After Dark (TV programme) After Dark was a British late-night live discussion programme broadcast on Channel 4 television between 1987 and 1997, and on the BBC in 2003. Roly Keating of the BBC described it as "one of the great television talk formats of all time" and the Daily Mail called it "the most intelligent, thought-provoking and interesting programme ever to have been on television". 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. Guests would be 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, pop music – were in the mix from the start". Memorable conversations included footballer Garth Crooks disputing the future of the game with politician Sir Rhodes Boyson; MP Teresa Gorman walking out of a discussion about unemployment with Billy Bragg; and Oliver Reed drunkenly kissing Kate Millett during a programme that asked "Do Men Have To Be Violent?" Other guests included "poets and pornographers, spies and solicitors, feminists and farmers, witches and whalers, judges and journalists". The show ended in 1991 but a number of one-off specials and a BBC revival followed, before the programme finally came to an end 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." 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 about to say something really interesting." After Dark would only end when its