ALT TV and ALT After Dark
I met ALT TV presenter Jack during my brief stint at Compass Communications. That chance connection turned into producing the station’s late Friday- and Saturday-night shows, rebranding the block as ALT After Dark, and eventually pushing the format beyond the studio itself.
ALT TV was messy, under-resourced and exactly the sort of place where I wanted to try things.
The late-night block gave us room to make television that did not feel overly polished. I was interested in the bits that made people stop and ask what the hell they were watching, then stay for the music.
Some of the more personal and graphic stories from that period belong in the autobiography rather than on the professional site. The part that still matters professionally is how willing we were to push the format and improvise when the normal answer was “no”.
The wider ALT TV / George FM lineage.
ALT TV was created by Thane Kirby and Ricky Newby. Kirby was also one of the founders of George FM ↗, which placed ALT TV inside the same Auckland alternative and electronic-music culture I had already been drawn towards for years.
National Library record for ALT TV ↗
I wanted to televise a live dance party.
At some point during ALT After Dark I had what seemed to me like an obvious idea: instead of only showing music television from the studio, why not take the station into a real nightclub and broadcast a dance party live?
Thane Kirby hated the idea.
So I got essentially no support for it from the top.
I still wanted to do it.
Terry Mathers helped me make it happen anyway.
Terry Mathers, one of the senior producers at the station, understood what I was trying to do and helped me solve the technical problem. Terry deserves the recognition here because without his practical help that broadcast probably would not have happened.
Through one of his industry connections he managed to source an extremely long CAT5 cable.
Then came the ridiculous part.
With a dodgy ladder and Terry helping me, I climbed across a series of equally dodgy rooftops along K Road in Auckland, running that cable from the ALT TV station down the road and into a nightclub that had agreed to let me stage the party there that night.
It was one hell of a day.
We got the connection into the club. We got the party running. We got the DJs playing.
And we broadcast it live.
The thing I had been told nobody would want to watch actually went to air.
It was live DJs, a real party and a television feed coming out of the venue rather than a conventional studio setup.
Years later, live DJ sets and party streams would become completely normal on the internet. At the time, I was simply trying to make television feel more like the culture it was supposed to represent.
The Red Vs Blue chapter also overlaps this period. The same young audience who were filling that gaming centre could sometimes see me appear on ALT TV, and the worlds of online community, gaming, music television and nightlife were starting to blur together.
“After Dark” followed me back to radio.
Years later, when I took over Friday and Saturday late nights on PulzarFM in Christchurch, I used After Dark again as a nod to the ALT TV period.