Really there is something feverish about that 'Ta-Ra-Ra' and people were more excited by the song than if it was a fine piece of dramatic acting . . .

Lottie Collins's first night was the great event of the season". This, too, had many parodies and successors, "All through Ta-Ra-Ra-Boom-De-Ay", "The Man Who Wrote Ta-Ra-Ra--Boom-De-Ay", "The Grand Old Boom-De-Ay" and "The Up-To-Date Ta-Ra-Ra-Boom-De-Ay". It will come as a surprise to many attending the exhibition to learn that one of the most famous London music-hall songs, "Down At the Old Bull and Bush", though it boasted three English lyric writers, is based on an American tune by Harry Von Tilzer, "Under the Anheuser Bush".

The rest of the display is divided into sections, mostly on subjects such as "Sporting life", "Soldiers of the Queen", "Trouble and Strife", "The working week", "Beside the seaside" and "The perils of travel" -with a particularly lovely Concanen illustration of the occupants of a railway carriage. A young lady is looking very put out: the gentleman who has just kissed her has left his false moustache adhered to her upper lip. The Bodleian collection is especially rich, containing some 11,000 music-hall songs that were deposited by their publishers; it was augmented by a further 4,000, part of the bequest from the American musicologist Walter Harding. The curators have concentrated on comic and topical songs, which immediately give a varied and rich picture of urban life and pastimes. The music hall, though, also had its love songs, often purely sentimental, as well as dramatic and morbid ballads. Death was a favourite subject, with songs of men lost at sea, or fallen in battle ("He Was Her Only Son"), the shadow of the gallows ("Sam Hall - Chimney Sweep" with its shocking denouement "Damn your eyes"), or children orphaned -as in "Skylark" ("If among the angels / Mother you should see / Tell her soon to come home again / To poor dear Daddy and me").

Although the Bodleian leaflet, published with the exhibition, suggests that "Music Hall was a comic form of entertainment unique to Britain", its influence spread, and it developed coincidentally with the Parisian cafe-concert, American vaudeville, German Kabarett and Russian Estrada. One of the stars who was equally popular in London and Paris was Little Tich. His big boots are to be seen in a glass case. Tich's career is emblematic in some ways of the history of music hall.

He had an enormous influence on the young Charlie Chaplin, and the rise of the cinema as popular entertainment contributed to music hall's decline. Then again, one of Little Tich's greatest admirers was Vaslav Nijinsky. Whenever he came to London, his first question was always "Littler?", meaning, was Tich to be seen? Nijinsky's companions related how he would sit entranced, waiting for the moment at the end of his turn when Tich would don the long-toed boots and dance, at the end rising up on point so that the tiny comedian (only four feet tall) suddenly became a lofty giant. It is the glory of music-hall that the same writers and singers could embrace the extremes of sentimentality, patriotism, sexual innuendo and social satire, and entertain the King of England and the barrow boy at the same time.