page_title: After Dark (TV programme)
section_title: Guest selection
hierarchical_section_title: After Dark (TV programme) / Production / Guest selection
caption_attribution_description: English: An After Dark production meeting in 2003
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: "After Dark is different: experts sit side by side with ordinary people – irrespective of age, race, gender or sexual orientation – whose experience happens to relate to the subject.... (The producer says) 'An average show should consist of Punch, Judy, a crocodile, a hangman and a grandmother'." 'There's nobody I wouldn't have on the programme'.
  Mark Lawson wrote in The Independent:
  The Watergate conspirator John Ehrlichman was at the dentist when the surgery phone rang. It was for him. A voice from London: how would he like to take part in an open-ended, very-late-night discussion on the nature of truth. If he was interested, he had four hours to get on the plane...Jeremy Isaacs, in his farewell speech to the television industry, counted (After Dark) among the innovations of which he was most proud.... The key to the series... is the casting.... (The producer says) "We start with one or two people without whom the discussion wouldn't take place, the catalysts. Then there are the people who are not known TV performers but who will bring personal testimony to issues which would otherwise be argued theoretically. Then there are the historians or journalists who provide a context.... In a documentary the meetings between these points of view would happen in a cutting room or, at best, around a table under bright lights with time running out. You don't, in any other programme, get the full nuances of a meeting between people."
  The Times wrote: "Some of the juxtapositions have been inspired." "After the Nelson Mandela concert last summer it ran a discussion programme including Harry Belafonte, Breyten Breytenbach, Denis Worrall and Ismail Ayob, Mandela's lawyer. Belafonte came directly from Wembley with a police escort for his only British TV appearance. Programme hired a private plane to fly in Breytenbach. Worrall came from South Africa at After Dark expense. But this largesse is apparently unusual."
  The producer wrote: "In amongst the exceptional and the celebrated, the stars and the scandalous, quieter folk often triumphed. Those who had written to us with a story to tell or who had been discovered through diligent research found that the format allowed them a voice, despite strong competition. Though maybe as late as an hour or more into the programme, they could nonetheless re-shape the discussion and might well trump the polished assertions of more professional experts."
caption: A production meeting in 2003
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