When the 'intelligent but vulnerable' Oliver Reed ruined After Dark

It’s 30 years since Oliver Reed’s notorious appearance on the Channel 4 discussion show, After Dark, which became fodder for the next three decades’ worth of clips shows (it was recently included on Channel 4’s Back to the 80s), and part of the rich, booze-soaked tapestry of Reed’s outrageous chat show appearances.

Along with seven other guests, the actor and legendary hellraiser was invited to discuss the weighty issue of “Do men have to be violent?” Both the topic and Reed’s invitation were timely. Broadcast on January 26, 1991, it came at the height of the Gulf War, as the British Army were deploying women to the frontline for the very first time; also, that same week, Oliver Reed had won a libel case against The Sun, which had called him a wife beater.

Reed’s contributions to After Dark – and to British television history, thanks to much-repeated clips – were indeed valuable: inappropriate comedy gold. Belligerent, disruptive, and sloshed on half-pints of wine, he called the feminist activist Kate Millet “big t___s”, kissed her on the cheek, and freestyled about the dynamic between men and women (“It’s all down to whether or not she wants to get shafted!”). When confronted with a story about an abused wife who chopped off her husband’s penis, Reed retorted: “I said to my missus ‘If I put my plonker on the table, I won’t take it off unless you give me my mushy peas.’”

His performance – and it does feel like a performance – has become mythologised, largely because of the events around it. In a first for British TV, the show was pulled off the air during its live broadcast. Not because of Oliver Reed’s antics, as was speculated (Reed was neither the drunkest nor most disruptive guest on After Dark, as series creator and producer Sebastian Cody tells me) but because of a hoax call – a mistake that Channel 4 tried to swiftly brush under the wine-splashed carpet.

It also speaks to the curious brilliance of After Dark – truly a format from another time, on which debate was open and the likes of Oliver Reed could create a boozed-up furor.

Produced for Channel 4 by Open Media and first broadcast in May 1987, After Dark was inspired by Club 2, a similarly formatted show from Austrian state television. After Dark covered a different issue each episode and adhered to some key rules: discussions had between four and eight guests, always with a non-expert host; it was broadcast live (actually live, not on delay or pretending to be live); and the discussion was open-ended. It would stop when the guests decided the debate was over, not when TV executives said so.

“It went from exciting to boring, exciting to boring,” says director Don Coutts. “It was fantastic. That’s exactly what happens in a pub or dinner party.”

Writing about the series in a 2008 edition of Lobster magazine, Sebastian Cody said: “After Dark turned out to be some kind of anti-television experiment, a programme which, despite the careful plans and preparations of TV professionals, was actually not in our hands. Week in and week out the participants took control of the programme and used it for their own ends and in their own way.”

Topics included class, race, sex, politics, euthanasia, drugs, parenting, foreign issues, and many others, mostly encapsulated by Britain under Thatcher. It was remarkable, really. Polar opposites sat together – politicians, celebrities, campaigners, academics, and a man literally off the street – and talked. In some cases, minds were changed.

Don Coutts directed it like a drama. “Because it was a drama every week,” he says. “And it wasn’t always about the person speaking. There was a lot of looking at other people – someone cadging a cigarette, picking their nose, or having a drink.” Coutts recalls David Mellor being a particularly prolific cigarette cadger. “We’d catch him every time,” laughs Coutts. “We had a joke with the camera crew – whoever catches David Mellor cadging a fag will get a tenner.”

By the time Oliver Reed appeared, After Dark was into its fourth series. Sebastian Cody had met Reed 10 years earlier while working on the Parkinson chat show. “He was instinctively very intelligent,” says Cody.

Reed’s libel win against The Sun made him a perfect fit for the discussion. “You can imagine how hard it is to sue News International,” laughs Cody. “He’d won this libel about stereotypical male violence and he was a soldier [Reed served in the Royal Army Medical Corps]. He was proud of his soldiering life. So we invited him onto a programme about soldiering and gender violence.”

The discussion was hosted by barrister (and now baroness) Helena Kennedy, alongside actress and mobster’s daughter Antoinette Giancana, journalist Neil Lyndon, psychoanalyst and criminologist Arthur Hyatt Williams, feminist writer and activist Kate Millett, social-anthropologist Elliott Leyton, and moustachioed Conservative MP Keith Simpson (who Oliver Reed called “tache” – despite Reed sporting a magnificent tache of his own).

While some accounts report that Oliver Reed showed up “worse for wear”, Don Coutts recalls that Reed was in reasonable condition when he arrived. “He was fine,” says Coutts. “He just enjoyed a dram. People said we plied him with it. We didn’t! It was just there.”

The discussion is best remembered by its oft-repeated highlights of Reed’s boozy behaviour – but it wasn’t all drunken gibberish. Coutts remembers some emotional outpouring from Reed across the several hours of recording.

“There was Oliver Reed, talking about masculinity and his dad, who was a conscientious objector,” says Coutts. “It obviously marked him – that his dad wasn’t a real man. There was wonderful complex stuff going round. I think the rest of the guests were quite cowed by him, because he was a big character.”

As Reed got drunker, he steamrolled over the group, gurned, and made incomprehensible, out-of-blue (and also very-blue-indeed) comments. “I don’t want to be a chicken arse,” he said at one point, and went off on a tangent about a dancing kelp who “jiggles his heels in the air”. “I’m not with it,” replied Arthur Hyatt Williams, quite rightly.

Reed also unleashed a diatribe about the sexes. “You are the receivers,” he said to the women. “You take our seed, you look after our babies, and we’ll go do the hunting for you.” When Keith Simpson tried to have some fun by suggesting he and Reed talk “tache to tache”, Reed corrected him with “c––– to c–––”. After a quick reprimanding for his language, Reed fired back at Simpson: “Well, no, don’t juggle with the words. Let’s know about our sexuality, flash boy.”

Reed lived up to the expectation. “When you book a guest, you book them to do a certain thing,” says Don Coutts. “Olli did exactly what we wanted. He behaved like a macho man and a boor, which worked well within a drama about masculinity… I personally found it very funny. I saw the role he was playing within it. However un-PC, he was a very interesting man and some of the rest of the cast were… well, not dull, but academics are not necessarily the most exciting people.”

Much of the comedy is in the other guests’ reactions: Kate Millett’s exhausted disapproval; Neil Lyndon laughing to himself; and Arthur Hyatt Williams looking generally befuddled. There’s also something amusingly childlike about Reed in the moments between the carnage: emptying yet another bottle – completely upturned so not a drop is wasted – into his glass; his eyebrows comically raising above the rims of his oversized spectacles as he swigs, like he’s extremely satisfied; and asking, seemingly to himself and quite profoundly, “Is there any happiness in the world?”

Reed’s brother, David, who was also his manager and agent, was in the production gallery. “His brother was completely reassuring, pointing out, ‘Oh, he’s just pretending, he’s winding them up…’”

Elsewhere, the commissioning editor, Michael Atwell received a call. The caller, claiming to be the "duty officer" of the Independent Broadcasting Authority, said that Channel 4 chief executive Michael Grade was furious and wanted the show pulled off the air. Atwell (described by Coutts and Cody as “wishy-washy” and “inexperienced”) charged into the gallery. “The door burst open, and the boy executive came flying in saying, ‘Stop! Stop! Stop!’” says Cody.

Don Coutts refused to stop directing. “I said, ‘I’m not f–––––– stopping, you can do what you want!’” Coutts recalls. “The commissioning editor said, ‘The show’s going off the air.’ I said, ‘Fine, f––– off, do what you want.’ I didn’t tell the presenter we were off the air. I carried on directing. They put some weird documentary about coal mining in Scotland for 20 minutes.”

The call was a hoax. Michael Grade was actually on his yacht and, as Sebastian Cody describes, “completely oblivious and uninterested.” Hoax calls were common during After Dark. “As soon as we heard the notional details of this phone call, we knew it was just another hoax,” says Cody.

In fact, Cody quickly found out who made the call: the critic Victor Lewis-Smith. “I got on to the phone to his mate Laurie Taylor [the sociologist and radio presenter],” says Cody. “I knew he’d ring Laurie and boast. Laurie told me it was him before the show was even over.”

With After Dark back on air, Reed’s misbehavior continued. He went to the toilet – which guests were permitted to do, and added to the conversational rhythm of the show – and reemerged in true Oliver Reed style. “He came running back into the studio and did a roll over the settee beside Kate Millett and kissed her,” says Coutts.

After grabbing Millett’s face and planting a non-consensual smacker on her cheek, Reed got an immediate telling off – the group suggested it was time he left.

“That’s aggressive, it’s obnoxious,” said Millett to host Helena Kennedy. “Is that something you want to visit upon somebody you’ve invited to your programme?” (Millett, who died in 2017, was amused enough that she later asked for a tape of the show, so she could entertain her friends with the incident.) 

After all the bullishness, Reed’s ejection from the studio is quite a sad scene – a naughty boy suddenly shamed, his shirt collar all skew-whiff.

“Suddenly, the school bully is confronted,” says Coutts. “Olli was vulnerable. You can see it in his performances. He was a really powerful actor. He wasn’t a ham. I think when he was confronted by some of the things that the other people said, he found that more difficult than he thought he would and drank more.”

Reed seemed to get over it enough quickly enough. “He went and stood by one of the cameramen for ages, just giggling and watching him work,” says Coutts. “Then he came into the gallery and said, ‘I kissed a bull dyke, and they’ve thrown me off! Get me a taxi, I’m going into Soho!”

By the time the show finished, the press was there. They seized on it. The news, as Cody remembers, had been full of grim Gulf War coverage for months. “What we did was give Fleet Street an opportunity, finally, to have some fun,” says Cody. “But it only became a story because Channel 4 took it off the air. That was unique in the history of television – that was a real news story. That was the point that they sent the snappers down to get shots. But the press – encouraged, I have to say, by some dishonesty on the part of Channel 4 – decided to run the simpler story ‘Naughty Oliver Reed runs amok on chat show.’”

Right after the show, Channel 4 executives hastily presented Cody with something to sign. “It was basically a get-out-of-jail-free card for the guy who’d made the mistake,” says Cody. “I refused to sign it… We’d dealt with it entirely professionally. The only mistake was made by someone employed by Channel 4.”

For Oliver Reed, it was just another notorious chat show spot. In 1975, Shelley Winters tipped a drink over his head on The Tonight Show; in 1987, he shouted through a sozzled rendition of The Wild One on Aspel & Company; and later, appeared drunk on The Word (though he claimed it was a stunt).

For After Dark, Oliver Reed's drinking was neither the tensest or most combustible situation. In 1988, a gay, homeless addict nicknamed Spider had to endure a patronising lecture from sneering MP John Heddle. “He was a boy off the street,” says Cody. “He had a glass in his hand. We felt several times there was a real risk of violence.” But Spider composed himself. Meanwhile, the record for most booze consumed on After Dark belongs to philosopher AJ Ayer.

The show was axed in 1991, with occasional specials and a short-lived BBC revival in 2003. The question is, could After Dark return? It feels like the art of reasonable discussion has been lost in the modern world (“Imagine what the debates would be now,” laughs Coutts. “My god, we’d never run out of subjects”).

In the world of modern TV – increasingly sanitised and controlled since the freeform days of After Dark – the art of the hellraiser is perhaps lost too. Oliver Reed would be quickly branded problematic. But After Dark said as much about the people as the issues. 

“Olli was an intelligent and sensitive man,” says Don Coutts. “If you want to watch the unpeeling of Olli Reed, it’s fascinating… He was a boorish drunk but he was also a kind, interesting, vulnerable man who was affected by life like we all are. If he hadn’t been thrown out or walked off it would have been a slight disappointment.”