After Dark is a British late-night live television discussion programme that was broadcast weekly on Channel 4 between 1987 and 1991, and which returned for specials between 1993 and 1997. It was later revived by the BBC for a single series, broadcast on BBC Four in 2003.
Roly Keating of the BBC described it as "one of the great television talk formats of all time".[1] In 2010 the television trade magazine Broadcast wrote "After Dark defined the first 10 years of Channel4, just as Big Brother did for the second"[2] and in 2018 the programme was cited in an editorial in The Times as an example of high-quality television.[3]
Broadcast live and with no scheduled end time, the series was inspired by an Austrian programme called Club 2.[4] The programme was hosted by a variety of presenters, and each episode had around half a dozen guests, often including a member of the public.
Premise
After Dark featured a different topic each week, with guests selected to provoke discussion. Topics included "the treatment of children, of the mentally ill, of prisoners, and about class, cash and racial and sexual difference", as well as "matters of exceptional sensitivity to the then Thatcher government, such as state secrecy or the Troubles in Northern Ireland"; "places further afield ... – Chile, Eritrea, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Nicaragua, South Africa and Russia – featured regularly" and "less apparently solemn subjects – sport, fashion, gambling and pop music – were in the mix from the start".[5]
Other conversations included footballer Garth Crooks disputing the future of the game with politician Sir Rhodes Boyson and MP Teresa Gorman walking out of a discussion about unemployment with Billy Bragg. Other guests included "poets and pornographers, spies and solicitors, feminists and farmers, witches and whalers, judges and journalists".[6]
From late April in 1987, Channel4 screened a Nighttime strand, a mixture of films and discussion programmes that ran until 3am on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays.[7] Channel4 launched After Dark in an open-ended format broadcast on Friday nights (later Saturday nights), as an original piece of programming that would be inexpensive to produce. There was no 'chair', simply a 'host', and the discussion took place around a coffee table in a darkened studio. Due to its late-night scheduling the series was dubbed After Closing Time by the BBC1 comedy series Alas Smith and Jones.[8]
Jeremy Isaacs, the founding Chief Executive of Channel 4, said that the programme allowed him to realise one of his longest-held ambitions: "When I first started in television at Granada... Sidney Bernstein said to me that the worst words ever uttered on TV were, I'm sorry, that's all we have time for. Especially since they were always uttered just as someone was about to say something really interesting." After Dark would only end when its guests had nothing more to say.[9]
The series was made by production company Open Media. The series editor, Sebastian Cody, later compared the show to reality television and said it was "real in the sense that what you see is what you get", with no editing and completely improvised dialogue.[10]
Cancellation and later versions
In August 1991, Channel4 announced the end of the series.[11] A number of one-off specials were broadcast from 1993 and 1997.
In 2003, it was revived by the BBC for a single series, broadcast on BBC Four.
Repeats
In October 2007, as part of its 25th anniversary celebrations, Channel4 repeated the first ever After Dark on the More4 channel.[12]
Reception
Viewer response
In 1987, The Guardian wrote: "After Dark, the closest Britain gets to an unstructured talk show, is already finding that the more serious the chat, the smaller the audience ... Channel4's market research executive Sue Clench ... says that around three million saw some of After Dark in its first slot."[13]
The audience survey conducted later by Channel4 reported that After Dark was watched by 13% of all adults, rising to what the research company referred to as a "staggering figure" of 28% amongst young men.[14] One viewer is quoted in the academic study Talk on Television as follows:
After Dark is far better because it allows people to go over all sorts of stages in a discussion and they are not shut off. Well I suppose they are on for three or four hours, but I think that is a really good idea, that you can really work everything out for yourself.[15]
The programme is still fondly remembered by viewers. For example, in 2016, Gail Walker, the editor of the Belfast Telegraph, recalled After Dark programmes about nuclear issues[16] and in 2020 the Cardiff-based writer Joe Morgan wrote a tribute A Sword in the Darkness, saying the show "broke all existing rules and conventions. There has been nothing like it ever since".[17] In 2022 the Liberal Democrat Jonathan Calder published Remembering After Dark, the best TV discussion programme ever.[18]
After Dark earned critical praise, from the Socialist Worker ("my favourite chat show") and The Guardian ("one of the most inspired and effective uses of airtime yet devised"), and The Daily Telegraph ("A shining example of late-night television"), to more media focussed journals such as the BFI's Sight & Sound ("often made The Late Show look like the Daily Mirror") and the American publication Variety in its review of the year ("compulsive for late-night viewers").[5]The Listener magazine called it "The programme in which you can see the people think".[19]
In 2012, on the 30th anniversary of Channel4, After Dark featured in a number of tributes in British newspapers.[20]
Guest response
Author James Rusbridger wrote in The Listener magazine: "When I appeared on a Channel4 After Dark programme recently my postman, milkman and more than two dozen strangers stopped me in the street and said how much they'd enjoyed it and quoted verbatim extracts from the discussion."[21]
Journalist Peter Hillmore described appearing on After Dark:
In the age of the glib, packaged sound-bite, a discussion programme that is long and open-ended, lasting as long as the talk is remotely interesting, occasionally longer, seems a necessity. For all its faults, as when Oliver Reed appeared tired and emotional as a newt, the programme fulfilled its purpose and filled a gap. I appeared on it once. It was a strange feeling to realise that if you had failed to make your point properly, you had more time a short while later. So Channel4's decision to axe it seems incomprehensible and wrong ... In his book on the channel, its founder Jeremy Isaacs gave a long list of programmes that he felt summed up its ethos. With the ending of After Dark, not a single programme from the list remains. That is not a coincidence.[22]
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