page_title: After Dark (TV programme)
section_title: Patricia Highsmith
hierarchical_section_title: After Dark (TV programme) / Notable guests and programmes / Series Two / Patricia Highsmith
caption_attribution_description: English: Patricia Highsmith appearing on television programme After Dark on 18 June 1988, (c) Open Media Ltd 1988
context_page_description: 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.
context_section_description: Following the programme broadcast on 18 June 1988 The Guardian wrote:
  After Dark, a three hour discussion on subjects which will not always bear the light of day, was about... murder. There was Patricia Highsmith, the thriller writer, inquisitive as a monkey, Georgina Lawton, Ruth Ellis's daughter... Lord Longford... the Rev James Nelson... (and) David Howden, the father of a girl who was murdered in her bedroom two years ago... "I don't know if you can imagine the scene of my daughter's bedroom. Friends and neighbours had to go and clean that bedroom up. The stains and fingerprints. They had to take the carpet up, sandpaper the floor and get rid of the marks, buy a new carpet and put it down". "What kind of marks?" asked Patricia Highsmith, who will be slaughtered herself some day.
  The Today newspaper wrote:
  There have been some very peculiar people on After Dark.... There was the skinhead who left mid-show to look for fresh supplies of lager. And two weeks ago journalist Peter Hillmore sweated so much I thought I would have to throw him a rubber ring. But for sheer oddness, none has outmatched crime writer-cum-New York bag lady lookalike Patricia Highsmith... asking a series of staggeringly daft and insensitive questions to poor David Howden, whose daughter was strangled by a maniac as she slept.
  Andrew Wilson, in his biography of Highsmith, expanded:
  Sitting next to Howden, Highsmith questioned the bereaved father in a near-clinical fashion. What kind of man was the murderer? Had he been watching the daughter? Was robbery part of the motive? Had she been raped?
caption: Patrica Highsmith on After Dark in June 1988
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