STRANGER THINGS

‘Moviedrome’ left late-night TV audiences spellbound with weird films from 1988 to 2000. As it inspires a season of screenings in London, Alex Deller talks to its creators

- Alex Deller

The existential dread of Sunday night has always been a mind-killer, but it used to be much, much worse. Long before we could safely vegetate before endless hours of Skibidi Toilet or doom-scroll ourselves to sleep with smartphones crab-clawed to our chests, there were the bad old days of linear television: four terrestrial channels and the kind of Sunday evening programmings whose theme tunes - Last of the Summer Wine, Songs of Praise, Antiques Roadshow - can still induce involuntary gag reflexes even decades later.

For those of a certain age and disposition, the dying days of the 20th century did, however, offer a weird, wonderful escape hatch: Moviedrome. Running from 1988 to 2000, the show offered a carefully curated deep dive into “cult” film, memorably presented by Alex Cox (1988-1994), director of movies including Repo Man and Sid and Nancy, and the filmmaker and documentarian Mark Cousins (1997-2000). It lifted the lid on everything from outrageous horror and sci-fi tales to film noir masterpieces and psychedelic Westerns. With Moviedrome, it was possible to tune into Jean-Luc Godard’s stylish Alphaville one week and be assailed by a film about a giant pig running amok in the Australian outback the next. Now, a special two-month season at London’s BFI explores the series in all its glory, covering once-reviled classics like Scarface, Get Carter and The Wicker Man to lesser-knowns like The Great Silence and California Dolls.

“The beauty of Moviedrome was that with ‘cult’ being the definition you could range far and wide over high art, low art, obscure foreign language films... anything from the Forties to the Nineties,” says Nick Freand Jones, the show’s mastermind and producer. He’d started his BBC career with