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". Specials and spin-offs The show ended in 1991 but a number of one-off specials were broadcast from 1993 and 1997, with a subsequent reboot by the BBC in 2003. In 2004 After Dark was characterised as "legendary" by the Open University and in 2014 as "the most uncensorable programme in the history of British television". In 2016 The Herald wrote that "Unlike reality television live feeds today, After Dark was essential viewing, with some very serious talk enlivened even more by unexpected events." In 2017 the Journal of British Cinema and Television called it "an excitingly different and politically adventurous kind of programme" and in 2018 an academic history of independent television production in the UK judged it "as an 'experiment' that challenged the limitations of television as a medium of intensive and democratic deliberation and discussion it was very successful, and from the vantage of history still seems remarkably fresh to this day." From 2010 to 2020 individual programmes were available for online streaming at BFI InView. In 2020 Simon Heffer wrote in The Daily Telegraph that "the time is surely ripe for the return of a programme such as After Dark" and The Guardian listed After Dark as one of the "jewels" in the history of television - "it offered a thing that's now extinct: constructive debate". In 2021 The Daily Telegraph wrote of the "curious brilliance" of the show: "It feels like the art of reasonable discussion has been lost in the modern world...increasingly sanitised and controlled since the freeform days of After Dark". Start on Channel 4 The media academic David Lee described the founding of the programme in his history of independent television production in the UK: Sir Jeremy Isaacs, the founding Chief Executive of Channel 4, wrote an account of the network's early years in his book Storm Over 4. In it he selects twenty-six programmes ('a very personal... choice'), including After Dark, which he describes as follows: The programme allowed Isaacs 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