After Dark: Channel 4’s innovation in television talk

This paper explores the significance of the late night British discussion programme After Dark (Channel 4, 1987-1997) in terms of the production contexts of the time and its distinctive form and structure as television. After Dark emerged during a period of significant transition in the political economy of British broadcasting, with a major factors being the creation of Channel 4. As part of its extension of the possibilities of television as a cultural form, Channel 4 attempted to break the prevailing temporal frame of television output and this was most evident in the open-ended nature of After Dark’s transmission, with the programme running into the early hours of the morning with no fixed end-point. Critical attention to it serves among other things to place in sharper perspective the variety of alignments possible between the discourses television produces and those in play more broadly across the different spaces of the political and social. In particular, it highlights the distinctive forms of speech and deliberation (and therefore the distinctive modes of viewing and listening) informing the programme’s design.