Flora Watkins has narrated this article for you to listen to.
Babycham, the drink you perhaps last sipped while tapping the ash from a black Sobranie as Sade played on the jukebox, is coming back. Launched in 1953 by Francis Showering of the Somerset cider family, it was aimed at giving women something to drink in the pub other than a port and lemon. Demand for the ‘genuine champagne perry’ soared after it became the first alcoholic drink advertised on the new ITV in 1955 – to the extent that Babycham was once said to be stocked by all but two pubs in the country.
It’s a ‘champagne’ rather than a ‘sparkling’ perry to this day – an attempt by Bollinger to sue for abuse of their trade name in the 1970s was dismissed by Lord Denning. The case, he declared, was not about wine, but ‘perry from pears’ – and ‘We English do know something about [this]’.
Even those too young to have poured one of the little bottles into a champagne coupe decorated with the dancing deer remember the ads. ‘I’d love a Babycham,’ says the Sloaney woman in the TV commercial of 1986, silencing the achingly hip bar – until the cool dude in dark glasses clicks his fingers and declares, ‘Hey… I’d love a Babycham’ – and everyone goes wild for it. But by then Babycham was already on the way down, that advert playing with the naffness of what was once known as ‘the landlady’s tipple’. The brand, along with the Showerings’ company, had been bought by Allied Breweries in 1968.
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