Rare
footage:
"In 1903, at the Alhambra Music Hall in London's Leicester Square - now an Odeon - the public got the chance to see something truly disgusting.
Less than a decade into the cinema age, a one-minute film of mites crawling in a piece of cheese, filmed down a microscope was enough to provoke gasps and laughter from a stunned audience.
The film, made by Charles Urban and Francis Martin Duncan, marked the birth of the popular science documentary with startling imagery.
According to Urban, the mites were "crawling and creeping about in all directions, looking like great uncanny crabs, bristling with long spiny hairs and legs".
"Cheese Mites was the first scientific film made for public consumption," Dr Boon says. "These were early days for cinema. The audience was highly attuned to going after exciting new entertainments.
"They enjoyed seeing something rather revolting."
The film was unlikely to have pleased anybody in the dairy industry, but it did have a lasting effect of sales of cheap microscopes, which would often include packets of mites as a test sample. "