4Later: The rise of late night television

I remember when 4Later followed Big Brother on Friday nights and always made you feel a bit naughty as if Channel 4 had led you into programming which you shouldn't be watching. Mind you, I was young myself at the time!

Nothing compared to Eurotrash..

True but that was more a silly European comic affair with added naked bosoms! 4Later felt dark as if it was leading you up a dark alley. Metaphorically speaking.

I think somebody's getting confused here.

4 Later was around in 1999, and had a distinctly, at the time, bravo-esque feel.



The original Channel 4 Nighttime look was back in the late 1980s, around the time that 24 hour television was new.

4Later, so naughty that they're showing something that was also on T4 on Sunday mornings.

This happened on UTV - a lot - even up until the early 2000s.

I recall being told by an insider that when LNN was responsible for playout, they sometimes deliberately did not send the necessary pulse signals which would trigger UTV's automation to play the ads (in the earlier part of the Night-time schedule). Don't know how true that was - but we certainly saw a lot of the generic 'Back Soon' caption during the ad breaks here in UTV-land.

I was the visual style of the ident, not the programming. This is a forum all about presentation after all...

Although Eurotrash was harmless fun, really, my parents were big fans of it and I think it had quite a large following among older viewers - I think they found it enjoyably bawdy viewing. It was always much cleverer than it had any right to be.

I've probably said this before but twenty years ago I shared a flat with someone from Hong Kong who had never seen British TV before (but living with me for a year, they learned everything there is to know about it) and the things they first recognised because they saw them all the time were Countdown and the Rapido TV frog.



Channel 4 had a number of different "looks" overnight, in the early nineties they had Late Licence which ran on Friday and Saturday nights through the night. Originally that had in-vision presentation from various double acts - Smashie and Nicey were the first, plus also Phill Jupitus and Billy Bragg, Mark Lamarr and Rhona Cameron, Caroline Aherne and John Thomson and so on, as well as being surely the first TV gig for Mel and Sue. That was phased out after a bit but the Late Licence branding carried on for a few more years.

4 Later began in 1998 as basically a rebranding of all the Late Licence content. I recorded Pop Up Video off it quite a lot, and I recall that there were little inserts in between the programmes, short comedy sketches or odd little vignettes. Can't remember when they abandoned that branding.



BBC3 did a strand like this for a few months, Destination Three, devised and produced by Andi Peters...
http://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/schedules/bbcthree/2005-02-07#at-23.30
It was a bit like a Broom Cupboard set-up, and they did well enough in picking presenters with Justin Lee Collins, Rufus Hound and Anita Rani going on to better things. Seemed a bit too much like hard work, though.



I do remember when we were going on holiday to Spain in 1992 we had to get up at 3am to catch the plane and I specifically turned on the telly to see what Video View and so on were like. Heady days. I know it sounds idiotic now but it was exciting to read the Radio Times and ponder about shows I knew I'd never see. In the nineties I did record a few things from overnight ITV, like the comedy review show Funny Business and, for shame, all 52 episodes of the appalling Bushell on the Box.

You're right to say at the time it seemed quite exciting, sitting in the provinces as a schoolkid I imagined that cool twenty and thirtysomethings in London watched all this stuff having rolled in from parties. Now I am a thirtysomething in London, and I often go to bed earlier than I did then.

it's a bit disappointing to get to 4am on a quiet nightshift and discover that your viewing options amount to some rolling news or a three-year-old signed repeat of Location Location Location . I appreciate there's no advertising revenue at that time of the morning, but do channels really incur much of a cost by showing more repeats - even if it's just what was on earlier?

If said nighttime franchise came to fruition though, why would the regions want to prevent that from happening if there was no money to be made?

My main memory of 4Later was Jaaaaam, the "remixed" version of Chris Morris's Jam, which mainly involved adding extra effects to the sketches or slowing them down a bit.

It was thrilling to sneak into the front room late at night, put on ITV and finally find out what all those programmes you'd always see in the listings like Get Stuffed and The Hitman and Her were actually like - and of course they weren't anything like as thrilling as expected.

It was a land-grab as far as they were concerned.

There was money to be made in the earlier part of the night, which is where any new franchise would be wanting to make their money also. Many ITV companies had started to broadcast up to 2 or 3 in the morning -- larger stations were just about profitable to 3am, smaller ones would have an earlier cut-off point.

If the IBA decided to start the franchise at, say, 12am (not an unreasonable time to start) then the regional companies would lose an hour or two of profitable advertising time.

But the rest of the night was a desert for advertising. Then as now.

Hence the like of TTT just effectively closing down at 2am and leaving the NT stream running. TTT had been quite vocal on the subject during 1987; when they started running JobFinder overnight they stated that they had no plans to introduce a night time service, and in 1988 when Night Time did start they went on record as saying it would be canned if unprofitable after 6 months.