This article is taken from the March 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.
“This place is an institution!” In a basement cinema, on a Thursday evening in central London, a largely female audience of 300 fans of 1980s murder mystery television was being addressed by a middle-aged Australian man in a tracksuit and a wig.
For the previous two hours, we had been laughing our way through a single episode of Murder She Wrote, as our host Tim Benzie discussed the joys and clichés of the long-running show and invited us to work out which of the guest stars would turn out to be the murderer.
But now, for a moment, Benzie was serious. “You might have seen in the news that the Prince Charles cinema” — where we’re sitting — “is under threat,” he said.
That week, the Prince Charles had announced that its landlord, Criterion Capital, was asking for “a rent far above market rates”, as well as a six-month break clause in its lease should they get planning permission to redevelop the building. It interpreted this as preparation by Criterion to take back the site, just off Leicester Square, and build something more lucrative.
Benzie’s outrage at this news was typical of the place’s many fans. “It’s the best cinema in London!” he said. That point is, on the face of it, debatable. There are more comfortable cinemas in London. There are ones with better screens and more sophisticated projectors and sound systems. In many ways, visiting the Prince Charles feels like stepping back into the 1980s, with two large auditoria packed with fold-down seats.
Most cinemas this size have become mini-multiplexes, with six or eight screens often seating just a few dozen people. But then the Prince Charles isn’t most cinemas.
Most cinemas have shared the same basic business model for decades: show popular films in the window between their first release and their move to home viewing, whether that was video cassette or streaming. The Prince Charles is a repertory cinema, showing any film except those on their first release.
It’s an eclectic mix. On a random Friday this month you could have spent an afternoon there watching the allegorical The Seventh Seal, followed by the surreal Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind, the gruesome The Thing and finally the awesome Interstellar. Is there anywhere else in the world that would offer that menu?
What all those films have in common is that you could watch them right now without getting off your sofa.
But what you wouldn’t be able to experience, as you streamed them to your TV, is the joy of a shared audience in a real cinema. The Thing, like any horror film, is simply more fun watched in a crowd. Interstellar is better on a bigger screen. Having kept its traditional projectors when it installed digital ones, the Prince Charles is one of the few places left where you can still watch a film on celluloid.
Audiences clearly agree. Last year the Prince Charles sold 250,000 tickets for the 858 films it screened. The management of the cinema seem to have a knack for finding ways of making movies into events.
I first visited the cinema in the mid-nineties, when they had a late screening of Braveheart on Friday nights, packed with Scots who had spent the hours beforehand drinking themselves into the mood.
The following decade, it became the home of Sing-Along-a-Sound of Music, where fans dressed as nuns to belt out the movie’s songs. Not all the films it shows are classics: it shows famous turkeys, too, for the audience that wants to go and laugh at a movie, not with it.
Solve-Along-A-Murder She Wrote is a great example of the collective experience. It’s a sell-out crowd, including people who are clearly regulars. One woman is there with a gang of friends celebrating her birthday. Of the men present, several have the distinct air of having been dragged along by partners.
I’d booked without knowing what I was getting, and it’s a simple, joyous format. Benzie introduces and then screens an episode of Murder She Wrote, pausing to explain the show’s secrets: because Angela Lansbury was playing an amateur detective, the writers needed some way that she could talk to suspects, so they decided she wouldn’t be able to drive, and the guest stars would have to give her lifts everywhere.
A laundry rack serves as his “suspiciometer”, where the audience decides which character looks guiltiest. We’ve been given party poppers to let off at the moment Lansbury has the episode’s epiphany and solves the crime.
Benzie was performing the show at a cabaret venue when he was invited to bring it to the Prince Charles a couple of years ago. “They’ve really embraced Solve Along with open arms,” he said. “It’s the closest I’ll get to the West End.”
The threat to the cinema was revealed as London’s mayor, Sadiq Khan, was setting out his efforts to save the capital’s nightlife. He should take a look at the Prince Charles. Compared to the Leicester Square cinemas two minutes away, it’s shabby. But we should embrace that.
London has plenty of slick venues focused on overcharging tourists and oligarchs. There is nothing that could be built on the site of the Prince Charles that we need more than we need a slightly down-at-heel cinema where you know there’ll be something interesting to watch any time you drop in.
