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 season, broadcast on BBC Four in 2003.
Roly Keating of the BBC described it as "one of the great television talk formats of all time". 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" and in 2018 the programme was cited in an editorial in The Times as an example of high-quality television.
Broadcast live and with no scheduled end time, the series, inspired by an Austrian programme called Club 2, 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.
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".
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".
History
Start on Channel 4
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.
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 series was made by production company Open Media. The series editor, Sebastian Cody, talking about the programme in an interview in 2003, said that "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:
Cancellation
In August 1991, Channel 4 announced the end of the series, an action which became the subject of an editorial in The Times.
Specials and BBC version
The show ended in 1991 but a number of one-off specials were broadcast from 1993 and 1997.
In 2003, it was revived by the BBC for a single season, broadcast on BBC Four.
Repeats
In October 2007, as part of its 25th anniversary celebrations, Channel 4 repeated the first ever After Dark on the More4 channel.
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 ... Channel 4's market research executive Sue Clench ... says that around three million saw some of After Dark in its first slot."