The 1967 film "The London Nobody Knows" shows the capital how it really is. It helped inspire Saint Etienne's 2006 film "What Have You Done Today, Mervyn Day?"

Tonight we will be showing two films: The London Nobody Knows from Norman Cohen, which was a great inspiration to the films of Saint Etienne, and What Have You Done Today, Mervyn Day? made by the band themselves.

The London Nobody Knows, starring James Mason, is based on a book from Geoffrey Fletcher, and is a fascinating documentary into the London of the 1960's. Bob from Saint Etienne says that "The London Nobody Knows, [is] a 1967 documentary stroll around the city with James Mason. No horseguards, no palaces, but Islington's Chapel Market, pie shops, and Spitalfields tenements. Carnaby chicks and chaps, the 1967 we have been led to remember, are shockingly juxtaposed with feral meths drinkers, filthy shoeless kids, squalid Victoriana... There is romance and adventure, but mostly there is malnourishment. London looks like a shithole."

The London Nobody Knows has just been chosen as "classic film of the month" by the Independent Cinema Office. They describe it as "essential viewing, elegiac and beautifully shot as well as endlessly fascinating."

Greatly inspired by the film and the book it is based on, Saint Etienne directed several films about London. Tonight we will be showing their second film, What Have You Done Today, Mervyn Day? The film is a chirpily creative documentary about the lower Lea Valley, a vast but largely forgotten swathe East London. The film-makers caught this "unplanned, ungentrifiable and untamed" patch of the city on the brink of a massive redevelopment programme to "transform" it from industrial wasteland to the site of the 2012 Olympic Games.

According to the Telegraph, the film is "an extraordinarily resonant urban pastoral" that is "at once a dreamy reverie, a series of snapshots and an oral history of a part of London that is due to disappear."

The London Nobody Knows (Dir. Norman Cohen, 1967, 53 min)
What Have You Done Today, Mervyn Day? (Dir. Paul Kelly, 2006, 50 min)

Both films will also be shown on Friday 18 January at 1pm. It will then be followed at 2.30pm by a discussion with Bob and Pete from Saint Etienne, with the theme: "Where is the beauty in degeneration?"