In a record shop in Truro last summer I heard someone ask for a recording of the Pirates of Penzance. `Would they be a local group"' drawled the girl behind the counter. G & S had obviously lost their hold on late twentieth century Cornwall, but in late nineteenth century America the Mikado was a wow. Rival Mikado companies sprouted like alfalfa seed and sued each other with litigious fury over who had the proper performing rights. On one evening in 1886, a year after the first performance in England, there took place across the United States 170 separate performances of the opera, one of them probably in the newly christened town of Mikado, Michigan.

The Americans, on the whole quite a prudish lot, had trouble conceiving how Gilbert could decently call his town Titipu, or think there might be a bird called a tit-willow - after all they carry...