Defending the Right to Say It Sebastian Cody

@TheBJReview Defending the right to say it Sebastian Cody In a world of social media that attacks those who disagree, shall we bring back a television programme that thrived on open debate? Today we have Facebook and Twitter – debate in 140 characters – engineered to limit rather than expand discourse and leading to brutal reprisals to anything outside a specific space or experience. Freedom of speech seems now to mean only the freedom to agree. The public square and our right to speak our mind have been privatised by some of the largest companies in the world. Perhaps that is why kindly souls suggest from time to time that we bring back After Dark. Its values – time, thought, freedom, open- mindedness, nuance – are in short supply in today’s media culture. After Dark started as an experiment for the newly-established Channel 4, late on the evening of May Day 1987, based on an idea developed by Austrian state broadcasting. A small group of guests, all of whom knew a lot about a topic in the news, met in informal surroundings and just talked, freely and for as long as they wanted. After Dark quickly earned good audiences and a remarkable spread of critical enthusiasm, from the Socialist Worker and The Guardian to the Daily Mail and The Daily Telegraph. It ran for 90 editions, including a transfer in 2003 to the BBC. The guests came from all sections of society. Housewives, prison officers and schoolchildren – and, on the very first programme, a Welsh hill farmer – mixed on equal terms with the famous, as well as some who might never have appeared on any other kind of television. What was behind the long-lasting success of a format which began tentatively and without many expectations? What lessons can be learned? And is it still relevant today, in our rather different media and political culture? 55 ©Cody; DOI: 10.1177/0956474817746098; [2017/12] 28:4; 55-60 http://bjr.sagepub.com The programme effectively exposed and challenged the prevailing weaknesses of monopolistic broadcasting systems. The prerequisites for each After Dark discussion, though seemingly straightforward, concealed powerful weapons which led, first, to the programme’s success and then to a variety of controversies, including numerous clashes with politicians, special-interest groups and indeed Channel 4’s own executives. Two aspects of this unique format suggest why. One of the programme’s unshakeable principles was that After Dark was always live, really live, the discussion being transmitted as it took place, without prerecording or delay. This is rarer than one might think, “live” being a word broadcasters use with promiscuous frequency to describe everything from theatrical events recorded long in advance to political debate edited before transmission. For example, the BBC’s Question Time – on air when After Dark started in 1987 and still going today – is pre- recorded but still claims, disappointingly, that it is “live”. The BAFTA TV December 2017 Awards were transmitted this year with a seven-second delay, just in case anything “dodgy” was said in the heat of the moment. But After Dark was actually live, whatever the consequences. What the guests said was vol.28 no4 no4 vol.28 transmitted. No delay, no editing, no hidden manipulation, and no censorship: what one might call freedom of speech. Second, After Dark was an open-ended programme: the conversation continued not only past the point when TV normally interrupts the flow with the words “I am sorry, we’ll have to leave it there, we have no more time”, but past the point when the guests had said what they had come to say. British Journalism Review What they said then, often in response to listening to others they met on the programme, could become exceptionally interesting (and at other times it was, in the words of a former Channel 4 board member, “a load of old waffle”). We made programmes about familiar British issues: the treatment of children, of the mentally ill, of prisoners, and about class, cash and racial and sexual difference. Several programmes were concerned with matters of exceptional sensitivity to the then Thatcher government, such as state secrecy or the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Places further afield but just as important – Chile, Eritrea, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Nicaragua, South Africa and Russia – featured regularly, as did programmes explicitly about the pressures history puts on the present (After Dark noted anniversaries as various as the Second World War and the death of Freud). Less apparently solemn subjects – sport, fashion, gambling, pop music 56 – turned out to be more serious than viewers might have expected. During a discussion about sex, the programme introduced the physically unappealing Anthony Burgess to the equally charming (and equally sex- obsessed) Andrea Dworkin, in the observant presence of a third writer, transgender rights activist Roz Kaveney. Other remarkable encounters saw the father of the H-bomb Edward Teller concede that he lobbied for the worst of all weapons because of what the Russians had done to his country; Nikola Koljevic´ admit to Serb concentration camps in Bosnia in 1993; a hangman declare, in the presence of a judge yearning for the return of the death penalty, that if authorised, he would happily kill another guest, a former IRA man; and one-time Baader-Meinhof terrorist Silke Maier-Witt confess that she could no longer remember why she had done what she did. In among the exceptional and the celebrated, the stars and the scandalous, quieter folk often triumphed. They could re-shape the discussion and might well trump the polished assertions of more professional experts. December 2017 Learning to love Big Brother vol.28 no4 no4 vol.28 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 British Journalism Review 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. 57 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 December 2017 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 vol.28 no4 no4 vol.28 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 British Journalism Review 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.

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