Starting with the 1948 short film A Circus Story filmed at the 7,000 seater Belle Vue Circus, we are introduced, both backstage and ringside, to an array of fabulously talented performers that make the Circus The Greatest Show On Earth ; equilibrists, balancing acts, high-wire jugglers, trapeze artists, performing animals Shetland ponies, dogs, sheep, horses and elephants and of course clowns.
But the bulk of this DVD is dedicated to a chronology of the British Circus starting with 1898 footage of the Barnum and Bailey Circus arriving in Sunderland.
Many circus companies are subsequently featured including Tom Arnold s Harringay Circus, Billy Smart's Circus and Bertram Mills, famous for their enormous Christmas Circus extravaganzas at Olympia.
This DVD is a veritable non-stop celebration of circus acts of yesteryear including tumblers, trick cyclists and unicyclists, the human cannonball, acrobatic comedians, the flying trapeze, plate-spinners and an elephant ballet among a treasury of performing animals including tigers, panthers, sea lions, chimps, polar bears, lions, dancing greyhounds, zebras, horses and a canine football game! But the perennial circus favourites are always the madcap antics of the clowns, including the most famous of all Coco The Clown!
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