After Dark was 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".Broadcast magazine, 28 January 2003 In 2010 the television trade magazine Broadcast wrote "After Dark defined the first 10 years of Channel 4, just as Big Brother did for the second"Broadcast magazine, 4 March 2010 and in 2018 the programme was cited in an editorial in The Times as an example of high-quality television.'Not So Dumb', The Times, 3 October 2018
Broadcast live and with no scheduled end time, the series, inspired by an Austrian programme called Club 2,see Club 2 in German Wikipedia was considered to be a groundbreaking reinvention of the discussion programme format. 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.
Open Media, the company that produced After Dark, acquired rights to its own back catalogue from Channel 4. The production company now offers clips of the series for paid licensing.
Premise After Dark featured a different topic each week, with guests selected to provoke lively discussion. Subject matter 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"."After Dark and the Future of Public Debate", Westminster Institute for Advanced Studies, 3 September 2017, accessed 29 March 2023
Other memorable 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".Enniscorthy Guardian, 31 January 1991 The Daily Telegraph said "the discussion was open-ended. It would stop when the guests decided the debate was over, not when TV executives said so".Tom Fordy, 29 January 2021, accessed 3 February 2021 In 2014 an academic book summed up the series as: "After Dark created an unprecedented climate which encouraged spaces where the process of thinking could be brought to light".Rod Stoneman "The Theories We Need", Petrie and Stoneman Educating Film-Makers, 2014
History
From late April in 1987, Channel 4 screened a Nighttime strand, a mixture of films and discussion programmes that ran until 3am on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays. Channel 4 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.The Listener, 21 December 1989
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.'The talk-masters of television', The Independent, 7 June 1989
The series was made by production company Open Media. The series editor, Sebastian Cody, talking about the programme in an interview in 2003, said: "Reality TV is artificial. After Dark is real in the sense that what you see is what you get, which isn't the case with something that's been edited to give the illusion of being real. Other shows wind people up with booze beforehand, then when they're actually on the programme they give them glasses of water. We give our guests nothing until they arrive on set and then they can drink orange juice, or have a bottle of wine. And we let them go to the loo."
The media academic David Lee described the programme:
Notable guests and programmes
Series One
Peter Hain, Clive Ponting, Peter Utley, Colin Wallace and "Secrets" The first ever After Dark programme (1 May 1987) was described in The Listener:
Nancy Banks-Smith wrote in The Guardian:
The programme finished with the Beatles singing "Do You Want to Know a Secret?"'After Kelly', Lobster 55, Summer 2008 The programme is available online here.
Simon Hughes The second programme of the first series – transmitted on 8 May 1987 – centred on press ethics and featured, among others, Tony Blackburn, Peter Tatchell, Victoria Gillick, Johnny Edgecombe and a Private Eye journalist. A week later After Dark broadcast the following correction in relation to the British Member of Parliament Simon Hughes: "Mr Hughes has asked us to say that he is not a homosexual, has never been a homosexual and has no intention of becoming a homosexual in the future." Nearly twenty years after the correction, Hughes came out as bisexual.
"Do the British Love Their Children?" As described by academic Nick Basannavar in 2021:
David Mellor, David Yallop and "The Mafia" The Financial Times described the following week's discussion about the Mafia:
During the programme it was claimed that Pope John Paul I was "eliminated ... because he discovered that mafia profits from heroin had been laundered using the Vatican Bank".Gillian Ania, Fortunes of the Firefly, University Texts/University of Hull, 1996 "Spectacular corruption allegations from author David Yallop"London Daily News, 1 June 1987 were described by The Observer as follows:
Chris Horrie and Peter Chippendale detail what followed: "the story had caused horror among the country's journalists, who waited breathlessly for a shower of writs to descend on the programme makers ... But although hacks who missed the show swapped videos and endlessly replayed extracts for snippets of information, nothing happened to the programme makers."Chippendale and Horrie, Disaster: The Rise and Fall of the News on Sunday, Sphere Books, 1988 Some years later David Mellor and writer Gaia Servadio described how their friendship started on the programme.'How We Met', Independent on Sunday, 4 December 1994
Teresa Gorman and "Is Britain Working?" On 12 June 1987, the night after the British General Election, "the first day of the third term of Thatcherism – a show called Is Britain Working? brought together victorious Tory MP Teresa Gorman; 'Red Wedge' pop singer Billy Bragg; Helen from the Stonehenge Convoy; old colonialist Colonel Hilary Hook ... and Adrian, one of the jobless. It was a perfect example of the chemistry you can get. There were unlikely alliances (Bragg and Hook) and Mrs Gorman"The Independent, 19 February 1988 "stormed off the set, claiming she had been misled about the nature of the programme"Maggie Brown, A Licence To Be Different, BFI, 2007 "She told the leftist pop singer Billy Bragg: 'You and your kind are finished. We are the future now.'"Alwyn W. Turner, Rejoice! Rejoice! Britain in the 1980s, Aurum 2010 Bragg said "I sing in smokey rooms every night and I can keep talking for far longer than you can Teresa".An Introduction to the Nature and Functions of Language, Jackson and Stockwell, Continuum, 2010 Bragg explained later: "She was so smug. And because she was Essex I took it personally. Then she accused me of being a fine example of Thatcherism."Daniel Rachel, Walls Come Tumbling Down, Picador, 2016
The Independent said:
"Killing with Care?"
The programme the following week was described by ITN as "A discussion on euthanasia, with the controversial Dutch doctor who has performed euthanasia; British Socialist and Methodist preacher Lord Soper; the founder of the Cancer support charity 'Cancerbackup', Dr Vicky Clement-Jones (in an appearance from her death bed – she died shortly after the end of this programme), quadraplegic Maggie Davis, Catholic philosopher John Finnis, a gay man and the founder of a hospice."
And, from a comment in The Guardian in 2012:
Edward Teller and "Peace in Our Time"
The programme on 3 July 1987 "saw the father of the H-bomb Edward Teller concede that he lobbied for the worst of all weapons because of what the Russians had done to his country"."Defending the right to say it", British Journalism Review, Sage, vol. 28, nr 4, December 2017
Jacques Vergès and "Klaus Barbie"
After Dark, "ending its ten-week trial run, has been a remarkable success" wrote The Independent in July 1987. "The series has brought to television the rare acts of listening, thinking and thorough and subtle discussion ... In the small hours of Saturday morning, Maitre Jacques Vergès, defence counsel to the Butcher of Lyons, leaned back on a sofa with a half-glass of something pale and put his case. A journalist and a canon and a Resistance fighter and a concentration camp survivor listened and put theirs."The Independent, 13 July 1987 Vergès said "the reason people were still prosecuted for massacring Jews was because the Jews were white; if they had not been, the crimes would have been swept under the carpet long ago."The Tablet, 25 July 1987
The Guardian described what happened:
The Sunday Times:
Jewish Telegraphic Agency:
Series Two "Freemasonry: Beyond the Law?" At the start of the second series The Independent reported ("Masons pull out of TV debate with policeman") that "Chief Inspector Brian Woollard, the Metropolitan Police officer at the centre of the Freemasonry controversy, will go on national television tonight to state his case." Woollard "completed 33 years in the force, earned seven commendations, and was responsible for tracking down the Angry Brigade."The Tablet, 27 February 1988 The Listener magazine described the programme:
Shere Hite and "Marriage" Mark Lawson wrote in The Independent:
The Evening Standard described this as "totally compelling viewing":
William "Spider" Wilson
The Sunday Times said the programme on 4 March 1988 "certainly remains lodged in many minds. Spider ... was 'discovered' by a programme researcher ferreting out characters at London's cardboard city. Spider duly came into the Channel 4 studios, cobweb tattooed on his forehead, to talk about drug addiction, being gay and living rough. (Host) Helena Kennedy recalls that homeless Spider, sitting on the plump sofas in the mock studio living room with fellow guests, did not take kindly to being lectured about fecklessness by John Heddle, a Tory MP". She described the confrontation:
Bernadette McAliskey and "Licensed to Kill?" The Financial Times wrote of the programme on 18 March 1988:
Another guest, General Sir Anthony Farrar-Hockley suggested to Ms McAliskey that she owed her life to the skill of paratroop surgeons who cared for her after loyalist paramilitaries tried to kill her.Summary of the After Dark programme on 18 March 1988 by the Channel 4 company, Screenocean. Accessed 8 August 2022
"Horse Racing"
The Racing Post described the programme broadcast on the evening after the 1988 Grand National:
Among the other guests was the Duchess of Argyll, appearing "so she said, to put the point of view of the horse", who later walked out of the programme "because she was so very sleepy".
"Bewitched, Bothered or Bewildered?"