It was in 1977 that the Guardian took the trouble to ask Lionel Bart ‘Whatever happened to the British musical?’

It was a fair enough question. Everybody who knew anything about the British musical, about which almost everybody in Britain knew hardly anything, thought it had pretty well gone down the proverbial plughole, but there probably wasn't a moment's hesitation before Bart replied ‘It stopped when I stopped. It was big when Gilbert and Sullivan were doing some; when Noel Coward was doing some. It was big when I was doing some.’

I wish I had seen this brilliantly concise analysis of what happened to the British musical in the second half of the twentieth century before attempting to capture the mystery in a book of 140,000 words. Bart had a point. Of course, enough British musicals have pleased and managed to run into respectable age, and by the beginning of the 1970s a more commercially keen ‘international’ brand of musical had (often clutching a bible) crept up on London, bringing much wider recognition and success to its creators and their products, recognition and success denied its predecessors.

‘Nothing Succeeds Like Success’ ran the title of one of the more intellectually inane songs in The Card, supposedly a period musical based on an undeservedly mutilated novel by Arnold Bennett, but effectually a collection of quasi pop-songs hung out to dry by the creators of the theme tune to Crossroads, and there was no denying the truth of it. Success, however, only exists because of failure. Success romps over failure, swims in clear water above the sinking depths of failure, rolls on as failure folds up, fades away, hides itself shamefaced as the curtain falls too soon, taking its creators down with the speed of a Titanic.

Success versus failure; these are simply, after all, labels, and the labels are slapped on with little heed of justice. Who can say if the show that runs four nights, two weeks or a few months is a failure, or the show that runs five years or seems destined to run for ever is a success? They may have been labelled wrongly.