As Christian Schroder has argued in his review of Alexander Kluge's television programmes, tuning in to watch Kluge's work on late-night German television is akin to the experience of stumbling upon a literary bookshop in the middle of a red-light district. Wedged between the pornographic films, crime thrillers and live competition and shopping programmes that constitute the regular evening fare on the commercial stations, Kluge's 10 vor 11 (10 to 11), News and Stories, Mitternachismagazin (Midnight Magazine), and Primetime Spätausgabe (Prime Time Late Edition) certainly strike the viewer as strange anomalies. Constructed, in a similar vein to his films, out of a highly diverse collection of raw materials (including photographs, drawings, diagrams, clips from films and documentary footage), Kluge's programmes are - in both their form and content - certainly unlike anything else on German television.

Organised predominantly around interviews with writers, artists, musicians, film-makers, academics and directors from theatre and opera, the aim of the programmes is to provide what Kluge describes as ‘cultural windows’ for the ‘old media’ within the comparatively ‘new’ medium of television. These interviews (which provide the backbone for the majority of Kluge's programmes) are, however, unlike those conducted on other cultural magazine programmes - a format which has become increasingly popular on German television. Although the basic structure of Kluge's work for television resembles the interview format characteristic of these programmes, the interviewer (a role regularly performed by Kluge himself) remains predominantly off-screen - his presence marked only by the highly enthusiastic voice guiding and animating the discussions. Although these conversations are organised around the discussion of a particular theme, topic, or event (such as a documentary about techno, Werner Schroeter's staging of an opera by Bellini, the unfinished film projects of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Siegfried Kracauer's writings on film and mass culture, or the ideas of Deleuze and Foucault) the discussions frequently shoot off in directions that would not appear to be related to the topic in question.