London calling.
London Walks connecting.
This… is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets ahead.
Story time. History time.
Top of the morning to you, London Walkers.
Wherever you are.
It’s Saturday, March 14th, 2026.
And here it is.
Here’s your daily London fix.
Important London anniversary, March 14th.
It’s the day Victorian London lost its collective mind.
Let’s go there. See what went down.
The date is March 14th, 1885.
The place: the Savoy Theatre just off the Strand.
And inside that theatre
something is about to happen
that will send London
into a frenzy of
humming, giggling and mild bureaucratic panic.
Because tonight
London premieres an operetta called The Mikado.
Now if you’ve never encountered The Mikado,
imagine this.
A Japanese town run entirely by British civil servants.
Except worse.
Far worse.
The town has a Lord High Executioner
who has never executed anybody.
A Lord High Everything Else who runs the entire government because nobody else will do the job.
And a bureaucrat called Pooh-Bah who holds every public office simultaneously
because the local council
has resigned in protest.
Which means he is:
First Lord of the Treasury.
Lord Chief Justice.
Archbishop.
Master of the Buckhounds.
And probably assistant deputy under-secretary for teapot regulation.
Victorian audiences adored this sort of thing.
Because they recognised it.
Now the Savoy Theatre itself
was already a sensation.
It was the first theatre in the world lit entirely by electricity.
Electricity.
In 1885.
Londoners came to the Savoy partly to watch the show
and partly to gawp at the light bulbs.
People sat there staring at the ceiling
saying things like:
“Good heavens, Margaret,
the chandeliers are glowing without gas!”
“Is it safe?”
“Probably not.”
But the real madness
was the show.
Gilbert and Sullivan
had decided to satirise British bureaucracy.
And they did it
in the most British way imaginable.
They set it in Japan.
Now Victorian London had recently become obsessed
with all things Japanese.
Fans. Screens. Umbrellas. Kimonos.
The city was suddenly full of people
who knew absolutely nothing about Japan
but were very keen to dress
like postcards from Yokohama.
So Gilbert thought:
Right.
Let’s set the whole ridiculous machinery of British government inside a Japanese village.
And then he invented the laws.
Oh the laws.
In the town of Titipu
flirting is punishable by decapitation.
The Mikado himself has issued a decree.
Flirting is illegal.
Which raises the obvious problem.
The town has no executioner willing to do the job.
Enter Ko-Ko.
Ko-Ko is the Lord High Executioner.
And the reason he has the job
is that he was originally scheduled to be executed himself.
But the town realised that
if they executed him
they would no longer have an executioner.
So, naturally,
they promoted him instead.
Victorian administrative logic at its finest.
Ko-Ko then produces a document.
A list.
A list of people who deserve execution.
It’s called:
The List of Society Offenders Who Might Well Be Underground.
Among those who deserve the chop are:
The idiot who praises with enthusiastic tone
All centuries but this
and every country but his own.
Also on the list:
The lady novelist who writes historical fiction and
insists that medieval people
spoke exactly
like Victorian drawing-room guests.
And the idiot
who whistles popular tunes in public places.
Which frankly sounds like half of London.
The audience at the Savoy absolutely lost it.
They roared with laughter.
They stamped their feet.
They demanded encores.
Within days
London was humming the songs in the streets.
Clerks in the City were singing them.
Cab drivers were singing them.
Members of Parliament were very definitely singing them.
Probably nervously.
Because everyone understood
what Gilbert was really doing.
He was poking fun at
British authority.
Government.
Officials.
Rules.
Regulations.
Committees.
Sub-committees.
Committees formed to examine the findings of previous committees.
The entire glorious machinery of British bureaucracy.
All disguised as a comic opera about Japan.
And the characters.
Good heavens the characters.
Pooh-Bah.
The Lord High Everything Else.
A man who holds
so many public offices
he has to pay himself fees
to talk to himself.
There’s a scene
where someone asks him
for official approval.
Pooh-Bah replies
that this will require
consulting
several departments.
He then leaves the room.
Changes hats.
And returns as the different departments.
Victorian audiences howled.
And frankly so would any modern civil servant.
The show ran
for 672 performances.
Which in 1885 was staggering.
It became one of the biggest hits
in theatrical history.
And London went completely Mikado-mad.
Mikado umbrellas.
Mikado fans.
Mikado tea sets.
You could barely buy a biscuit tin without a Japanese village painted on it.
And here’s the truly glorious part.
This ridiculous operetta.
This absurd satire.
This gloriously silly night
of music hall nonsense.
Quietly influenced British comedy for the next century.
Wodehouse loved it.
Radio comedy loved it.
And if you squint just slightly
you can see the seeds
of something else.
Something that would emerge nearly a hundred years later.
Six men in suits
singing about spam.
Dead parrots.
The Ministry of Silly Walks.
Yes.
Gilbert and Sullivan walked
so that Monty Python could run.
Preferably in a ridiculous hat.
So next time you pass
the Savoy Theatre.
Just off the Strand.
Pause for a moment.
Because on a March night in 1885 that theatre witnessed
one of the great explosions
of laughter in London history.
Electric lights blazing.
Victorians in evening dress.
And a comic opera cheerfully explaining
that the best way to run a government
is to appoint a man
called Pooh-Bah
as Lord High Everything Else.
And that,
as they say in Titipu,
is the sort of administrative reform that could catch on.
This is London calling.
And looking ahead.
Tomorrow we step into a building that changed the sound of the modern world.
Portland Place.
March 15th, 1932.
The doors open on Broadcasting House and suddenly a brand-new institution called the BBC begins speaking to millions of people at once.
Microphones. Studios. Five million listeners.
And a voice that would soon become one of the most famous in the world.
Join us tomorrow for the story of the day London found its voice.
And on that agreeable note… come then, let us go forward together on some great London Walks.
And that’s by way of saying, Good walking and Good Londoning one and all. See ya next time. Same place, same time tomorrow. Well not the Savoy Theatre… Portland Place. Broadcasting House. But the same town. London. This…is London.