Droming On - Moviedrome Year One
I'm going to plough throw both the Alex Cox and Mark Cousins eras. So let's start at the very beginning...
I’d like to say I remember watching the first series of Moviedrome when it originally aired. But with the show starting in the May of 1988, the truth of the matter is that I was probably busy revising for my GCSEs. However, come the end of that initial run, I was certainly aware that the programme existed, since it was courtesy of Messrs Cox and Freand-Jones’ eccentric enterprise that I first saw The Good, The Bad And The Ugly and the original Invasion Of The Body Snatchers.
It mightn’t be a fashionable opinion but I think Moviedrome Year One was as strong and on point as it could possibly be.
Kicking off on May 8th with The Wicker Man (‘the Citizen Kane of horror movies’ - Fangoria), the first series comprised Ozploitation pictures (Russell Mulcahy’s Razorback), Italian horror films (The Long Hair Of Death), arty Euro flicks (Jean-Jacques Beneix’s Diva), old skool B-movies (...Body Snatchers, Kurt Neumann’s The Fly), plus films that deserved a bigger audience than they’d been previously afforded (John Huston’s Fat City, Peter Fonda’s The Hired Hand, John Milius’ Big Wednesday).
What might come as a surprise is the fact that such rich pickings didn’t seem particularly rich in the 1980s. Back then, great movies seemed to air all the time. Indeed, a number of the films mentioned above and listed below had actually aired on the Beeb in the years running up to Moviedrome’s launch on its sober precursor, Movie Club.
That strand had been hosted by such luminaries as Kim Newman, Neil Norman and Derek Malcolm. Moviedrome, meanwhile, was the domain of Alex Cox, a Liverpudlian filmmaker whose small but impressive body of work comprised the sort of films that wouldn’t look at all out of place on Moviedrome.
Repo Man, Sid And Nancy, Straight To Hell, Walker - all these years on, it’s hard to think of a British director whose career kicked off as spectacularly and as idiosyncratically. And now here was the man of the hour on a mock-up of a run-down motel - a classic cult film/B-movie location - explaining how your life couldn’t progress unless you stayed up to watch James William Guericio’s Electra Glide In Blue and/or Francis Coppola’s One From The Heart.
Alex wasn’t just shilling for the movies that played at the ‘Drome, mind you. He was quick to point out their failings (the literal interpretation of the songs in One From The Heart, the longeurs of The Good, The Bad…) as well as interesting aspects that were easily overlooked (take the scene in Diva that’s designed entirely to complement a packet of Gitanes). Though we mightn't have realised it at the time, we the viewer were attending a sort of film school, one where the teacher had an electric shock haircut and the study materials came with lashings of gore and nudity.
By the time the curtain came down on Moviedrome’s first year, an awful lot that we’d come to love about the programme was already in place. A host with the most, ace filmmakers who’d feel like old friends by the time the 'Drome died (Nicholas Ray, Nic Roeg, Don Siegel), the simple thrill of staying up late to watch movies that could only be shown long after the watershed - only the double-bills that would become the show’s stock in trade were AWOL.
As Alex Cox bid us a final ‘adios’ on September 4th 1988, I couldn’t have been alone in hoping that the next summer - one where I wouldn’t be up to my hips in life-changing exams - would be full of as many compelling pictures. Ahead lay a long winter during which I promised myself that trips to the video shop would see me rent films other than those directed by Johns Hughes and Landis.
Moviedrome - Series One (1988)
The Wicker Man (8th May, 11pm)
Electra Glide In Blue (15th May, 11pm)
Diva (22nd May, 10.55pm)
Razorback (29th May, 11.20pm)
Big Wednesday (5th June, 10.50pm)
Fat City (12th June, 11.20pm)
The Last Picture Show (19th June, 11.30pm)
Barbarella (26th June, 10.20pm)
The Hired Hand (3rd July, 10.35pm)
Johnny Guitar (10th July, 10.40pm)
The Parallax View (17th July, 10.50pm)
The Long Hair Of Death (24th July, 10.50pm)
Invasion Of The Body Snatchers (31st July, 10.55pm)
The Fly (7th August, 10pm)
One From The Heart (14th August, 10.30pm)
The Man Who Fell To Earth (21st August, 10.15pm)
The Good, The Bad And The Ugly (18th August, 10.05pm)
One-Eyed Jacks (4th September, 9.55pm)