From Fingermouse to The Wicker Man:Examining the Archives at the BFI.

Throbbing Gristle, Threads, Fingerbobs (but not Fingermouse), Give my Regards to Broad Street, Norman Wisdom, the progressive rock band Quintessence, Oz magazine, Highgate Cemetery, Gus Honeybun, Andy Milligan, the Grindhouse scene, witchcraft in the Notting Hill area, Anthony Newley, Operation Yewtree, the TV show Music Box, the busking days of a pre-Hawkwind Dave Brock, and the former Play School presenter Toni Arthur's spell as a gothic folk singer.

These were just a few of the subjects that were covered during the Q&A alone at last night's London Fortean Society talk, The Bodies Beneath:The Flipside of British Film & Television, at the Conway Hall. An event that, as I left the estimable building, I nearly walked straight into the esteemed metaphysical philosopher, and author of The God Argument, A. C. Grayling on the way out. He's a bit of a slouch when it comes to doors, it turns out.

Grayling had been speaking at an event about the compatibility (or not) of various Abrahamic faiths in the main room while I'd been squirreled away in a side room beset by technical difficulties (that continued into the talk) for an hour and a half that was enjoyable enough but, sadly, lacked any real narrative structure. It felt less like a curated evening than three blokes chatting as if they were in a pub - except without any booze.

Which was probably for the best. I've drunk enough recently. So with a bottle of water and a packet of Polos I waited as three bearded men took to a table and sat behind some laptops. I'd have not been too surprised if they'd kicked off by playing a few tracks by Orbital or the Psychick Warriors ov Gaia, such was the set up's accidental debt to the techno scene.

These men weren't musicians though, but archivists. Of sorts. They were William Fowler and Vic Pratt (described, worryingly - they looked youthful to me, as 'veteran' film curators) and interviewee Mark Pilkington and they were with us to talk about (and hopefully sell a few copies of) their book, which carries the same title as the talk.

It's a book that aims to look behind what the urban intelligentsia, the arbiters of taste, have decreed is worth restoring or enjoying another run in arthouse cinemas. Stuff like The Red Shoes or The Third Man. It's a book that looks, even, to go beyond canonically approved cult favourites like The Wicker Man, El Topo, Eraserhead, and Psychomania.

Pratt and Fowler were very keen to make it clear they had nothing against The Third Man or Eraserhead or, indeed, any of these films. It was more that their interest was digging a bit deeper in the crates, getting down into the dusty corners of the archives, and discovering what they termed "the films of the damned". The work that has, for some reason or another, been excluded from the canon.

They both work at the BFI so they're in a pretty good place to locate these 'curate's egg's'. They were also keen attendees of the Scala cinema's cult film nights in the eighties and raved about Nigel Wingrove and Marc Morris's Art of the Nasty, a book that reproduced the sleeves of some of the eighties most notorious, and most obscure, video nasties.

Video nasties! Almost sounds quaint now. They were fascinating at the time. Hard to get hold off and yet having quite a kudos in the playground. In reality they were often, but not always, poorly produced, badly acted, and had lame special effects and woeful plots. But Pratt and Fowler aren't in the business of looking for films that are good from start to finish. They're more interested in films that may only contain a few minutes of genius, for curios, or for the completely out there.

So following an opening montage (sadly the only film of the night) that featured clips of Dr Who, creepy crawlies, and lots of topless women we were soon into a wild, somewhat random, journey that took in electronic music playing while chickens were being slaughtered for sale at a supermarket (a thing called Paranoid London), a key party in 1965's Wife Swappers, the soft porn of Stanley Long, navy documentaries, the origins of the mondo genre, and the various scandals that have afflicted Sooty over the years.

There was an uproar when Sooty first got a girlfriend but it was as nothing compared to a film in which he runs a chemist shop selling intoxicating pharmaceuticals. Most of which are guzzled up by Sweep. This comes from a very rich, and very British, seam of film making. That of the company training film. Or the educational film.

One, so far mostly unheralded, female director who worked in this field was Mary Field (Field's field). 1932's The Mystery of Marriage sought to educate school children about sex and was shown in schools that decade. Because they obviously couldn't show actual humans copulating or even getting it on in milder ways they got round that by using locusts and praying mantises.

Hereford Pedigree Cattle was an even tougher sell as it was designed to teach children how to sex livestock and why Rough Sea at Dover featured a cricket match on a listing ship is anyone's guess but it certainly sounds odd and helped, in America mainly, to cement the UK's reputation as a place where the very mundane could exist right next to the completely bonkers!

Where The War Game nuclear war drama/documentary can sit next to Charlie Drake, where Nigel Kneale (Quatermass) can make a sitcom (Kinvig) in the eighties about a scantily clad alien who visits an electric repair shop in a small British town, and where the idea of the gifted outsider (think John Pertwee's Dr Who or Patrick McGoohan) taking on the grey society men is not just accepted but positively relished.

There was a lot of talk of films and television programmes that I'd never heard of (which was kind of the point I suppose) and a lot of it went over my head (most things do) but I did get the feeling that the talk was of more value to the initiated. One for the purists, perhaps, although I was particularly interested when ideas of an alternative version of the cliched image of the swinging sixties in London was broached and I would have loved for the speakers to delve further into their theories on what these films say about London, what they say about Britain, and what they might even say about us.

For the most part, however, enthusiasm bested narrative or hypothesis and though it was interesting to hear about 1975's Seven Green Bottles (in which Danny John-Jules starred, as Frog, along with seven other unknown kids in a parable about crime that was so effective that all the kids bar Danny later ended up doing time), to reassess Colin Baker's stint as Dr Who via 1986's Trial of the Timelord, and even to have a debate about the waxing and waning popularities of mummies, zombies, werewolves, and vampires these occasionally proved dead ends in which the talk employed a hyperspace button to escape and reappeared elsewhere chatting about something almost completely unrelated.

Which was fun. But frustrating. It was illuminating to hear about Mary Whitehouse and the Festival of Light's attempt to shut down anything that was too sexy, too shocking, or too much fun or to learn of the 1971 'campaign' documentary The Savage Voyage. A film about 'the hells of depression' that was virtually a horror and features scenes of extreme vivisection certainly sounds like something I never need to see. But, ultimately, I'd need to be smoking some of Sooty's gear for all of this to cohere in my head.

That, ultimately, probably doesn't matter. The evening's aim was to be fun (which it mostly was), to sell a few books (which they did), and, perhaps, more than anything, point people towards some hitherto unregarded pieces of auteurship and in that it succeeded. It was ramshackle, threadbare even in places, and beset by tech gremlins but it was charming and had moments of absolute hilarity. In that it was much like the aforesaid curate's eggs that Vic Pratt and William Fowler were promoting.

Now, if you'll pardon me I've got to go. I've got a yellow puppet bear with a wand coming round for a re-up and I want to get to him before Sweep snaffles the entire stash. Izzy, whizzy, let's get bizzy!