Leisure

_{Dan Leno, the hugely successful comic actor, appeared in multiple films and even had his own boy's comic. © Getty Images.}

By 1901, the world was beginning to look recognisably modern in media innovations.

On the first day of the new century, Alfred Harmsworth created the world’s first tabloid newspaper, the World. Harmsworth had started publishing the Daily Mail in 1896, boosting its circulation to a staggering 989,255 in 1900, with slogans like “the busy man’s daily journal” and “the penny newspaper for one halfpenny”. Now the masthead of the World welcomed the century of hurry and rush: “The Busy Man’s Paper. All the News in Sixty Seconds.”

Cinema was developing rapidly, too. Until now, it had been just one item on a variety bill. The Empire Music Hall, in London’s Leicester Square, had for several years been slotting four short films into an evening’s entertainment – the arrival of the Paris Express, a practical joke played on a governess, the collapse of a wall and boating in the Mediterranean – between jugglers, singers, dancers and a performance of Faust. But the new medium was taking over: in August, the first dedicated cinema opened, in Islington, north London.

The documentary film was hugely popular: for the first time ever, people could see events almost as soon as they took place, hundreds of miles away. Dozens of companies rushed to capitalise on this market. Cecil Hepworth’s production company produced three films on the Paris Exposition of 1900, and on the death of Queen Victoria in January 1901, it filmed her funeral. In February, the British Mutoscope and Biograph Company provided footage of Edward VII and Queen Alexandra being driven to the opening of Parliament, as well as sporting events like the Derby and the Henley Regatta.

While film was taken out of variety halls, variety was finding a new outlet in film. Dan Leno, the great comedian, now at his zenith, was everywhere. He appeared annually as the Dame at Drury Lane’s Christmas pantomime, and he even became the ‘hero’ of a boy’s serial, Dan Leno’s Comic Journal, possibly the first real person to be so fictionalised. Now he also appeared in films, a few times as an actor, but mostly as himself, the befuddled Everyman trying to get to grips with the modern world in Dan Leno’s Attempt to Master the Cycle, or attempting to open a champagne bottle in An Obstinate Cork. In 1902, he would neatly merge the new worlds of tabloid journalism and film in his appearance in Dan Leno and Herbert Campbell Edit the ‘Sun’.

Judith Flanders