Defending the Right to Say it

Learning to love Big Brother

One programme included film actor Oliver Reed, clips of whose appearance during the 1991 Gulf War continue to turn up, often out of context. He had just won a libel action against a tabloid newspaper, which erroneously claimed that he beat his wife. In the light of Reed's success in the courts, we invited him to discuss male violence on our programme, where he got famously sloshed, but perhaps not quite as much as viewers might have thought (or as other guests had been – the drinking record was held by philosopher AJ Ayer). Simon Reed – Oliver's brother, but also his manager and agent – sat with us backstage and told us he had no concerns about any apparent drunkenness. His brother was just “playing up”, perhaps because he felt uncomfortable in the presence of “intellectuals”.

This edition of After Dark subsequently became notorious because a hoax phone call persuaded a junior Channel 4 executive to stop transmitting the live programme, an interruption previously unknown in the history of British network television. Our programme resumed, with Reed still participating (he left of his own accord some time later).

It was a high wire act, exhausting to put together, with many an excitement before, during and sometimes even after transmission, but a source of pride to the dozens of skilled professionals responsible. Some report that they were never again able to deal so fairly with contributors to television programmes.

But at the height of the programme's success, in 1991, Channel 4 announced the series' retirement. The subsequent furore was substantial, even earning After Dark a mention in a leading article in The Times. We warned that After Dark's “loss poses such a threat to broadcasting freedom. It is… the only television programme whose guests were not straitjacketed into a fixed time-slot, subjected to pre-censorship or editing, or confronted with a celebrity host and a noisy studio audience”.

Such warnings may seem an over-reaction on our part, but consider what followed. First Channel 4 tried other discussion formats (with vanishingly small success). Then in 2000 – and this is no small thing -Channel 4 bought Big Brother. Here was big business for the network: the show once accounted for nearly three-quarters of the money Channel 4 earned in an entire year. One does not have to be a fully-fledged Leavisite to observe that the purpose of Big Brother was, nakedly and unashamedly, economic. The fashion for such “reality” television has shaped the media world we now take for granted, or at least eased certain pathological ways of thinking. “Reality” shows create expectations of drama, or if not drama then constant incident, voyeurism, cruelty and cartoon conflict. This puts pressure on alternative ways of seeing, making some things harder to see, let alone the almost invisible things that were a speciality of After Dark.

Since then, reality TV has become so formulaic that participants increasingly come via agencies of so-called “real people” who learn lines and act out scripted scenarios in what has modulated into “scripted reality” (ie unreality). Reality TV is eating itself - in fact, television is eating itself - with the consequence that discussion and debate become no more than entertainment; the political becomes showbusiness; the private and the personal become public and increasingly perverse; and someone who first became famous on a reality show is now the president of the United States of America.

Reality TV has been overtaken by what came along with multichannel TV – drizzle TV – now itself being rapidly supplanted by the infinite echo chamber of the internet, where everybody is talking (or at least “sharing”) but nobody seems to be listening. This endless sea of chatter, comment, opinion and gossip is the unanticipated outcome of what Brecht, 85 years ago, called for when he asked that radio be made “two-sided”, a shift from “distribution to communication”, or what we now call interactive media.

On After Dark we did what we could. We tried not to censor or manipulate. Guests sat in a circle and so concentrated on each other rather than the cameras. For the benefit of the watching audience at home, participants were often filmed listening, a sight far more expressive than the faces we make when speaking. In fact, After Bark gave such opportunities for listening that on occasion viewers even saw guests – slowly, perhaps only provisionally – changing their minds on air. Relearning how to listen seems a reasonable but perhaps no longer realistic goal for any future media product of this kind.

A political and social need may well exist but is “television” – however adapted, extended, enhanced by later technologies – still an appropriate forum? The time for this kind of programme may well have passed, as the attention of the public splinters, having moved on from what was truly another age. After Dark launched in 1987, when the UK's viewing options were significantly less than now: not only was there no internet, there wasn't even Channel 5, let alone dozens of separate networks covering different interests and even languages. Back then, Crossroads was on four nights a week and EastEnders got an audience of more than 30 million on Christmas Day, which hasn't happened anywhere recently. Indeed, that figure was down to six million for Christmas Day 2016, an 80 per cent loss in 30 years.

After after Dark

Given a budget, one could no doubt force something on to some channel, even if only as 24/7 internet. The problem would be that very few would be watching. As my former colleague, ex-LWT and Weekend World supremo David Cox, now a media commentator of distinction, writes:

“Once upon a time the elite controlled public discourse. Since the invention of the printing press, technology has been wresting this control away from them and redistributing it to the people. The internet has concluded this process. Now people can communicate in any way they like. They can listen to the wisdom of the elite if they want. They don't need Channel 4: there's TED talks, The Conversation etc etc. But it turns out that they don't want to. Now that they can all publish, that's what they want to do. They don't want to listen and they don't want to debate; they want to express themselves, ie post a selfie on Instagram or a hate-tweet on Twitter. The potential audience won't pay much attention because it wants to post its own high-velocity boasts and racist bile, not look at other people's.”

Of course it is vital that the current limits of public discourse should be challenged and extended. After Dark was not only about the conversation in the studio but also the conversation it engendered with viewers and therefore wider society: the Austrian producer used to say that the programme only really began afterwards, when the viewers switched off the television and started to talk. But since that time the mechanisms, the technology and viewing patterns have fundamentally changed: few people take TV seriously any more, and when they do get round to watching, they tend to be electronically engaged elsewhere at the same time (emailing, tweeting, Snapchatting, Facebooking, even Skyping).

So if television and After Dark are no longer sufficient for the purpose, what can now be done instead? If one wants to tackle the problems of the new monopolies of today – Google, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter etc – one will need to be as radically countercultural, inventive and thoughtful as the Austrian format inventors were. With that in mind, perhaps the real lesson of After Dark for today – drawing a direct historical analogy from what happened all those years ago – could be the following plan:

Beyond going to the pub, putting away the smartphone and having a chat in real life (a good, if not ground-breaking, idea), maybe this notion might inspire someone out there quixotic enough to give it a go. Good luck!

@TheBJReview