Torquay, home of Agatha Christie, the fictional hotelier Basil Fawlty and thousands of well-heeled pensioners escaping the crush of the Home Counties for sea air, golden beaches and sunlit promenades, is not normally associated with the excesses of Binge Britain.

Yet like countless other towns and cities, after dark its streets belong to teenagers in hoodies, scantily clad hen parties in fancy dress, stag night pub-crawlers and groups of drunken youths who spill out of the seafront clubs after an evening knocking back vodka shots and pints of lager.

The towns known collectively as Torbay are among 175 communities to have received Home Office funding for a crackdown on underage drinking during half-term.

Down on the seafront, where the palm fronds hang like green icicles, closed-circuit television has picked up a group of six teenagers swigging from a bottle. They have been to a party at the ten-pin bowling alley before deciding it would be more fun to get drunk in the doorway of Debenhams.

PC Nikki Evans and her colleague, Chris Jolley, a former military policeman, find three boys, three girls and a nearly empty bottle of Lambrini, a cheap wine. Georgia, a 14-year-old in a skimpy stripey top, denies having drunk anything but looks distinctly queasy.

PC Jolley asks her to take ten paces, which she manages to do without stumbling. The officers then take the teenagers’ details and advise them that their parents will be receiving letters.

Seconds later Georgia is throwing up by the side of the road. She admits she has been drinking but insists: “I only had a small amount. It must have been a bad reaction with the pills I’ve been taking for my period.”

Her mother arrives to take her home for a telling-off. PC Evans and PC Jolley get back in their patrol car.

Most of the kids out on the streets on a cold night were only there because they had nowhere else to go. Jack, a 15-year-old wearing two hoodies to keep out the icy wind while he shared cans of Foster’s with other teenagers in an unlit park, asked resentfully: “You don’t think we’d be here if there was anywhere else to go, do you?”

PC Evans says that she has noticed a significant change in attitude among the young drinkers she encounters.

At 23 she is just a few years older than the teenagers she is dealing with.

“I don’t know what it is with this generation but they aren’t intimidated by police officers and they don’t have any respect for authority. No one I knew as a teenager would have dared speak to an officer in the way we get spoken to. Their parents have no control over them either. If we take them home and the parents ask what’s happened they just get told ‘Eff Off’, and they take it,” she says.

PC Jolley adds: “We had one 16-year-old last week who was drunk and aggressive; it took five of us to restrain him. When we got him to the station he head-butted the custody officer.”

It is not just the antisocial behaviour that is concerning the Government. Alcohol-related hospital admissions of young people have risen by more than 40 per cent since 2001.

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