Yet subversiveness has at last struck even these pillars of the establishment, or one of them. In late August, a clip was posted on YouTube of a guard tweaking the routine. During the three minutes and 23 seconds of footage, he is seen three times doing a few slow chané turns, and for this he has been hailed in British newspapers as the pirouetting guard. This feat alone — pirouettologists will note that he is a left-turner — makes him radical.
But those turns also make him an adorable example of the absurdity that is so crucial in British humor. Keep watching the YouTube clip and you will see that this guard offers several other, subtler kinds of movement wit. Such is the formality of Guard behavior that it seems shocking when he simply bends to inspect a piece of gravel; but then he suddenly decelerates. It’s like the moment in Offenbach’s opera “The Tales of Hoffmann” when the doll soprano’s clockwork runs down, her voice descends, and she has to be wound up before she can resume singing. This guard, however, recovers his own clockwork in no time at all.