When X-Files fever was at its height, [Richard Metzger] posed as a kind of on-line version of Fox Mulder, and discovered that men in suits were prepared to write out some very large cheques. (Metzger also wears a suit - in regulation IBM blue, no less - but his Pee-Wee Herman hairstyle suggests it's worn in an ironic way.) Along with Oliver Stone - the director of films such as JFK, and a man who knows a conspiracy theory when he sees one - Metzger developed a site called Disinformation. This pulls together everything from UFOlogy to the occult to government cover-ups in a bizarre melange of "news" items whose only common factor is their dubious authenticity.

Now, in another part of the masterplan to drag alternative culture into the mainstream, Metzger is in London to promote his new late- night Channel 4 show. He is not allowed to call the series Disinformation because the television watchdog ITC is worried about cross-promotion and hasn't quite worked out how to regulate this collision of old and new media. As a result, the show has been titled Disinfo Nation - but be in no doubt that this is another tentacle of Metzger's growing alternative empire.

To be fair, Metzger makes no claims for the veracity of the stuff on his website, but happily describes it instead as "infotainment". The charm of this approach is that all ideas are given equal weight, so that heavyweight American intellectual Noam Chomsky rubs shoulders with LSD guru Timothy Leary and Genesis P Orridge, who has made a career out of combining interests in the occult and genital piercing. In fact, Orridge's experimental musical outfit Throbbing Gristle was what first got Metzger interested in the kind of underground culture reflected in the Channel 4 show. Having spent his youth seeking out hard-to-find books and records that existed well outside mainstream entertainment, Metzger is now selling them back to a new generation of kids in an online bazaar of the bizarre.