Red Triangle (Channel 4) - Legacy

Legacy

BBC Two commissioned its own strands of late night screenings of controversial or censored arthouse cinema, Moviedrome, which featured horror and cult cinema introduced by Alex Cox.

Several years later, Channel 4 instituted a late-night programming slot (entitled "The Red Light Zone") in which it showed a variety of adult-oriented programmes with more overt sexual content, mixing avant-garde material such as the works of photographer Robert Mapplethorpe with more unabashedly salacious content. By this time Whitehouse's influence had declined, and the general moral panic over "smut" and "video nasties" had largely subsided, such that the Red Light Zone proceeded without great controversy.

More generally, the experiment showed there was a considerable appetite in the British viewing public for adult, sexually themed programming beyond the double entendre comedies of the preceding decades (e.g. Are You Being Served?), and the following decade saw Channel 4 increasingly resorting to more blatantly sexual programmes to attract viewers. By showing that it was possible for TV to get viewership of several millions after midnight, the red triangle experiment (along with late-night comedy programme Who Dares Wins, which notably parodied the red triangle films) went some way to establishing a late-night "after the pub" slot. This continues (particularly on Channel 4 and its competitor Five), although the content is more inclined toward the bawdy and laddish than to the red-triangle series' arty goals.