guests had nothing more to say. 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 as 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 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." 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." The audience survey conducted later by Channel 4 reported that After Dark was watched by 13% of all adults, rising to what the research company referred to as a "staggering figure" of 28% amongst young men. One viewer is quoted in the academic study Talk on Television as follows: Critical response After Dark earned a remarkable spread of critical enthusiasm, from the Socialist Worker ("my favourite chat show") and The Guardian ("one of the most inspired and effective uses of airtime yet devised"), to the Daily Mail ("the most intelligent, thought-provoking and interesting programme ever to have been on television") and The Daily Telegraph ("A shining example of late-night television"), to more media focussed journals such as the BFI's Sight & Sound ("often made The Late Show look like the Daily Mirror") and even the US showbiz bible Variety in its review of the year ("compulsive for late-night viewers"). The Listener magazine called it "The programme in which you can see the people think". Guest response Author James Rusbridger wrote in The Listener magazine: "When I appeared on a Channel 4 After Dark programme recently my postman, milkman and more than two dozen strangers stopped me in the street and said how much they'd enjoyed it and quoted verbatim extracts from the discussion." Journalist Peter Hillmore described appearing on After Dark as follows: 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?" Credits for this programme are listed 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, the man who started the Profumo scandal and a Private Eye journalist. A week later After Dark broadcast the following correction in relation