As satirists cast around for different ways to have a go at the scandal-hit House of Lords last week they could have done worse than hark back to the past — almost 130 years ago, in fact, when W. S. Gilbert and Sir Arthur Sullivan lampooned the peerage, poking fun at the bewitched fools in their comic operetta Iolanthe.

But no matter how topical their satire might have remained, for years G&S have occupied a no man’s land of cultural naffdom, caught between opera and musical, whose chief flag-wavers are eccentric amateur enthusiasts.

For 22 years the only scintillating professional G&S production has been The Mikado at English National Opera. A critical and popular one-hit wonder, Jonathan Miller’s setting in a 1920s British seaside hotel is still considered groundbreaking on its thirteenth revival. ENO — surely the natural guardian of big-budget G&S — has failed to muster a follow-up. Martin Duncan’s The Gondoliers sold well enough in 2006 but was a critical flop, and the company has no plans to revive it. Likewise, Elijah Moshinsky’s overcooked Pirates of Penzance disappointed in 2004.

So forget the West End if you want a G&S fix and you want it now. Head to its Middle-England heartland: Northampton, Abbots Langley or Godalming, the places where amateur G&S societies beaver away year in, year out on productions of The Mikado, HMS Pinafore and so on. I can remember my mum warbling G&S at our local am-dram society, the Nomads, and it wasn’t pretty. Even she blushes at the memory. Consequently, in one sense I’d rather have plucked out my own eyeballs than visit the Savoy Singers of Camberley, Surrey, rehearsing their 40th anniversary production of The Mikado, G&S’s Japanese masterpiece.

The scene is a goldmine for Peter Kay or Little Britain: performers of every shape, size and fashion sense; men in a flap with their Japanese fans; the minxy three little maids (apart from one) nudging 40. All of them singing along — impressively well, I admit — to a piano in the local community centre. Why do they do it?

“For me it’s the music,” says Andrew Few, 45. Few has sung in every G&S opera bar one, though he started reluctantly. “I thought: ‘Urgh, G&S: fuddy-duddy and boring.’ But it’s fantastic. People write it off because it was written more than 100 years ago but if you stop and listen, it has modern references: idiotic politicians, corruption . . .”

According to the D’Oyly Carte Company, which hires out G&S scores to amateur societies, last year was its busiest for four years, with the biggest interest coming from student groups, especially the Oxbridge societies. At 19, Ellen Hunter is the youngest of the Savoy Singers, and slightly bemused by her first show. “I don't know much G&S but I’m sure they grow on you,” she offers apologetically. “Bits of it are funny.”

The keenest G&S champion in the room is 50-year-old Stuart Box, who averages seven G&S productions a year. “Sullivan could write beautiful music; Gilbert had a rapier wit and understood how to make the English language sing,” he enthuses. The slogan on his sweatshirt reads: “Bringing G&S into the 21st century.”

But is that realistic? G&S still struggles on the professional stage. In 2003 the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company (the original company formed in 1878 to perform G&S) staged its final show at the Savoy Theatre in London, blaming failure on the tough economic climate. “It’s a limited market and no longer commercially viable,” the promoter Raymond Gubbay said at the time. While hopeful of a return, today D’Oyly Carte has “no specific plans in place”.

Oddly, this could be G&S’s professional saving grace. “The death of the D’Oyly Carte, in my view, was not necessarily a bad thing,” says Mike Leigh, the director of the Oscar-winning G&S film Topsy-Turvy in 1999. “I grew up watching those things and they were stale as hell.

“The perception of G&S — comfortable, cosy, superficial — owes a lot to amateur productions and to the traditions of D’Oyly Carte.” For Leigh, the companies are obstacles, not the work itself. “Of course G&S is old-fashioned. But so are Hogarth and Dickens,” he says. “The work is there to be explored, freshly and in a radical way.”

And the green shoots of a possible renaissance are poking through. In the summer the BBC Proms will showcase a semi-staged G&S operetta, Patience. A further whiff of kudos will come with the imminent publication of The Cambridge Companion to Gilbert and Sullivan, a collection of essays written by aficionados lofty and popular, including Leigh, which may reboot both academic and popular interest.

Even the big record labels are moving in: SonyBMG forked out £1.25 million to sign the Gala Ensemble, a troupe of five singing teachers whose album The Best of Gilbert and Sullivan was the second biggest-selling classical debut of last year. It has also just entered the newly-created Specialist Classical Chart at No 1. “We realised no one had done G&S for a long time but there was clearly an audience,” says their manager, Richard Hinkley, citing the International Gilbert and Sullivan Festival at Buxton, Derbyshire. Some 20,000 G&S enthusiasts flock to this jamboree each year, though it is strictly an event for the hardcore fan .

Undoubtedly G&S is tricky to get right. Neither wholly comic nor wholly satirical, its ridiculous tomfoolery masks an intelligent view of humanity, and, as Moshinsky’s Pirates showed, directors camp it up at their peril.

One man determined to breathe new life into G&S is Peter Mulloy, the artistic director of Carl Rosa Opera. “Our audience is 45 to death,” he says. “I call them the wistaria-guinea brigade, women with wistaria hair, who live in Cheltenham and pay for their tickets with guineas.” With no public subsidy and no wealthy G&S philanthropist to back him, Mulloy has to find a new audience. His trick is “interesting” casting.

The comedians Jo Brand and Alistair McGowan starred in Carl Rosa’s West End run last year and it was a sell-out. “Jo Brand brought a completely new, younger audience through the door, an audience who think G&S isn’t for them,” Mulloy says. “And you know what? They loved it!” Mulloy is planning another eight-week West End run this summer and casting a Yeomen of the Guard to be staged at the Tower of London Festival in September. His wish-list includes Lee Evans, Shane Richie, Eddie Izzard and even the American actor Robin Williams. It’s certainly radical.

If ever there was an oeuvre hemmed in by tradition, it’s been Gilbert and Sullivan. An English tradition preserved in aspic, G&S has been unwittingly smothered by the am-dram societies who love it so deeply. And yet it survives, and given a frisson of daring direction, star casting or a showcase like the Proms, it might just grow stronger.

Mike Leigh for one isn’t worried about a topsy-turvy tomorrow. “People will be doing this stuff in the future and they will do it liberated from fusty conventions,” he says. “The conventions will fall away but the work will still be there.” Until then, there’s always Godalming.

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