After Dark

Country

United Kingdom

How it feels

A late-night television discussion show that brought together a small group of guests, often including one ordinary person, to talk about a topic with no fixed end time. The conversations were completely live and could go on as long as the participants kept talking.

thoughtfulunpredictablespontaneousintellectualconversationallate-nightunscriptedfree-flowing

What happens

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". 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. 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. (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

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