After the Watershed | Late-Nite TV from Britain

Curated by Matthew Harle, Colm McAuliffe and S.S. Sandhu

Presented with The Colloquium for Unpopular Culture

Oct. 10 - Nov. 9, 2025

Opening Reception | Oct. 10, 7-9pm

When British television slipped “after the watershed” — 9pm — broadcasting rules were loosened. From the 1960s to the 1990s, living room screens across the country filled with wonky experiments, sinister provocations, strange beauty. The centre became the edge. Night turned into a university - a free one.

After the Watershed revisits this era and brings its unruly spirit to New York, transforming Various/Artists into an uncanny living-room space where visitors can experience late-night TV as it was meant to be seen: on large CRT cubes, in real time, without pause or rewind. The exhibition recreates the rhythms of a bygone broadcast culture. Each week a new schedule will play on loop, mixing forgotten dramas, subcultural dispatches, artists’ TV, political theory, all manner of inexplicable debris.

Visitors can lounge on sofas, chew on dubious corner-shop confectionery, and navigate weekly handouts designed like vintage television listings. There will also be additional live screenings with guest artists.

Matthew Harle is a writer and the Curator of Artistic Programmes at The Warburg Institute, London.

Colm McAuliffe is a writer and curator from Co. Cork. He has written about film, music and literature for The Guardian, Irish Times, Sight and Sound and many more.

S.S. Sandhu directs the Colloquium for Unpopular Culture at New York University.

WEEK 1

Oct. 10 - 16 | BAD MEANING GOOD: BRITAIN DOES SUBCULTURES

Late-night British TV: an accidental record of youth culture, a nocturnal ledger of restlessness, aspiration and eccentric local style. Always broadcasted after the watershed hour of 9pm. Armed with a mandate to capture the viewing of disaffected youth, Britain’s terrestrial channels served up a dizzying diet of the “new” to isolated teenagers from Belfast to Cornwall and everywhere in between. Witness punk in Belfast as a safe space along the sectarian divide; dole-queue bohemia and zine culture in Newcastle; hip hop and graffiti taking Brixton by storm; black queer lives amid the industrial toil of West Yorkshire. This week’s programming showcases the astonishing array of subcultures in late twentieth century Britain, spinning from mainstream outlets to community endeavours through pirate radio, retina-detaching experiments in colour and confrontations with urgent social issues. A throughline and a hotline to the sharp ends and outer boundaries of an era lived through television.

WEEK 2

Oct. 17 - 23 | THEORY ON TV: ARCHITECTURE, MORALITY & THE DOLE

Television after 9pm was a warped classroom. Theorists, historians, often hirsute and unkempt, sunk into beige television studio furniture and expounded upon Marx, Hegel while smoking twenty Major cigarettes. They coughed, the spluttered and they theorised. Students and dropouts and those idling away on the dole loved it and learned from it in equal measure. Theory on TV showcases an era of television broadcasting when prime-time hosts were disrupted by swearing Yippies, offering joints to the audience; when teach-ins on violence and social change were fodder for the BBC; and even the planning of post-war British cities had an air of dialectical cool. It was an era of hangovers and comedowns intensified by J.G. Ballard and soothed by Roland Barthes. The television lover’s discourse became a glorious empire of signs.

WEEK 3

Oct 24 - 30 | EVERYDAY BRITAIN: MAPS OF THE INFRA-EXTRAORDINARY

Britain is an island. And beyond it lies weird neighbours with mad heads and even madder ways of speaking. So instead Britain likes to look inside to the granular, the everyday where workplaces, hobbies, suburbia, high streets and even football terraces are homes for the eccentrics to turn and face the strange. Much late-night British television captured local lives in transformation: witness the glamour of a shed, a shovel and a compost heap; the jazzy charm of a Greenwich community television special report on British ropemaking; the poetic mastery of Basil Bunting; the passionate fury of Sunderland football club as they battle relegation and indifference. Meanwhile, we go shopping in war-torn Belfast with a children’s television presenter; we trail Raymond Williams across the threshold of working-class Wales and middlebrow Cambridge University; we detour to Belgium to find out what Britain is really like; and we finish with the camp glories of Saturday Night People which folds astrology, Native American history and a breezy takedown of contemporary film at the dawn of the 1980s.

WEEK 4

Oct 31 - Nov 9 | DRAMA AFTER DARK: SOMETHING 'TRUE, IMPURE, AND DISSONANT'

To hell with primetime. For a generation of playwrights history could be made and remade at night. These awkward-squad anarchists, bolshy dreamers and impish perverts let fly at governments, cultural orthodoxies, codes of broadcasting decency. After 9pm obscenities were permitted and there were fewer advertisers to appease. In Drama After Dark a reporter discovers a TV channel is trying to brain-addle viewers; building-site workers take on the Department of Employment; a maniacal skinhead kicks against the pricks, a Frenchman rages against his inability to control his farts; a fresh-faced doctor at a university health centre confronts the slow apocalypse of British higher education; a priggish teenager is liberated by the siren calls of paganism and queer pastoral.

Public Programs

TUES. OCT 14, 7:30pm | BAD MEANING GOOD: BRITAIN DOES SUBCULTURES

Screening followed by discussion between S.S. Sandhu and Dan Fox

Bad Meaning Good - the opening week of After The Watershed: Late-Night TV from Britain at 19 Essex Street - represents an accidental record of youth culture. A nocturnal ledger of restlessness, aspiration and eccentric local style. Always broadcast after the watershed of 9pm, Britain's terrestrial channels served up a dizzying diet of the "new" to isolated teenagers from Belfast to Cornwall and everywhere in between. Witness: punk in Northern Ireland as a safer space along the sectarian divide, dole-queue bohemia and zine culture in Newcastle, hip hop and graffiti taking Brixton by storm; black queer lives amid the industrial toil of West Yorkshire.

Bad Meaning Good showcases the astonishing array of subcultures in late twentieth century Britain, spinning from mainstream outlets to community endeavours through pirate radio, retina-detaching experiments in colour, and confrontations with urgent social issues.

In addition, this one-off live screening will feature upstart jazz, metal machine music, fetish enthusiasts, Mark E. Smith, and much much more.

DAN FOX is a writer, musician and filmmaker. He is the author of Pretentiousness: Why It Matters and Limbo, and co-director of the documentary Other, Like Me. As a teenager he once briefly appeared on British TV reading from a Mills and Boon novel.

TUES. OCT 21, 7:30pm | THE VERY MATERIAL OF TELEVISION

A screening presentation on the pioneering work of David Hall. "Hovering somewhere on the McLuhan-Monty Python-Mr Rogers continuum, Hall’s work explored the television as a physical object, a piece of furniture, a dream machine." Presented by writer, professor and programmer Leo Goldsmith.

THURS. OCT 30, 7pm | We Dissent (1960), Kenneth Tynan

1st screening for 65 years of Kenneth Tynan's 90-minute TV programme about American writers, artists and thinkers who saw themselves as refuseniks from what America was - or was becoming. Introduced by radio producer and Theory of Everything presenter Benjamen Walker.

FRI. NOV 7, 7pm | SEASON FINALE

Closing party for the exhibition featuring deep cuts and televisual arcane with show co-curators Matthew Harle and Colm McAuliffe.