a living. "I was five when I announced that I wanted to be a Punch and Judy man when I grew up," he recalls.
"I have a hazy memory of a day trip to Weston the previous year. The puppeteer, I've since discovered, was Professor Reuben Staddon, whose family had been performing there since 1796. Well, he must have made an impression on me because we came here to Weymouth for a week's holiday the following year and I remember being fixated as soon as I heard the music. I watched every performance that week. As soon as we got home, I destroyed my teddies to transform them into puppets and set up my own show behind a wall-papering table in the back garden."
By 1988, he was proficient enough to win the Most Promising Young Prof award. Hence the invitation to do the summer season at Llandudno from Anne Codman, widow of the late Professor Jack Codman. "She was in her 80s by then, with strict Victorian values, " Poulton reminisces. "As I had to stay with her, it rather curtailed my first taste of freedom. But once I'd done a seaside season, I knew that I had to get out of Stroud and live by the sea. Devon feels like home now. I've got more than enough to do in the winter with school workshops, Christmas street fairs and late-night shopping evenings. It also gives me chance to spend some time with Dawn and Kaya."
Unlike many a Punch and Judy practitioner, he had no family tradition to live up to. "It means that I'm free to build up a show structured to today's audiences," he says. "It has to work on two levels, a bit like The Simpsons. In fact, I see it as a cross between The Simpsons and a Carry On film. Some of the lines go straight over the heads of the children, but help to keep the adults engaged."
And do any of those adults ever object to the content? "One member of the public came up to me and proclaimed that Punch and Judy should be banned because they sent the wrong signals to children. Somehow I persuaded him to sit down and watch the show. The following week he came back with two bottles of wine by way of apology. He hadn't realised that things have moved on a bit."
And a dying one? "Not at all. I could do pre-paid gigs at theme parks and leisure centres all year round. But there's something about being down on the beach, living off your wits and pushing yourself to attract an audience." It helps that he can up the volume of Mr Punch's voice with the help of a device called a "swazzle", which a puppeteer keeps in his mouth to reproduce that instantly familiar rasping vibrato. "It's about the size of a boiled sweet," he goes on. And, yes, he has been known to swallow his swazzle. "It's happened to me four or five times but, thankfully, I've never choked on it," he adds as the Arsenal fan sees off the last of his jumbo breakfast.
Outside the cafe, storm clouds are gathering again as the first show of the day approaches. "Sometimes people are glad of something to watch when it's raining. I'll just have to carry on."
That's the way to do it.
Curriculum Vitae
Pay A closely guarded secret. Audiences vary considerably in size, but each member is asked to contribute 80p, from which "Mr Punch" has to pay a ground rent to the local authority.
Hours Up to 10 hours a day, seven days a week, in the summer months. Shows last a maximum of 30 minutes, but there's plenty of preparation and maintenance.
High point "Working on the beach and striving to generate the warmth and happiness I felt when I came here as a kid."
Low point "A wet summer at Lusty Glaze beach in Cornwall. There was no prom, so no passing trade."