Comic opera

Arthur Sullivan knew better than to mess with a winning formula. ‘Cox and Box, based on J. Maddison Morton’s farce Box and Cox’ reads the title page of his first comic opera, composed to a libretto by F.C. Burnand a good five years before he latched up with W.S. Gilbert. ‘Those boys hit on a brilliant idea,’ Billy Wilder is supposed to have said when he saw the musical that Andrew Lloyd Webber and Don Black had created from his movie Sunset Boulevard. ‘They didn’t change a thing.’ Gilbert’s comic beats are sharper and faster; and he’d doubtless have shortened it by about 15 minutes. But Burnand’s words gave the

Melons. An absolutely cracking pair of melons, right there on a platter: the centrepiece of the banquet that the chaste, all-female inhabitants of the castle of Formoutiers have provided for their surprise guests, a band of nuns. Except these sisters all seem to be singing well below the stave, and judging from the way she adjusts her crotch, Mother Superior has something more than a chastity belt beneath her habit. We all know where this is going. You can’t get your melons out on stage unless, sooner or later, some great hairy bloke in a wimple is going to shove them down his front. It’s the law. And if that

It’s my new lockdown ritual. Switch on the telly, cue up the menu and scroll down to where the vintage movies gather — Film 4, or the excellent Talking Pictures TV. Then search through their early-hours offerings, and press ‘record’ more or less at random. Gainsborough costume flicks; Rattigan adaptations; anything with John Mills in a submarine — it’s all good. Then, next day, trawl through the catch to see what’s surfaced, and who wrote the music. On a good night you might get Vaughan Williams in 49th Parallel, Richard Rodney Bennett in Billy Liar or — bewilderingly — the fire-breathing serialist Elisabeth Lutyens, keeping herself in cigarettes and brandy