After Dark (TV Series) - Production - Editorial

Editorial

The main themes of After Dark were listed in an internal memo in 1988:

"1. Lovelessness: the spaces in our society that for whatever reason are cold, empty, formulaic, unfeeling, systematised and filled only with empty rhetoric or silence.

"2. Who owns your body? Do you? Does the State? Your doctor? Your lover? The police? Your parents? This theme covers a variety of apparently unrelated subjects: imprisonment, health care, capital punishment, mental illness, abortion, schooling…

"3. What happens ‘after dark’? Sex, crime, astronomy…

"4. Shining light into the shadows we find not only Ralf Dahrendorf’s underclass but also the invisible people. Some invisible people are so because they choose to be (criminals, spies, the hidden rich) but others are invisible because we do not want to see them (the homeless, the dispossessed, the mentally confused, the dying…). Among the invisible there is a new slave class: some of those were uncovered by Gunther Wallraff in his documentary ‘The Lowest of the Low’ (illegal immigrants who are used for clearing up nuclear accidents although the work is known to be fatal).

"5. Do you want to know a secret? Guests tell all, or their bit of it.

"6. What is beyond the law? Who is beyond the law?

"7. Not knowing is an act of choice. During a discussion on the Holocaust, an Austrian woman claimed ‘We did not know’; another participant countered by saying that not all knowing comes from reading newspapers. Looking, listening and drawing deductions are another way of knowing, so choosing not to look or listen or draw a deduction can be conscious ‘not knowing’. So: what things in our society are we choosing to look away from, choosing not to know? What will our grandchildren accuse us of?"