Katie Puckrik’s word. We just found the room for it.
You weren’t looking for it. One breath, and you’re suddenly years away. Smell doesn’t knock — it walks right in.
Someone you haven’t thought of in ten years, back in a single sniff.
A place lost to time, but your mind marks the spot.
The feeling lands intact, a time machine to your heart.
Smell touches our hidden selves. It retrieves vanished rooms, reclaims forgotten scenarios. It signals safety and danger, love and fear, life and death, all before the conscious mind can catch up.
“Smells detonate softly in our memory.”Diane Ackerman
Katie Puckrik follows those detonations across human history — ten smells, ten stories, and one question beneath them all: how much of what makes us human begins with the nose?
Katie Puckrik built the first perfume channel on the internet, and has spent the years since making scents make sense: funny, precise, idiosyncratic.
She made her name on Channel 4’s The Word, fronted the BBC’s I Can Go for That: The Smooth World of Yacht Rock, writes for the Guardian and the Observer, and co-hosts the modern history podcast We Didn’t Start the Fire. Before television, she danced — with DV8 and the Pet Shop Boys. And on this evening, she makes the invisible visible.
Of everything we put on this stage, this is the one we can’t stop talking about. Come and find how much of you has been keeping time by smell all along.
It sold out the first time. Book now.
The first one sold out. It comes back for one more night — same ten smells, same room of fifty-five, passed hand to hand. Once they’re gone, they’re gone.