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Arena is a British television documentary series, made and broadcast by the BBC. Voted by leading TV executives in Broadcast as one of the top 50 most influential programmes of all time, it has run since 1 October 1975 with over five hundred episodes made, directed by the likes of Martin Scorsese, Alan Yentob, Roly Keating, Frederick Baker, Volker Schlondorff and Vikram Jayanti. Arena's subjects are a roll-call of the world's best known cultural figures from the 20th and 21st centuries, from singers Bob Dylan and Amy Winehouse to academics Edward Said and Eric Hobsbawm, from writers Jean Genet and V S Naipaul to artists Francis Bacon and Louise Bourgeois. The current series editor is Anthony Wall.
BBC Four
687
90 min
Premiere. Ronald Eyre reviews what's going on in the theatre, Kenneth Tynan talks to Laurence Olivier about Lilian Baylis and The Old Vic, and a film about David Hockney's sets for The Rake's Progress.
Oct 1, 1975
George Melly looks at how they sold the 70's and a report on the opening of the Space Studios.
Oct 8, 1975
An interview with Howard Barker, author of 'Stripwell', and an extract from same; commentary by Kenneth Tynan; and an investigation of 'Birds of Paradise'.
Oct 15, 1975
Cartoonist Mel Caiman on the New Yorker magazine and its artists, Richard Hamilton at the Serpentine Gallery, and a new documentary exhibition from Jarrow.
Oct 22, 1975
Peter Hall talks about the history and new South Band location of the National Theater, where he is artistic director.
Oct 29, 1975
Features Observer critic William Feaver on Painting the End of the World, Bill Brandt's selection of landscape photography at the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the best of science fiction illustration.
Nov 5, 1975
Extract from a contemporary play and Kenneth Tynan opines.
Nov 12, 1975
Shirley Conran is the guest columnist; fashion photographer Barry Lategan is filmed working; and Victorian painter Edward Burne-Jones' London exhibition.
Nov 19, 1975
Deborah Norton reviews British stage events, a play extract, and Kenneth Tynan opines about the theatre.
Nov 26, 1975
Guest columnist Terry Measham; a look into the work of painter and poet Charles Tomlinson.
Dec 3, 1975
Mikhail Baryshnikov and Natalia Makarova rehearse for a BBC New Year Gala Performance; Kenneth Tynan draws a portrait of Albert Finney.
Dec 10, 1975
Filmmaker Roger Graef and journalist Simon Jenkins discuss the destruction of historical buildings, in light of a recent SAVE campaign report and the conclusion of the European Architectural Heritage Year.
Dec 17, 1975
Deborah Norton returns with reports, interviews and extracts from what is liveliest and best in the British theatrical scene.
Jan 7, 1976
Jan 14, 1976
Jonathan Miller introduces this week's look at what is most stimulating and enjoyable on the theatrical scene.
Jan 21, 1976
A look at American photographer Paul Strand and recent trends in British photography.
Jan 28, 1976
Arena goes to Scarborough for the British premiere of a new Alan Ayckbourn play "Just Between Ourselves".
Feb 4, 1976
Arena looks at aspects of community art and the work of painter Keith Grant, artist-in-residence at the New Charing Cross Hospital.
Feb 11, 1976
Claire Bloom and Kenneth Tynan discuss extracts from Samuel Beckett's 'Happy Days', George Bernard Shaw's 'Too True to be Good', and Tennessee Williams' 'Sweet Bird of Youth'.
Feb 18, 1976
Arena talks with Robert Janz and Dante Leonelli about incorporating time into sculpture.
Feb 25, 1976
Arena brings extracts from Paris' contemporary theatre season, including Frank Wedekind's 'Lulu' and Marguerite Duras' 'Days in the Tree', and an interview with Delphine Seyrig.
Mar 3, 1976
Arena presents the work of British and American video artists.
Mar 10, 1976
Barbara Jefford, Laurence Olivier, Joan Plowright, Kenneth Tynan Billie Whitelaw and many of the people behind the scenes say goodbye to the Old Vic building.
Mar 17, 1976
Liverpool poet and painter Adrian Henry visits 'The Face of Merseyside'; Boyd and Evans use photographs as the basis of their explorations of everyday life.
Mar 24, 1976
Alumni of the Royal Court celebrate its 20th anniversary.
Mar 31, 1976
Barrie Penrose investigates a multi-national art empire and the artists and methods that created it.
Apr 7, 1976
Features Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Galina Visnevskaya in the Scottish Opera's production of Macbeth, The Kantor Theatre Company from Poland, and Fenella Fielding in a late-night revue.
Aug 25, 1976
Features the La Mama Theatre Company from New York; Bunraku, traditional Japanese Puppet Theatre; a recital by Frederica Von Stade; and Judith Blegen as Susanna in 'The Marriage of Figaro'.
Sep 1, 1976
Writer Germaine Greer and her god-daughter Ruby take a look at a child's Edinburgh Festival and some of the fringe activities, including Gruppo Teatro Libero from Rome and Quentin Crisp.
Sep 8, 1976
A look at the opening of the Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester.
Sep 15, 1976
Gavin Miller interviews the director Robert Altman on "M*A*S*H", "Nashville", "Buffalo Bill and the Indians" and more.
Sep 22, 1976
David Gould, the expert who discovered Tom Keating's Samuel Palmer imitations, shows the process of identifying and analyzing suspected pictures.
Sep 29, 1976
Gavin Millar talks with Frank Westmore, whose family has dominated the make-up departments of American cinema for decades.
Oct 6, 1976
Peter Shaffer, writer of 'Equus', talks about his plays, his life and the theatre with an excerpt from the 1976 stage production of 'Equus'.
Oct 13, 1976
Gavin Millar interviews director Eric Rohmer about 'Die Marquise von O', 'Claire's Knee' and 'Love in the Afternoon'.
Oct 20, 1976
British illustrators Mick Brownfield and Allan Manham are documented working on their current projects; Artist Chris Orr probes the dreadful truth behind the net curtains of suburbia.
Oct 27, 1976
Don Siegel, director of 'The Shootist', 'Charley Varrick', 'Coogan's Bluff', 'Dirty Harry' and many other violent thrillers talks about the problems of the director who is typecast by his success in one specialized genre.
Nov 3, 1976
A look at Theatre National Populaire, one of France's leading theaters, and Patrice Chéreau's 'La Dispute' by Marivaux and Roger Planchon's 'Tartuffe', as well as scene's from Planchon's scenes from his Blues, Whites and Reds.
Nov 10, 1976
In light of the low proportion of British films in the 20th London Film Festival, Gavin Millar looks at what's wrong with the British film industry and distribution system.
Nov 17, 1976
Sculpture for the Blind - a special Tate Gallery exhibition; Linda Benedict-Jones, photographer; James Boswell - a revival of his war pictures.
Nov 24, 1976
Arena speaks with Spanish directors at the Madrid premiere of 'The Long Vacation of 36'.
Dec 1, 1976
20th anniversary tribute to Bertolt Brecht at Newcastle's University Theatre with scenes from 'The Good Woman of Setzuan' and prose, poetry and music.
Dec 8, 1976
A look at the Disney exhibit at the Victoria and Albert Museum; an interview with 'The Ritz' director Dick Lester and actress Rita Moreno; an excerpt from Buster Keaton's 'Spite Marriage'; and the results of the Titles Competition.
Dec 15, 1976
Gavin Millar talks to Mel Brooks just before the London release of 'Silent Movie'.
Jan 5, 1977
An introduction to the magical world of wood-sculptor Sam Smith, plus a look at one of this month's major exhibitions.
Jan 12, 1977
Gavin Miller talks to director Martin Ritt, writer Walter Bernstein, and actors Woody Allen and Zero Mostel about 'The Front'
Jan 19, 1977
An interview with Stewart Parker about his new musical 'Spokesong' with excerpt; a profile of 81 year old actor Richard Goolden with scenes from 'Toad of Toad Hall' and Tom Stoppard's 'Dirty Linen and New-Found-Land'.
Jan 26, 1977
A fortnightly look at the big screen at home and abroad. News, views and interviews presented by Gavin Millar.
Feb 2, 1977
Ralph Steadman illustrates a children's anti-war story, caricatures at his local pub, and speaks about his drawing techniques and his work, including Alice, and impressions of the Patty Hearst trial and the Watergate hearings.
Feb 9, 1977
Gavin Miller discusses 'Network' with director Sidney Lumet and Robert Kee; Alberto Cavalcanti talks about his film career on the occasion of his 80th birthday.
Feb 16, 1977
Peter Stein, director of Die Schaubuhne theatre co-operative, comes to London with his Shakespeare Project. Includes extracts from 'Summerfolk' and 'Shakespeare's Memory'.
Feb 23, 1977
Gavin Millar talks to New Yorker critic Pauline Kael about Costa-Gavras' 'Z' and 'Section Speciale', along with her passion for the movies and how she wields her power.
Mar 2, 1977
Arena investigates holograms and their potential in the arts; artist Kit Williams' vivid folklore paintings.
Mar 9, 1977
On the occasion of the release of the third film version of 'A Star is Born', James Mason talks about the curious business of stardom and how it has changed.
Mar 16, 1977
Arena visits three theatres - the Mercury Theater in Colchester, the Humberside Theatre in Hull, and the Duke's Playhouse in Lancaster - to find out what they are doing, how they are doing it and why they think they should go on doing it.
Mar 23, 1977
A look at Ealing Studios, including excerpts of many of their popular films.
Mar 30, 1977
Portrait painter Philip Sutton; Helmut Weissenborn, a German WWI soldier who illustrated with wood engravings the war diary of Edward Thomas, an English poet who died in WWI; and Gothic art in Cologne.
Apr 6, 1977
In a special edition from Rome, Gavin Millar interviews Bernardo Bertolucci, director of 'Last Tango in Paris' and '1900', and Gore Vidal on Hollywood and 'Cinecitta'.
Apr 13, 1977
Prospect Theatre Company reopens the Old Vic. Includes rehearsal footage from 'St Joan', 'Hamlet', 'Antony and Cleopatra', and 'War Music', a new musical adaptation of 'The Iliad' by Christopher Logue.
Apr 20, 1977
Gavin Millar talks to director Bernardo Berolucci in Rome about '1900', his new five and a half hour film, as well as his earlier work.
Apr 27, 1977
The artist Ian Breakwall gave up painting for the art of a daily diary; Jim Dine explains why he returned from pop art to drawing the human figure.
May 4, 1977
Arena looks at erotic films, including 'Je T'Aime Moi Non Plus', 'Hardcore', and 'Come Play With Me'.
May 11, 1977
An interview with Sophia Loren on the occasion of the opening of 'The Cassandra Crossing'.
May 25, 1977
Mr Universe, the Crazy Horse Girls de Paris, Yum Yum Shaw, superstars with police escorts, topless bathing beauties-the Cannes Film Festival still sometimes seems more like a circus than a trade fair. But for all that, film people find it an indispensable fortnight in their calendar. More buying, selling and setting up of movies takes place in the jostling corridors of the Carlton Hotel in the last two weeks of May than anywhere else the rest of the year. A report on the business and the ballyhoo.
Jun 8, 1977
In the last ten years an astonishing number of new writers have emerged. Plays by Barrie Keeffe, John McGrath, David Hare, Howard Barker, Howard Brenton, Trevor Griffiths and Stephen Poli akoff have been performed at the Royal Court, the Aldwych, in the West End and at the National Theatre. The plays they write are about violence, sex and politics. How accurate and useful is their portrayal of society? What is the reason for their success? What are their own roots, influences and attitudes? In an extended Arena, writer and critic Albert Hunt assesses this renaissance of British playwrights, which has given the theatre of the 70s a distinctive voice. Including interviews with, and extracts of plays by: Howard Bren ton, Trevor Griffiths, David Hare, Barrie Keeffe and John McGrath.
Jun 15, 1977
Features the 1977 Edinburgh International Festival with a new production of Carmen, the experimental shows, Film Festival, Television Festival, and art galleries.
Sep 7, 1977
with Gavin Millar returns for a new season after a visit to Hollywood, which despite rumours of slump and panic is still the unquestioned capital of the cinema world. We talked to one of its ruling princes, John Franken heimer, director of The Manchurian Candidate and Grand Prix, about his career in the Dream Factory, and especially his latest suspense thriller Black Sunday.
Sep 14, 1977
Sep 21, 1977
Sep 28, 1977
Diane Keaton and Woody Allen talk about the filming of 'Annie Hall' and their long friendship.
Oct 5, 1977
Oct 12, 1977
Oct 19, 1977
Oct 26, 1977
Nov 2, 1977
In the 17th century Troilus and Cressida was censored and in the 18th century Tate gave King Lear a happy ending. The programme debates the line between interpretation and vandalism.
Nov 9, 1977
Nov 16, 1977
Nov 23, 1977
Nov 30, 1977
Dec 7, 1977
Dec 14, 1977
Star Wars - the biggest and fastest money-maker in the history of the movies - has opened in Britain at last. What on earth - or in heaven - has caused the phenomenal success of this galactic romp-cum-morality tale? Gavin Millar talks to the producer Gary Kurtz , the designer John Barry and to Mark Hamill who plays the young hero Luke Sky-walker.
Jan 11, 1978
George Melly explores his lifelong relationship with surrealism in all its forms and prominent personalities; Henry Moore discusses Leonardo da Vinci's anatomical drawings.
Jan 18, 1978
The Force is with us? Star Wars - the biggest and fastest money-maker in the history of the movies - has opened in Britain at last. What on earth - or in heaven - has caused the phenomenal success of this galactic romp-cum-morality tale? Gavin Millar talks to the producer Gary Kurtz, the designer John Barry and to Mark Hamill who plays the young hero Luke. Howard Hawks died this Christmas. His career spanned the history of Hollywood. As well as designing and racing sports cars, motor-bikes and aeroplanes he wrote, directed and produced every kind of Hollywood movie. The Big Sleep, Red River, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and Bringing up Baby are amongst the best examples of their genre. Gavin Millar talked to him at his home in Palm Springs just before his 80th birthday.
Jan 25, 1978
But please, this is a farce! ' The story of The Cherry Orchard CHEKHOV: '... It hasn't turned out a drama but as a comedy, in places even a farce.' STANISLAVSKY: ' ... I wept like a woman, I tried to control myself but I could not. I hear you say, " but please, this is a farce! " No, for the ordinary person, this is a tragedy.' With the advent of two major new productions of The Cherry Orchard, at the National Theatre and Riverside Studios, Arena: Theatre addresses itself to the recurring debate about Chekhov the ' comic' dramatist.
Feb 1, 1978
A British film The Duellists starring Keith Carradine , Harvey Keitel and Albert Finney won the Special Jury Award at Cannes last year and it opened in London last week. It is a finely photographed period film set in the beautiful Dordogne but the most admirable thing about it may be that it is as faithful an adaptation of Conrad as any the screen has seen - and there have been many, from a 1926 silent version of Nostromo to Richard Brooks 's Lord Jim and Hitchcock's Sabotage.
Feb 8, 1978
Feb 15, 1978
Feb 22, 1978
Mar 1, 1978
Mar 8, 1978
Mar 15, 1978
Mar 22, 1978
Mar 29, 1978
Apr 5, 1978
Apr 12, 1978
A tribute to the British filmmaker Alan Clarke (1935-1990).
Apr 17, 1978
May 3, 1978
May 10, 1978
May 24, 1978
Last Saturday in the Francois Truffaut Season now running on BBC2, "L'Enfant Sauvage", one of his masterpieces, was shown. Set in 18th-century France it is about the attempts of a man of science to civilise a young boy brought up without parents in the wild. Gavin Millar talked to Francois Truffaut when the film was first released here in 1970. From his first film, "The Four Hundred Blows", which looks affectionately at the making of a young delinquent, to "Small Change", made a couple of years ago, his films have often had children at their centre. Gavin Millar also talks to Bill Douglas whose recently completed trilogy about a poor Scottish childhood, "My Childhood, My Ain Folk, My Way Home", is regarded by many as the most important contribution to the British cinema for years.
Oct 11, 1978
'She is a creature of fire and light, her voice a golden gate opening on lapis lazuli hinges, her body a supple reed rippling in the breeze of her love. This is not acting at all but living, breathing, loving.' (Bernard Levin, Daily Express) The paragon thus described was Vanessa Redgrave. The performance, Rosalind in As You Like It The date was 1961. In recent years her skills as an actress have been somewhat overshadowed by the publicity surrounding her political activities. Now after an absence of five years Vanessa Redgrave returns to the English stage. This programme offers a rare opportunity to see her in rehearsal and performance in Ibsen's play The Lady from the Sea, and to hear her talk about her commitment to her acting career. With illustrations from her major roles including Jean Brodie, Rosalind, Isadora. Julia and her latest film Yanks.
Oct 18, 1978
Hooray for Hollywood? Gavin Millar talks to: Christopher Isherwood has been a Hollywood immigrant for 40 years and loved every minute of bis screenwriting career there. 'Thank goodness I had the sense to realise I wasn't the great genius prostituting myself.* Neil Simon (The' Goodbye Girl, The Cheap Detective) is a New York playwright who has chosen to live now in Hollywood. David Puttnam is the young English producer (Midnight Express) who has been in Hollywood only two years and is coming home. 'Leaving Los Angeles is Mke giving up heroin.'
Oct 25, 1978
A new British film has its Royal Premiere tomorrow. It is an English period film and vividly demonstrates the high production values, quality and talent available in this country but which so rarely get the chance to reach our screens. The Thirty-nine Steps was originally a novel by John Buchan and has already been filmed twice, by HITCHCOCK in 1935, starring ROBERT DONAT , and by RALPH THOMAS in 1960, starring KENNETH MORE. Gavin Millar looks at the tradition from which it sprang. Plus a foretaste of one of the most interesting London Film Festivals ever.
Nov 22, 1978
This year's London Film Festival contained five entries from India. It's a reminder that we hardly see any of the output of the biggest film industry in the world. Gavin Millar reports from Bombay, including interviews with Satyajtt Ray , Shyam Benegal and two of India's heart-throbs, Shashi Kapoor and Parveen Babi.
Dec 6, 1978
Arena takes you on a guided tour of the smallest museum in the world - its 'curator', Swiss artist Herbert Distel, has transformed a small chest-of-drawers into a miniature museum. Originally used to store cotton reels, the Museum of Drawers now houses a collection to rival any major gallery - 500 original works contributed by many of the world's leading artists. Now and Then - Anthony Green Recently awarded the accolade of a one-man show at the Royal Academy. Anthony Green is one of the most original and approachable of all figurative painters working in Britain today. He paints his family - his wife, his two daughters, his mother, his stepfather, his French uncle and his aunts. In tonight's film Anthony Green looks back on the growth of his family and his painting since his first encounter with the BBC's cameras nearly ten years ago.
Jan 8, 1979
Featuring two of the greatest photographers of the 20th century Jacques Henri Lartigue began taking photographs at the age of seven in 1902. His celebrated Diary of a Century is a photographic record of his life from that time until the present day. This entrancing autobiography is a unique reflection of the passage of this century. 'Photography is a magic thing! Almost more enchanting and clear than the reality I was staring at.' Roman Vishniac a Russian Jew born in St Petersburg in 1897. His striking images of life in the Jewish ghettos-taken with a concealed camera just before the last world war-are extraordinary documents of a lost epoch, of a lost people. ' I returned again and again because I wanted to save their faces from the devastation of Hitler's Germany.'
Jan 15, 1979
Gavin Millar presents another edition in his regular series about the cinema today.
Jan 17, 1979
Gavin Millar talks to Robert Alt man about his new film A Wedding; plus Karel Reisz 's Dog Soldiers and other turn-of-the-year news. (Postponed from 20 December)
Jan 21, 1979
wo years ago Marion Elliott , a 20-year-old from Brixton, gave up working in Woolworths and became punk singer Poly Styrene. Having created her own plastic image, she formed a band, X-Ray Spex, and set about reflecting life in the synthetic 70s with songs like 1 The Day the World Turned Day-Glo' and ' Germ-Free Adolescents' 'Rock stars are disposable products, and I just wanted to send the whole thing up.' This film observes the differing worlds of MARION ELLIOTT and POLY STYRENE.
Jan 22, 1979
Aloe: a genus of plant indigenous to South Africa, noted for its ability to survive under the most adverse conditions. Athol Fugard is the author of such celebrated plays as The Blood Knot, The Island, and Sizwe Bansi is Dead. He is known throughout the world for his opposition to Apartheid, and, more importantly, for his determination to express these views through the theatre and within South Africa. Last month his latest play, A Lesson from Aloes, opened in Johannesburg. It was both written and directed by Fugard and Arena was there from the first day of rehearsals until the opening night. The film offers a unique insight into the evolution of a play and the remarkable tenacity of its author.
Jan 29, 1979
Assault on Precinct 13 and Dark Star were two of the ' sleepers ' of the last two years - small-budget films from the USA that struck a chord right round the world. Their young writer/director John Car penter's third feature film Hal loween has opened in London. Gavin Millar interviews John Carpenter and star Donald Pleasence on location in Los Angeles.
Jan 31, 1979
Fibreglass carcasses, a flaming typewriter, and a troop of girl guides - each has been a -key ingredient in a work of art by Leopoldo Maler. Deliberately provocative, surprise and spectacle are key elements in Maler's work. How do the verbal images of poetry relate to the visual images of painting? Charles Tomlinson , one of England's finest poets, is also a painter. In this film he explores the landscapes, urban and natural, which have inspired his work.
Feb 5, 1979
The sell-out success of this year's Royal Shakespeare season at Stratford is the musical play, Piaf. Jane Lapotaire, television's Marie Curie, has won universal critical acclaim for her performance as the great French singer. Tonight Jane Lapotaire talks about imitating the inimitable. What Did You Do in 'The Warp' Daddy? A cast of 50 actors and musicians playing over 200 parts were commandeered by Ken Campbell for his marathon production of The Warp at London's ICA. They were there to perform an epic cycle of ten plays running an uninterrupted 22 hours. Arena was there to witness the event and to film the cast prior to their collapse.
Feb 12, 1979
John Barry (designer Star Wars and Superman) is now directing Saturn 3. Ridley Scott (The Duellists) is shooting The Alien. Gavin Millar reports on these two new British SF films.
Feb 14, 1979
Other Writers Will Tell You Different.... Lifers in prison cages, comedians in Hollywood, adolescents in the East End and female androids on the edge of the galaxy have all been subjects for Glasgow play-wright Tom McGrath in a career which started only in 1976. Arena profiles an original new talent. With extracts from The Hard Man and Mr Laurel and Mr Hardy. The Moving Picture Mime Show More like Tom and Jerry than Marcel Marceau , this highly unconventional group has attracted a cult following by combining traditional mime with their own fast-moving cartoon style.
Feb 26, 1979
Isabelle Huppert is 23 - ' a stunning actress ', says Claude Chabrol ; 'Best Actress ' at Cannes in 1978 for Violette Noziere , the new Chabrol thriller. We talk to her in Paris. Alberta Hunter is 83, a classic blues singer who performs the soundtrack of Alan Rudolph 's Remember my Name. We catch her singing at The Cookery, New York.
Feb 28, 1979
The television premiere of GEOFF DUNBAR'S brilliant animation film. Based on ALFRED JARRY's notorious surrealist hero, Pere Ubu , it chronicles the rise to power of a kind of punk Macbeth, a lewd and unscrupulous despot with the mentality of a petit bourgeois and with absolutely no redeeming qualities. Ubu Roi was originally written by Jarry as a schoolboy in 1888 and eventually presented to an outraged public in 1896. For his version of the story Dunbar has invented a brutal and graphic style to recreate the explosive impact of Jarry's original production.
Mar 5, 1979
Q. What do the following have in common? Frank Sinatra, Sid Vicious, Dorothy Squires, Barry John, Paul Anka, Lord George-Brown, Elvis Presley, Prof Wilfrid Mellers, Shirley Bassey, The Disapointer Sisters, The St Paul's School Choir, David Bowie, Claude Francois A. They are all doing it their way in tonight's Arena. "My Way" has become an anthem. It's been recorded over 140 times and for every artist who has put it on wax, countless others sing it in pubs, clubs and private homes. Arena investigates the appeal and staying power of a phenomenally popular song. "It was three o'clock in the morning in New York. It was pouring with rain, and it came to me: 'And now the end is near and so I face the final curtain ...'. And I said wow that's it, that's for Sinatra ... and then I cried." (Paul Anka)
Mar 12, 1979
Twenty-three years ago Don Siegel made his famous horrorpic Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Now there is a new Invasion, even more chilling than the original; make-up effects by the man who dreamed up the aliens in Close Encounters, special sound effects by the man who ' voiced' R2D2 in Star Wars. Gavin Millar talks to star.
Mar 14, 1979
Arena presents The Agony and the Ecstasy of Edna Everage In this, the first-ever exclusive Arts Documentary about a living legend, our cameras probe and etch the enigma which is Dame Edna. Meet her in the privacy of her fabulously appointed penthouse suite atop the Dorchester Hotel, London, W1. Witness the fabled finale of her current West End hit, A Night with Dame Edna. Visit her Melbourne home suburb, Moonee Ponds, now a national monument... and suffer with her the tears, terror and triumph as she claws her way to the top. Dame Edna talks fearlessly about her fame, her wealth and her humility, whilst wearing no less than ten unique couturier-simulated gowns. And much, much more. Dame Edna Everage is a division of the Barry Humphries group.
Mar 19, 1979
At the height of the American depression in the summer of 1936, t writer JAMES AGEE and photographer WALKER EVANS travelled south to Alabama. There they lived with a family of poor-white farmers recording their daily lives in intimate detail. What finally emerged was an extraordinary and personal account of deprivation and poverty. The book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men has become a classic. More than 40 years later Arena returned to Alabama, in the foot-steps of Agee and Evans, to trace the survivors of that original family.
Mar 26, 1979
with Gavin Millar. Everybody knows about Kung Fu, Run Run Shaw and Bruce Lee. They probably know less about the young film-makers who are trying to get a few of Hong Kong's more pressing problems on to the screen: over-crowding, poverty, refugees, and worries about China. There are, too, the glamorous invaders from Hollywood who see Hong Kong as another exotic backdrop where two hearts might beat as one. Candice Bergen has been there starring in Oliver's Story, the sequel to Love Story. Where's the real Hong Kong gone? ' she asks.
Mar 28, 1979
Rock band Sham 69 have a large and loyal following of working-class kids, who call themselves 'The Sham Army'. They have a reputation for causing trouble and Sham concerts have often been disrupted and brought to an end by fighting. Jimmy Pursey, the lead singer, has struggled to prevent these outbreaks but the violent and conflicting passions aroused at Sham concerts have placed him in an increasingly difficult position. sham's latest album That's Life portrays the pressures that face the kids who follow the band. Arena this week re-creates scenes from that album and follows the story of one Sham concert which threatened to explode.
Apr 2, 1979
The King and I For David Oxtoby, Elvis is king. He's been painting rock 'n' roll stars since the 50s, much to the bemusement of the art establishment. Most of the paintings in this film-of Presley, Haley, Gene Vincent etc - were stolen and subsequently burnt by Italian bandits and so Arena presents a unique chance to view the work of this entertaining but ill-starred artist. Journey to the Surface of the Earth Last year the artist Mark Boyle attained the singular distinction of occupying the entire British pavilion at the Venice Biennale astonishing visitors with a Sardinian mountainside, a ploughed field and a Liverpool pavement. Since pioneering light shows with Jimi Hendrix and the Soft Machine he has devoted his life to travelling the world, recreating with uncanny accuracy six-foot-square replicas of the Earth's surface.
Apr 9, 1979
Arena presents a film about the strange art of ventriloquism with Tattersall and his amazing life-size doll.
Apr 15, 1979
A film about the popular reggae band Steel Pulse, Whose highly successful debut album ' Handsworth Revolution' launched them last summer on the road to fame. Although their roots are in Jamaica STEEL PULSE is very much an indigenous British band. ' If you are a Black man born here there's no way you are going to get that Jamaican feel. We are putting over the feelings of the Black kids here about the trouble that is going to come.'
May 21, 1979
The Paintings of Kit Williams Inspired by the landscape, the wildlife and by his village neighbours, artist Kit Williams conjures up in his paintings a vivid folk-lore of his own. In tonight's Arena, this magical world comes alive in a Gloucestershire valley.
Jun 11, 1979
One in six people in Britain will spend some time in a mental hospital. For 50 years, painting or drawing have provided an important key to the problems of the mentally ill. This Arena film presents some of the extraordinary and moving pictures of the mind produced in Europe since the war.
Jun 14, 1979
John Hoyland is reckoned by many both here and abroad to be this country's finest abstract painter. A key figure for younger artists and critics, he has been both loved and hated to excess. As a major retrospective of his work opens in London, here is a film that stays close to the artist during six days when he faces hostile criticism, starts a new painting and explains why, in bleaker moments, painting can seem ' like flicking away in a corner with a feather duster '.
Sep 29, 1979
Arena presents a profile of Richard Rogers, one of the most original and controversial talents in architecture today. It was Rogers, together with his Italian partner RENZO PIANO , who created the spectacular Beaubourg Arts Centre in Paris. Described variously as 'art hanger', oil refinery', 'cultural colossus ' - it looks like a giant meccano set, a bizarre and brightly coloured building rising out of the heart of traditional Paris streets. It caused a furore when first unveiled, but has now brought new life to the area, and attracts as many as 50,000 visitors a day, even more than Disneyland! British architect Rogers has now returned to England to embark on even more ambitious projects - startling new home for one of Britain's oldest institutions, Lloyds of London, and a huge and much-debated scheme to enliven London's South Bank, the Coin Street Project.
Jan 16, 1979
Athol Fugard is the author of such celebrated plays as The Blood-knot, The Island and Sizwe Bansi is Dead. He is known throughout the world for his opposition to apartheid and for his determination to express these views through the theatre and within South Africa. Last year his latest play, A Lesson from Aloes, opened in Johannesburg. It was both written and directed by Fugard and Arena was there to follow its progress from the first day of rehearsal until the opening night. The film offers a unique insight into the evolution of a play and the remarkable tenacity of its author.
Jan 17, 1980
Formerly a professional screamer in horror films, a belly-dancer in the Middle East, Lene Lovich has now emerged as one of the most original performers in rock music -aided and abetted by a bizarre appearance and an extraordinary vocal range. Arena travels with Lene and her constant companion Les on a journey to Berlin.
Jan 23, 1980
Arena presents the extraordinary story of Tim Page, war photographer and Vietnam legend-a tale first told in MICHAEL HERR'S celebrated book about Vietnam, Dispatches. 'People made Page sound crazy and ambitious, like the Sixties Kid, a stone-cold freak in a country where the madness raced up the hills and into the jungles ... he'd picked up a camera the way you or I would pick up a ticket, but he would go places for pictures that very few other photographers were going.' Page was wounded four times in Vietnam. The fourth and final time, he was logged ' dead on arrival'. But he survived against all the odds. Tonight he tells his story.
Jan 30, 1980
Arena presents a hilarious and touching portrait of the great Yiddish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer, filmed on location in Brooklyn, New York, and featuring friends, relatives and other ' odd-balls '. 'I wouldn't say that Yiddish is dead, neither would I say that Yiddish is blooming. I would say that Yiddish is sick. But in our history, between being sick and dying is a long, long way...
Feb 6, 1980
This week Arena features two highly-individual women artists. Peggy Taub has always wanted to sculpt like the classic Greeks. But whenever she leans over the clay bin an animal head appears. An American writer and artist who now lives in London, Peggy Taub's work centres on the belief that the main difference between people and animals 'lies in the placement of the ears'. Thalma Goldman We look at the work of one of the most original artist-animators around today. Her latest film Stanley has just been nominated as Britain's entry to the Berlin Film Festival. Plus a 'commercial break' with news of current exhibitions in the arts.
Feb 13, 1980
Irish folk music is one of the oldest unbroken cultural traditions in Europe. As the Sense of Ireland festival of arts comes to London, Arena presents some of the finest Irish musicians of today. In tonight's programme the Bothy Band and Planxty - two of the best folk groups of recent years - play and sing with their families and friends on location in Dublin and on the west coast of Ireland.
Feb 27, 1980
The growth of black consciousness through the 1970s has produced an explosion of original new theatre in black South Africa. At a secret performance in the backyard of a Soweto shop, a radical poet recites his banned work accompanied by drums and songs. In a ghetto hall, two men in chains portray their escape from prison and their dream of liberation - a dream that is shattered by the grim reality of working in Johan nesburg 's mines ' 6,000 feet underground ... in the dusty caves of gold '. And the women of Crossroads shanty town re-enact their fight with the police and the bulldozers which have harassed them for years. Tonight's film investigates the remarkable emergence of a vivid and defiant theatrical life.
Mar 5, 1980
Adrian Thrills investigates a new and exhilarating musical blend which is taking the country by storm. 2-tone is a unique mix of music, fusing together reggae, rock, soul, ska, blue beat and punk. With its home in Coventry and its roots in reggae, it derives its name and identity from the co-existence of its black and white members. Tonight's film features The Specials and The Selecter, the founders of the 2-tone sound.
Mar 12, 1980
A profile of Liverpool playwright Alan Bleasdale With two new productions packing them in, in the North of England, ALAN BLEASDALE continues to build on the popular success of his TV plays The Black Stuff and Scully's New Year's Eve. Arena looks at the people and places - the tarmac gang, the school, the hospital and the docks around which he has woven his plays. 'I didn't know what a proscenium arch was till I was into my fourth play ... I'm writing about people and emotions, people at work, people in conflict ... I suppose I'm really writing about " laughter and tears ".'
Mar 19, 1980
As prizewinning writer/performer Victoria Wood opens in her latest play, Good Fun, Arena looks at her talent to amuse through her witty and engaging songs. And we profile teenage playwright Andrea Dunbar, whose remarkable first play, The Arbor, is now running at the Royal Court. Written when she was only 15, it draws on her own experience as a schoolgirl mother.
Mar 26, 1980
"Failure can be fun' is the motto of self-confessed failures David McGillivray and Stephen Pile (above-if RADIO TIMES had only been able to take a picture of him). McGillivray was commissioned to write a book about failure but failed to write it; Pile's Book of Heroic Failures has got into the best-sellers list. This unlucky break has resulted in Pile being thrown out of the Not Terribly Good Club of Great Britain, which he founded. Among others they meet-GEOFF O'NEILL, author of 519 unpublished songs; MIRIAM HARGRAVE , veteran of 39 driving tests; LT-CDR BILL BOAKS , who has lost his deposit at 21 by-elections, and JAN TAIGEN , who scored no points whatsoever in the 1978 Eurovision Song Contest. Reginald Bosanquet will be reading from the Book of Heroic Failures.
Apr 2, 1980
The story of an unusual collaboration between rock musician Brian Eno and artist illustrator Russell Mills. The 65 works in Russell Mills' new series of paintings provide a remarkable visual counterpoint for 38 of Brian Eno's songs. It's a project they have both pursued obsessively for over seven years. 'I see myself,' says Mills, 'as a kind of explorer. Given the music and lyrics as a starting point, I set off into alien territory in search of a visual solution to the songs.' plus Rainbow Hughes Painter Patrick Hughes pursues rainbows in St Ives, in search of visual puns, paradoxes and jokes.
Apr 9, 1980
featuring "Where Did You Get That Hat?" The outrageous hats of designer David Shilling, modelled by his mother Gertrude - doyenne of Ascot Day... "One Ascot I wore a Christmas tree hat with lots of glass balls on - the same one I wore when I was elected Oddball of the Year by the Export Clothing Federation." and "Seams Like A Dream" A bizarre musical entertainment from 'Swankey Modes'. Mel, Judy, Esmé and Willie - four girls who have created a unique fashion house in a corner shop in Camden Town launch their new collection in a most unusual way...
Apr 16, 1980
One after another mighty politicians have fallen victim to the savage caricatures of Peter Fluck and Roger Law , better known as Luck and Flaw. Among their most memorable targets are Henry Kissinger as the Statue of Liberty, Jeremy Thorpe as Saint Sebastian and Keith Joseph as Dracula. Uncannily modelled in plasticine, the victims are then photographed for magazines and newspapers all over the world. The results are bizarre, witty and unapologetically extreme.
May 21, 1980
In Their Own Image Two women photographers turn the camera on themselves ... Time Release For over a year Linda Benedict -Jones photographed herself, by using the time release on her Pentax camera. The results-studies in and out of doors, at home, in hospital, in the bath and in the bedroom - provide a witty and sometimes poignant self-portrait of this extremely talented photographer. Facing Up to Myself At the age of 40, having spent most of her working life photographing other people for a liv ing, Jo Spence began to have serious doubts about what she was doing and why. Overnight she stopped taking photographs altogether and turned instead to an exploration of her own image as seen by others - snapshots of herself from the family album. It began as a kind of therapy and ended as an exhibition called Beyond the Family Album, which Jo Spence hopes will help others to see beyond the smiling images in their own family albums.
May 28, 1980
Stanley Kubrick's long-awaited film The Shining opens in London this week and throughout the country from tomorrow. To mark the event Arena offers a unique opportunity to eavesdrop on the set of the legendary but elusive film director. Kubrick's youngest daughter Vivian, having obtained her father's reluctant consent, was on location throughout the filming armed with an Aaton camera and a miniature tape recorder. The result is some unusually candid scenes of the director at work with his stars - Jack Nicholson and Shelley Duvall.
Oct 4, 1980
Not so long ago they were playing in London pubs. This week - 16 platinum discs, 21 gold and a triumphant world tour later, Dire Straits return to the London stage. Tonight's Arena film features the superb concert they played on their last visit to The Rainbow, and band members talk about their music and the pressures and consequences of their astonishing success.
Dec 22, 1980
It was in the Chelsea Hotel, New York, that Bob Dylan wrote 'Sad-eyed lady of the lowlands', Andy Warhol filmed Chelsea Girls and Dylan Thomas drank himself to death. For 100 years the Chelsea has been a legendary haven for artists and performers from Mark Twain to Sid Vicious. Tonight Arena explores the brilliant and eccentric worlds created behind the drab brown doors of the Chelsea's apartments. Andy Warhol and William Burroughs have dinner in the room where Arthur C. Clarke wrote 2001; Virgil Thomson, doyen of American composers, reveals the truth about Alice B. Toklas and those famous cookie cakes; Quentin Crisp recalls moving in to 'the place where the great stylists have lived'; Nico, star of the Velvet Underground, sings 'Chelsea girls'; George Kleinsinger, composer of Tubby the Tuba plays a waltz for his turtle... and painter Alpheus Cole reflects on being 104 years old.
Jan 3, 1981
Arena eavesdrops on the writing of a new adventure for James Hazell , popular cockney private eye. He is the creation of Terry Venables , manager of Queen's Park Rangers, and Gordon Wil liams, author of Straw Dogs. Now the TV series has ended, who, after NICHOLAS BALL , could Possibly take over the part? Both authors have definite ideas about how their hero should be portrayed. In tonight's film John Bindon and Michael Elphick try out the role ... and indulge in a little eavesdropping of their own.
Jan 10, 1981
' Uncle Sidney' is the kindly old soul in charge of an institute for the disabled: he tucks them up at night and keeps them supplied with back numbers of the Reader's Digest. But, his crippled charges have had enough of him, and Side-show, the Graeae Theatre Company's highly successful play, tells the story of their escape. Arena marks the International Year of the Disabled with a profile of this extraordinary company of disabled actors.
Jan 17, 1981
This week two genuinely, original English artists introduce you to their work: Sam Smith , whose impeccably carved and printed wooden models evoke an Edwardian childhood - obsessed with the sea, the circus and the fairground; and Chris Orr , artist and illustrator, whose witty, crowded drawings penetrate behind the discreet net curtains of suburbia. Plus the ' commercial break ', with news of current exhibitions in the arts.
Jan 24, 1981
Arena investigates the grass-roots of rock today with John Peel and John Walters ' When the punk thing started, the whole process of making records, and music as well, was demystified ... Now everybody seems to have a home tape-recorder and a group. They make a tape and they send it to us.' (JOHN PEEL) John Peel's radio show provides a unique platform for the thousands of groups who have been making music entirely outside the big business of the record industry. Tonight's programme does not begin in a 36-track recording studio in Los Angeles but in a bedroom in Carshalton Beeches, a tasteful suburb just outside Croydon. featuring The Nightingales from Birmingham; The Liggers from Manchester; The Skids from Dunfermline and introducing, from Carshalton Beeches, Move to India
Jan 31, 1981
Arena marks a major retrospective exhibition at London's Hayward Gallery with a film about the great American realist painter EDWARD HOPPER. His subject is the face of America - haunting, unforgettable images of late-night bars, lonely hotel rooms, sunlit buildings and isolated figures. Through them we glimpse an aspect of America, austere and un-idealised, which we now recognise as familiar. But Hopper was not a recorder of externals. ' I believe that the great painters have attempted to force this unwilling medium of paint and canvas into a record of their emotions .
TBA
For the past ten years Peter Brook and his unique company of actors have travelled the world with a series of extraordinary theatrical ventures. The last stage of their journey was Australia. Here, in a disused quarry in the hills above Adelaide they perform some of their most popular plays, and a remarkable meeting takes place with tribal Aboriginal performers who have travelled 1,000 miles to see a production of The Ik. This story, of the breakdown of a traditional tribal community, provides a moving parallel to the problems faced by the Aborigines themselves.
Feb 28, 1981
Tonight, from a converted cowshed in the wilds of Scotland, Arena presents The Smallest Theatre in Great Britain. Immortalised in the Guinness Book of Records, Barrie and Marianne Hesketh have for the past 17 years been the sole designers, directors and cast for every production, including their famous two-man version of The Tempest. It seems nothing is impossible, ' although
Mar 7, 1981
There were these five guys round the table: the Lightweight Boxing Champion of California; an expert on Pre-Columbian art; an honorary lieutenant in the Mexican army; an architect admired by Frank Lloyd Wright ; and a man of whom Marilyn Monroe said, ' No woman can be around him for long without falling in love'. What had they in common? They were all JOHN HUSTON , who also happened to direct The Maltese Falcon, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, The African Queen, The Misfits and 25 others. At the age of 74 he started work last week on the$30-million screen version of Annie. Gavin Millar visited him at his Mexican hideaway to mark the publication of his autobiography An Open Book.
Mar 14, 1981
' Marching the streets of Jerusalem in 67, carrying a sub-machine-gun, I was in an absurd way acting out the role reserved* for the Arabs in my childhood nightmares. For the life of me, I don't want the Palestinian Arabs to become the Jews of the Jews.' The leading writer of his generation, Amos Oz is one of the most controversial figures in Israel today. Born in the fanatical atmosphere of Jerusalem in the last years of the British Mandate, he grew up with the Israeli state through the War of Independence and Suez. Arena filmed AMOS OZ in Jerusalem; he takes a walk through 30 years of Israel's history and talks about the fears and aspirations of a new generation of Israelis.
Mar 21, 1981
"I don't go out much these days, and when I do I find life infinitely dreary compared to my books..." William Gerhardie, who died at the age of 82 in 1977, was a legend in the world of letters. Born of English parents in Imperial Russia, he was reluctantly 'discovered' with his hugely acclaimed first novel "Futility", written at the age of 26. He was destined, however, to remain a prodigy. Despite the great success of his next novel, "The Polyglots", he lived out the rest of his life in a small London flat and busy obscurity. The remarkable book he was working on much of this time - "God's Fifth Column" was published this month. To mark the event, Michael Holroyd discusses Gerhardie's life and work and introduces a fascinating film portrait made by the BBC ten years ago.
Mar 28, 1981
' It suddenly dawned on me that I was absolutely broke, completely and utterly. I didn't have a penny in the world ... this was where fame was cruel.' (GARY GLITTER) Five years ago Gary Glitter announced his retirement - unfortunately the world took him at his word. Once he lived the life of a millionaire in a Sussex mansion, now he lives in Earls Court, hopelessly in debt. But the man who seemed to be just another in a long line of rock casualties has returned in triumph, welcomed back from the scrapheap by the punk generation for whom he's an idol and a legend.
Apr 4, 1981
Lupino Lane , the man who made ' The Lambeth Walk ' famous, was a comic who once rivalled Chaplin and Keaton. With the advent of the talkies, his small studio folded and all the negatives of over 40 films were destroyed. After years of painstaking research film historian Philip Jenkinson has managed to track down and restore 14 of the original films. Tonight's programme picks out some of the best moments from the lost legacy of Lupino Lane.
Apr 15, 1981
This week Arena patrols the skies above Metropolis in search of the legend that is SUPERMAN ... Meet Kirk Alyn , the first celluloid-Superman and Christopher Reeve the latest; Dr Fredric Wertham , Superman's greatest living adversary; Joanne, the model for Lois Lane ; Dave ' Darth Vader ' Prowse, who turned a 13-stone weakling into The Man of Steel and, for the first time on British television, Superman's creators, the legendary Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster.
Apr 18, 1981
Clair thought of himself as a screenwriter as well as a director. He put his stamp on French screen comedy in the 20s and 30s with such classics as The Italian Straw Hat , Sous les toits de Paris, Le Million and Le quatorze juillet, all of which he wrote or adapted himself. When the war came he went to Hollywood, but, like so many other Europeans used to a personal cinema, found their methods strange. He returned to France after the war, and Le silence est d'or, Les Belles de nuit and Porte des Lilas - about his beloved Paris -showed all his old command of sentimental irony. Gavin Millar talks to colleagues and stars who worked with him: Leslie Caron , Gina Lollobrigida , Jean-Pierre Cassel , directors Claude Autant-Lara and Michel Boisrond. With extracts from 40 years of his films.
May 2, 1981
As a child, trapped in a crazy Jewish household in a poor Chicago tenement, the American artist Robert Natkin had to find a way to change his life. His imagination was engulfed by movies from Fred Astaire to The Wizard of Oz, and by the vast collection of modern European paintings at the Chicago Institute. In Life magazine he read an article on Jackson Pollock and realised ' even a schmuck like me can become an artist' This film is about some of the paradoxes of his success, about how and why he paints the way he does and why the English critic Peter Fuller , author of a recent provocative book on Art and Psychoanalysis, thinks these particular abstract paintings matter,
May 9, 1981
Britain's musical reputation is second to none, and depends ultimately on an exceptional tradition of youth orchestras. The educational ideals which underlie this tradition are exemplified in Leicestershire. Here, for the past 30 years, music and art have been central to school curricula; consequently, children of all backgrounds have had the opportunity to pursue a musical career. The present cuts threaten this unique tradition.
May 16, 1981
Derek Jacobi, Helen Mirren, Martin Jarvis, playwrights Peter Terson and Barrie Keefe - all products of the National Youth theatre, a unique organisation, which every summer brings 600 Young amateurs to London to work on new productions and present them to West End audiences. Over the years it has introduced actors like David Hemmings and Simon Ward, encouraged young playwrights and won praise around the world. In two days' time, the NYT opens its 25th anniversary season. But last December it seemed that this, the biggest season ever, might be the last - the Arts Council canceled the Youth Theatre's grant. Tonight's programme examines the issues behind the cut, charts the company's struggle to survive and outlines its history with the help of Sir Ralph Richardson, Kate Adie, Martin Jarvis, Peter Terson and Helen Mirren.
Aug 16, 1981
For 25 years the Polish film director ADRZEJ WAJDA has been making some of the most exciting and boldly critical films in Eastern Europe. He was filmed in Warsaw and Cracow shortly after he had returned from the Cannes Film Festival, where he won the Palm d'Or. How has he managed, in a long career in film and theatre, not to be silenced by censorship? How does he view his films, and his obsession with Polish history, in the urgent mood of today? From the post-war disillusion and despair of Ashes and Diamonds in 1958 to Man of Iron, which centres on the days of hope in the Cdansk shipyards last year, Wajda looks back on his career as a film-maker, and questions some of- the attitudes of his times.
Sep 6, 1981
From Brooklyn to Beverly Hills - the life and times of a great comic film director. Tonight on BBC2 Mel Brooks , creator of Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein , and The Producers, reveals practically everything. Filmed on location in Hollywood with Gene Wilder , Dom deluise , Sid Caesar and Mr Brooks 's lawyer.
Oct 2, 1981
She is two-and-a-half feet tall and nearly 500 years old. She hangs in The Louvre behind plate-glass - an unsigned, undated portrait of a smiling woman, the most idolised and abused woman in the history of art. She can be found in The Louvre, on the pavement in Buckingham Palace Road, on Doctor Who and on biscuit tins ... There's only one Mona Lisa but she's everywhere. Tonight Arena looks behind the Gioconda smile...
Nov 3, 1981
When JOINT STOCK began their latest project four months ago, they had a writer but no script, actors but no roles. Borderline, by award-winning young play-wright Hanif Kureishi, finally emerged out of the remarkable working process unique to the Joint Stock company. Kureishi wanted to write a play about the problems faced by the Asian community in Britain, and his final script was the result of research, workshops and improvisation involving the whole company-writer, director and actors. They began the project in Southall just before the riots earlier this year, meeting the local people and finding out about their lives first hand. Arena was with them throughout that period, from original idea to the first programme.
Nov 10, 1981
Only a short while ago Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger were forgotten names in cinema history. Now, some of the greatest film-makers in the world are their ardent fans. Arena tells the story of two men who confronted the complacency and parochialism of the British cinema with a series of brilliant, subversive and often mystifying films. The Red Shoes, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, Black Narcissus , A Matter of Life and Death-film classics which only now have gained the recognition they deserve. Twenty-five years after their last film together, Powell and Pressburger have received the accolade of the fellowship of the British film academy. They tell their story to Gavin Millar with contributions from Francis Ford Coppola in Los Angeles, and Martin Scorsese on location in New York.
Nov 17, 1981
This week, a total contrast in visual style-the art of RADIO TIMES and the jaundiced eye of Private Eye. The Art of Radio Times: Since 1923, the 'official organ' of the BBC has been a leader in design and illustration. Among its contributors: Nash, Whistler and Ardizzone. Arena raids the archives and visits the legendary Eric Fraser , a regular contributor for 55 years. The Eye of the ' Eye ': Twenty years ago Lord Gnome's private organ pioneered its own maverick visual style with the help of a few unknowns: Gerald Scarfe , Ralph Steadman , Willie Rushton , Bill Tidy et al. Watch the current edition take shape! See ' Great Bores of Today '; ' The Last Chip Shop in England '; ' True Stories ' and much more.
Nov 24, 1981
Arena profiles one of the most dazzling literary talents of recent years - Saiman Rushdie , a storyteller extraordinary and winner of this year's Booker prize. Midnight's Children, his fantastic epic novel about life in 20th-century India, has established him as the new star of English fiction. Tonight, from the quiet of Kentish Town, Salman Rushdie looks at the turbulent history of India through the eyes of his hero, Saleem Sinai. Born in Bombay on the eve of Independence, his hero's vantage point is the corner of a pickle factory in Bombay. 'All the 600-million eggs which gave birth to the population of India could fit inside a single, standard-size pickle jar ... 600-million spermatozoa could be lifted in a single spoon.'
Dec 8, 1981
Reggae has its roots in Jamaica, and has found a home in Britain. But there are over 60 countries in the Caribbean, each with its own distinctive culture. Arena invited Linton Kwesi Johnson , Britain's foremost reggae poet, to investigate the remarkable richness and variety of Caribbean art on its home ground-the occasion was the Carifesta, a huge festival held this year in Barbados. Among the highlights were the Rene gades , one of Trinidad's most brilliant steel bands; the best of soul-calypso with The Mighty Arrow from Montserrat; ' Riddim ' poetry by young Jamaican Michael Smith; big-band Irakere with the exotic Latin jazz of Cuba and Rebirth, an extraordinary dramatic saga which symbolically unites the many different ethnic groups of Surinam through their myths and legends.
Dec 15, 1981
A ski run in Italy, a supermarket manager in Luton, a sandwich bar in London EC2, Arena opens the bonnet of the Ford Cortina, Britain's most popular, most stolen, and most misunderstood car. 'Dagenham dustbin'? 'Poor man's Rolls-Royce'? In the year that may well see the end of a legend, some of the motoring public, including Sir John Betjeman, Tom Robinson, Alexei Sayle, Sir Terence Beckett and Magnus Magnusson take apart the Ford Cortina: Life and Works 1962-1982.
Jan 19, 1982
John Updike 's new book, Rabbit is Rich, is the third in the Rabbit series from the author of Rabbit, Run, Couples and The Coup. At 50, Updike is at the height of h s powers and reputation. His novels amount to a chronicle of Middle America in the liberated and disillusioned post-Kennedy years. 'Many of my books and stories involve a bourgeois home being disrupted by sex ... Maybe 1 should pay more attention to the fact that these homes were basically established by sex as well.' Art, sex and religion; he has described these as the Three Great Secret Things, and in this film, the first full-length study of Updike, he looks at his own life and art in the light of his strictly religious Pennsylvania past, and wonders about the drives that make Rabbit run.
Jan 26, 1982
Osip Mandelstam, one of the greatest poets of the 20th century, died in a prison camp somewhere in Siberia in the 1930s: no one knows precisely how or when. He was imprisoned not for his political activity but for writing a poem. All we know of the life of this remarkable man comes from two classic books by his widow, Nadezhda Mandelstam : Hope Against Hope and Hope Abandoned. In tonight's Arena, poet and novelist D. M. Thomas , author of The White Hotel, traces the the career of this great lyric poet, with the help of Joseph Brodsky , exiled Russian poet, and Nadezhda Mandelstam. filmed secretly in her Moscow flat in 1973 and seen here for the first time on British tv.
Feb 2, 1982
In a month of continuing controversy about the aims and methods of the ' documentary', Arena presents a classic film by one of the pioneers of the movement-Humphrey Jennings 's Listen to Britain. Made in 1941, it will be seen here, complete, for the first time on British television. Also Gavin Millar looks at the craft of recent documentary makers, focusing on the techniques of the BBC's current Police series. With Roger Graef , Charles Stewart and the team who made it.
Feb 9, 1982
' I love its homeliness. It conjures up the best in traditional British pleasure, like the great British breakfast. It's an honour to be asked ' (PAUL MCCARTNEY ) For the past 40 years everyone who is anyone has been cast adrift and washed up on a desert island. The great and the famous, from Princess Margaret to Henry Cooper , from Arthur Rubinstein to Noel Coward , have faced up to the agonising task of choosing the eight records, one book and one luxury with which to live alone. This week Arena celebrates Roy Plomley 's unique fantasy island with the help of the following castaways: Paul McCartney , Frankie Howerd Russell Harty , Trevor Brooking, The Lord Mayor of London Professor J. K. Galbraith and Arthur Askey who first appeared on the programme in 1942.
Feb 23, 1982
Presents two classic films from the early days of documentary. Featured in last month's True to Life? edition, they're shown complete for the first time on British television. Listen to Britain made in 1941 by HUMPHREY JENNINGS, is a poetic evocation of the spirit with which - and for which - Britain was fighting the war. Housing Problems made in 1935 by Arthur ELTON and EDGAR ANSTEY , simply ' reported ' from the heart of London's East End slums, giving ordinary people a voice for the first time in cinema history. The 'father' of documentary, John Grierson hoped it would give people ' a living sense of what is going on'. In quite different ways, both these films did exactly that. Introduced by Gavin Millar
Mar 9, 1982
Arena presents an exclusive film profile in two parts of one of the great legends of the cinema. With unprecedented frankness and detail. Orson Welles talks about his long and turbulent career - from the heady days of the Mercury Theatre and Citizen Kane, through a spiral of unfulfilled ambitions and unfinished films. His admirers see an individual still vigorously idiosyncratic, batt-ling constantly against a movie establishment. His critics see him as a burnt-out star, never fulfilling the promise of his early career, and wasting himself on cameo roles in bad films on sherry commercials, and projects that may never see the light of day. He talked to us in Las Vegas about his early life; the making of his films; his equally brilliant career in theatre, radio and magic and his incompatibility with an industry he once took by storm. with Jeanne Moreau, Anthony Perkins , John Huston, Charlton Heston , Peter Bogdanovich, Hilton Edwards and Robert Wise.
May 18, 1982
'I should never have stayed in movies. But it's a mistake I can't regret because it's like saying I shouldn't have stayed married to that woman and I did because I loved her. I'm in love with making movies.' Part 2: in which Orson Welles leaves Hollywood for ever and begins his journey through Europe, searching for money for his movies, making The Trial, F for Fake, his master-piece Chimes at Midnight, and working on some of the most talked-about unfinished films in movie history.
May 21, 1982
Mike Leigh is a dramatist in a tradition of his own, a fiercely original talent whose work and working methods have always provoked curiosity and contention as well as praise. He is a social caricaturist in the graphic manner of Rowlandson and Gilray. the creator of a sequence of television films and stage plays which are funny and extreme, often liable to shock and offend as well as entertain. Tonight MIKE LEIGH talks about his work and demonstrates the unique processes of character-building and improvisation which have led to such successes as Abigail's Party, Grown-Ups and Nuts in May. with Sam Kelly. Alison Steadman , David Threlfall and Eric Allan , Marion Bailey Brenda Blethyn , Philip Davis Sheila Kelley and Antony Sher.
Sep 4, 1982
In April 1967 at the peak of his career as a dramatist, Joe Orton was murdered by his lover, Kenneth Halliwell... Arena presents a documentary portrait of the author of Loot and Entertaining Mr Sloane, whose daring and sense of style added a new word - Ortonesque - to the English critical vocabulary. Although he was widely attacked for presenting the world as a bizarre and savage place, this film presents the case that Orton's life was, on occasion, quite as curious and extravagant as his work. With contributions among others from Orton's sister Leonte; his close friend Kenneth Williams; his biographer John Lahr; and the librarian whose complaints against Orton and Halliwell finally landed them in prison.
Nov 9, 1982
One of the most spectacular and unlikely theatre events of last year took place a long way from the West End of London in the small Dorset town of Bridport. The Poor Man's Friend, written by playwright Howard Barker and performed by hundreds of towns-people, was the inspiration of Ann ellicoe, best known as the author of The Knack. During the past five years her ambition to create true community theatre has produced amazing results. HOWARD BARKER 'S play looks at the history of the town where in the 19th century the best hanging-rope was made and focuses on the dubious figure of Dr Roberts, inventor of the famous patent medicine known as ' The Poor Man's Friend'. Tonight Arena follows the making of the production, chronicling the scenes on and off the stage as the whole of Bridport becomes absorbed in telling a story from their past.
Nov 16, 1982
It is commonly thought that poets are university-trained intellectuals who occasionally produce slim volumes about their personal feelings. This is not so with Michael Smith. Smith, an electrifying performer, is an exponent of 'dub' poetry - which draws on talk culture, reggae music and the rich rhythms of Caribbean native speech. At school in Jamaica Smith was taught the standard works of English Literature but poems about 'The Daffodils' and 'Westminster Bridge' had little relevance to his upbringing in the ghettos of Kingston. Tonight's Arena follows Smith on his recent British tour and features the great Marxist historian C.L.R. James, Lynton Kwesi Johnson, the pioneer of dub poetry, and film of the late Bob Marley.
Nov 23, 1982
Classics like ' Summertime blues , 'C'mon everybody' and Three steps to heaven' made Eddie Cochran one of the all-time greats of rock 'n' roll. But for his tragic death, many think he could have become as successful as Elvis. In 1960, in the middle of a triumphant tour of Britain, the car carrying Cochran, his fiancee and Gene Vincent crashed on the A4. He died hours later in a hospital in Bath - he was 22. Tonight Arena examines the legend of Cochran and the enduring appeal of his music. Larry Parnes , the most successful promoter and manager of his time, describes the heady days of the 1960 tour. Adam Faith , Marty Wilde and Joe Brown recall the nursery slopes of rock 'n' roll and the enormous impact of Cochran on the British rock scene. Cochran's mother and his fiancee Sharon Sheeley talk publicly for the first time.
Nov 30, 1982
For nearly 50 years everybody who was anybody in the British theatre passed before the lens of Angus McBean - Gielgud, Olivier, Thorndike, Coward ... He was known as the photographer who resolutely flattered his sitters. Tonight, after a ten-year absence. McBean demonstrates his skill with his old friend Sir Ralph Richardson. He discusses for the first time his astonishing surreal pictures of the 30s and 40s.
Dec 8, 1982
by Samuel Beckett Starring Billie Whitelaw With Leonard Fenton Arena presents the first programme in a Samuel Beckett Season providing a unique opportunity to see famous interpretations of his work. The playwright himself directed this production of his classic play Happy Days, and Billie Whitelaw, Beckett's favourite actress, plays Winnie - one of the strangest parts in modern theatre. Winnie, buried to her waist in a sandy mound, struggles to get through her day, searching for distractions that will stave off the panic of having nothing to say, nothing to do, no reason to continue living. Willie, her husband, offers little help. Out of this bizarre and improbable setting Beckett makes a play with many comic and touching moments. Introduced by Martin Esslin.
Dec 11, 1982
Continues the Samuel Beckett season. Starring Jack MacGowran A rare opportunity to see an early television premiere. Recorded in 1966, tonight's presentation has only one visible actor, the late Jack MacGowran who, with Patrick Magee, was one of the principal interpreters of Samuel Beckett's work. Unseen is an actress, Sian Phillips. She is the voice of a woman whom Joe once loved. He sits remembering, and his memories recall a life whose hypocrisy and faithlessness have brought tragedy - as much for Joe as for the woman. Introduced by Martin Esslin. An Arena Presentation.
Dec 13, 1982
Arena continues the Samuel Beckett Season with a unique record of his new play Rockaby which has just opened at the National Theatre. Premiered in America, it was filmed in rehearsal and performance by the celebrated film maker D.A. Pennebaker. The programme follows Billie Whitelaw's preparations for her latest Beckett role: 'People think because I do this I'm well read and knowledgeable and know what it means. In fact, I have no education at all. Beckett blows the notes... they just come out of me....' Attend the opening night in Buffalo; New York, and see the strange and haunting play, and the old woman rocking herself into death...
Dec 14, 1982
Continues the Samuel Beckett Season. In one of the most extraordinary pieces of modern drama Billie Whitelaw, Beckett's foremost interpreter, performs this astonishing tour de force. Not I - the mouth suspended in space, caused a sensation when it was first performed at the Royal Court in 1973. Beckett himself is a great admirer of this television version. Introduced by Martin Esslin. An Arena presentation.
Dec 15, 1982
Continues the Samuel Beckett Season with a premiere. A play without words. Quad has a musical structure. It is a kind of canon or catch-a mysterious square-dance. Four hooded figures move along the sides of the square. Each has his own particular itinerary. A pattern emerges and collisions are just avoided. From these permutations, Beckett, as writer and director creates an image of life that is both highly charged and strangely funny. Introduced by Martin Esslin.
Dec 16, 1982
Concludes the Samuel Beckett Season. One of the best-known Beckett monologues starring its creator, the late Patrick Magee. Krapp, an old man, is alone with his memories and the reels of tape he has recorded during his life. As he reviews the years listening to his diary, he finally makes a conclusion about the most important thing that ever happened to him. Introduced by MARTIN ESSLIN.
Dec 17, 1982
Last year a £13-million painting travelled in top secret from America to Spain. Next day it was headline news that Picasso's masterpiece ' Guernica ' had come home at last, after 40 years in exile. This Arena special tells the story of an extraordinary work of art, and talks to survivors of the terrible event that inspired it.
Dec 28, 1982
Today, in post-revolutionary Cuba, under the benign patronage of Fidel Castro, classical ballet thrives. This unlikely success story is mainly due to the legendary figure of Alicia Alonso. After almost 20 years as an internationally acclaimed star of the American ballet, she returned to support the Revolution in 1959, determined to create from scratch a national ballet company. Now aged over 60, her long career frequently threatened by failing eyesight, Alicia Alonso is still Cuba's prima ballerina, still performing Giselle and still the formidable leader of a huge company of dancers, all of them now trained and recruited within Cuba.
Jan 18, 1983
Tonight Arena takes you on a tour of contemporary British heads, from the exotic to the mundane, from hot wax to Brylcreem. Blue rinse, quiff, mohican, short back and sides, dreadlocks or just shaved off altogether. By your choice of hairstyle you tell the world about yourself. You can blend in with the crowd or stand out from it. For some it is a fundamental part of their religious beliefs, for others pure indulgence. What are the prospects for a bank clerk with a hennaed 'trojan '? How does a white man become a Rasta? Does the back of your neck still prickle at the thought of the barber's clippers? This Arena investigation will make your hair stand on end.
Feb 1, 1983
Pierre Boulez, leading composer of the post-war generation, later a powerful and innovative conductor, is now the head of an extraordinary experimental studio in Paris. This huge underground music laboratory was built especially for Boulez beneath the Pompidou Centre. Here for the past-seven years, accompanied by computers and music assistants, he has been developing his.most ambitious work to date - "Répons". It had a huge success at last year's Proms. In tonight's film he shares his ideas and methods of working, introducing. extracts from "Répons" and describes his enthusiasm for opening a window on a new world of sound. With the Ensemble Intercontemporain conducted by Pierre Boulez.
Feb 8, 1983
George Melly presents films of the greatest names of swing jazz - but with a difference. Some were made for visual juke boxes which flourished in the early 40s, others are promotional shorts from the major Hollywood companies. The forerunners of today's rock promos, these gems are by turns witty, moving, surreal and always irresistibly entertaining. The line-up includes Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong Billy Holliday , Fats Waller Bessie Smith and the three kings of boogie-woogie, Meade Lux Lewis , Albert Ammons and Pete Johnson.
Feb 15, 1983
Widely regarded as one of the greatest literary figures of the century, William Burroughs has perfected a unique and terrifying vision of the world. He is, most notably, a savage satirist and a revolutionary stylist and his ideas and experiments with language have had effects far beyond the world of literature. Born into a wealthy family in St Louis, Missouri, he abandoned his background for another kind of life - the central theme of his work comes from his experiences as a heroin addict and a homosexual outlaw. Filmed over five years, tonight's programme is an intimate portrait of this elegant, witty and often shocking man. The film features him reading from his own work, unique footage of his family and his son, William Burroughs Jr , his Beat Generation collaborators Allen Ginsberg and Brion Gysin , younger admirers Terry Southern, Frank Zappa , Laurie Anderson and the great painter Francis Bacon.
Feb 22, 1983
Tonight Arena presents one of the most ambitious dance projects ever seen on television. The Catherine Wheel combines the talents of Twyla Tharp , one of America's most imaginative choreographers, and David Byrne , leader of the rock band TALKING HEADS, who composed and performed this original music score. The starting point of the dance is the image of a Catherine wheel and the unattainable ideal of physical and moral perfection which St Catherine herself aspired to. Energy, benign and malevolent, is the central theme of the work, which builds to a spectacular climax of virtuoso dancing in the final Golden Section. When premiered on Broadway the New Yorker referred to The Catherine Wheel as a 'major event in our theatre' with dancing of ' astonishing beauty and power'.
Mar 1, 1983
Writing about his experiences as a war prisoner in Dresden in the novel Slaughterhouse-5, Kurt Vonnegut achieved a unique blend of dead-pan humour and shrewd observation of human folly. For Vonnegut, disaster is an everyday experience. Today the world freezes over, tomorrow a visitor from outer space is brained to death with a golf club... Tonight Arena looks at Vonnegut's career with the help of his most famous creation, his alter ego - the SF writer Kilgore Trout.
Mar 8, 1983
Tonight Arena takes an extraordinary journey through the video age. Video pirates, video trials, video weddings, video graves.... Fifty years ago it was just the dream of a science fiction future - now It's All True. With Sir Michael Hordern, Dandy Nichols, Stephen Berkoff, Mel Brooks, Koo Stark, Ray Davies, Mari Wilson, Grace Jones and Orson Welles
May 9, 1983
The great Luis Bunuel died last month. Born in 1900, he was undisputably one of the outstanding creative figures of the 20th century. Tonight Gavin Millar introduces a ten-week season of his films, beginning tonight at 9.25, which will culminate in the autumn with an exclusive Arena profile about his life.
Aug 19, 1983
Dear boy, you are out of your mind, this woman will annihilate you, she will grind you to a fine powder and blow you away ... Director Joseph Mankiewicz recalls the warning he was given by a colleague when he offered Bette Davis the lead role in "All About Eve". Bette Davis is undoubtedly one of the most original stars Hollywood has ever produced, and in this exclusive interview, filmed on her 70th birthday, she is as formidable as ever.
Nov 2, 1983
Anthony Powell's 12-volume epic, A Dance to the Music of Time, is widely regarded as the most formidable single work of British fiction since the war. It is also largely entertaining: its cast of 400 characters ranges from upper-class drawing-rooms to Bohemian London, and a violent death in a hippie commune. They have, in their turn, gathered a devoted set of fans among English-speaking readers. Tonight's portrait of Powell includes tributes from such admirers as Clive James, Kingsley Amis, Alison Lurie, Robert Conquest and Hilary Spurling. Most of all, Powell himself talks about his work, which is illustrated by James Fox, as the narrator, and with drawings by Marc.
Nov 9, 1983
Starring Claire Bloom, Sam Wanamaker from the novel by Philip Roth with Mark Linn Baker, Paulette Smit 'You're not so nice and polite in your fiction. You're a different person.' Philip Roth's masterly novel about writers and writing, conflicts of family, race and art, has been specially dramatised for Arena. Nathan Zuckerman learns some unexpected lessons about himself and his aspirations to become a great writer, when he spends a night in the troubled household of his hero, the distinguished E.I. Lonoff. And who is the young woman with the shadowed eyes - and the mysterious past?
Nov 12, 1983
Following the success of Jazz Juke-Box I, George Melly presents another selection of jazz shorts and ' soundies ' - the delightful films made for visual juke-boxes in the early 40s. He is joined by great jazzman Slim Gaillard, famous for such hits as ' Flat foot floogie ' and ' Dunkin' bagel'. Gaillard recalls swing's heyday and its legends -Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Fats Waller, Louis Armstrong and Nat King Cole.
Nov 23, 1983
Roman Vishniac is a Russian Jew born in St Petersburg in 1897. His striking images of life in the Jewish ghettos - taken with a concealed camera just before the last war - are extraordinary documents of a lost epoch and a lost people. ' I returned again and again because I wanted to save their faces from the devastation of Hitler's Germany.' and Arena examines contemporary coverage of the destruction of Lebanon from two points of view: the photo journalist who arrives on assignment for an international agency; and the Lebanese citizen who finds himself compelled to document what is happening to his country.
Nov 30, 1983
Arena shows three film classics from the early years of British documentary, which began 50 years ago.
Dec 7, 1983
The GPO Film Unit-50 years old this year-went where no Hollywood film studio would dare to go in 1933. Down the mines, across the Alps, through the storms of the North Sea ... they really were a dedicated and intrepid group ot film makers. Held together by a dour and dynamic Scot, John Gnerson— the man who first coined the word documentary-they made some of the greatest factual films of the 1930s which still provide a fascinating insight into the everyday life of the time. Tonight Arena tells the story of this remarkable period of British cinema.
Dec 14, 1983
An Arena special Last September at the Royal Albert Hall Don and Phil Everly performed together for the first time in ten years. The concert was the popular music event of the year. With a fine band, including lead guitarist Albert Lee and Pete Wingfield on keyboards, the Everlys faithfully re-created the sound of their huge repertoire of hits. 'Cathy's clown', All I have to do is dream', 'When will I be loved', 'Wake up, little Susie' and the rest stirred the memories and emotions of a rapturous audience. The Everlys' harmonies are among the most special sounds in rock 'n' roll-and they sound as good as ever.
Dec 23, 1983
George Orwell is one of the greatest writers England has produced. Tonight and for the next four nights Arena presents a unique full-scale portrait of this remarkable man, filmed in the places where he lived and worked and told in his own words and the words of those who knew him. The first programme traces Orwell upbringing in a sedate middle-class home near Henley, his horrific experiences at preparatory school, his years at Eton and as a military policeman in Burma - and closes with his sudden and dramatic emergence as a writer with Down and Out in London and Paris, a book drawn from his experiences among vagrants, tramps and outcasts. Among those appearing are Jacintha Buddicon, Sir John Grotrion, Malcolm Muggeridge, Cyril Connolly and Professor Bernard Crick.
Dec 29, 1983
Tonight's episode of the five-part Arena biography tells the story of Orwell's marriage to Eileen O'Shaughnessy , his growing political awareness and retraces what was to be the most important journey of his life-the trip he made to Wigan and the industrial north in 1936, in an attempt to understand the embittered and divided working class of the 30s. Among those appearing are Sir Richard Rees , Kay Ekkeval, Geoffrey Gorer and the people of Wigan and Barnsley.
Dec 30, 1983
Orwell, like many of his generation, enlisted to fight on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War. Filmed in Barcelona and on the Huesca front, where he fought, tonight's film tells the story of Orwell's war. It begins as a heroic crusade for a beleaguered socialist state, and ends with disillusion and betrayal, with Orwell fleeing across the Spanish frontier, a wounded and wanted man. Among those appearing are Stafford Cottman, Victor Alba, Enrique Ardroer, Ramon Jurado and Professor Bernard Crick.
Jan 2, 1984
For a brief period after the Spanish Civil War, Orwell was a revolutionary socialist, violently opposed to the coming war with Germany. Tonight's film shows his sudden emergence as a patriot in 1940, his ill-starred career as a producer at the BBC, and later as a columnist on Tribune. The film closes with the end of the war and the writing of Orwell's masterpiece Animal Farm. with Douglas Cleverdon, Lettice Cooper, Tosco Fyvel, Anthony Powell and Malcolm Muggeridge.
Jan 3, 1984
The last in this series of Arena films about the life and work of George Orwell begins with the tragic death of his wife Eileen in March 1945. Overcome with grief at his bereavement and despair at the future of Britain under the post-war Labour government, Orwell retreated to the remote Hebridean island of Jura. It was here, crippled with tuberculosis and isolated from the rest of the world, that Orwell cared for his adopted infant son, Richard, and wrote his last novel Nineteen Eighty-four-a nightmare vision of a totalitarian future in which Big Brother controls not only the lives but also the thoughts of his citizens, and love and individual freedom is no more than a distant memory. Among those appearing are Avril Dunn, Bill Dunn, Susan Watson, Sonia Orwell and Richard Blair.
Jan 4, 1984
Tonight's Arena Special tells the extraordinary story of two of the legendary figures of American 'gospel' -the music whose emotional impact and burning conviction lie at the heart of much of today's popular music, Tomas A Dorsey and Willie Mae Ford Smith.
Feb 4, 1984
ANTHONY CARO: 'I wanted to play games with our sense of space ... you experience this room with the eyes and the body too.' HOWARD HODGKIN: 'I tried to evoke a sense of romantic luxury. Sadly in a public place nothing very exciting is meant to go on.' RICHARD HAMILTON : 'I took the idea of a room in an institution as a way of looking at the times we live in.' MARC CHAIMOWICZ: 'There are hints of a liaison between two people, like a frozen frame from a film.' Four leading contemporary artists take on an unusual and imaginative commission, to design and build a room of their own.
Feb 21, 1984
Dario Fo is unique in world theatre. Playwright, actor, clown, teacher and philosopher, he is an international celebrity with two West-End smash hits to his credit - Can Pay? Won't Pay! and Accidental Death of an Anarchist. He is also a passionate collector of theatre history and a great hero of the Italian Left. Arena filmed Dario Fo against the background of medieval Italy, working with students in Umbria, at home in Milan and against the colourful backdrop of the Venice Carnival, where he performed his triumphant one-man comic show, Mistero Buffo.
Feb 28, 1984
Tonight Arena takes a journey down one of the best known streets in the world. Sunset Boulevard stretches 27 miles from Los Angeles' Chinatown all the way to the ocean, a ride made famous by Philip Marlowe in the Chandler books. Film star mansions give way to tatty motels; exclusive offices stand alongside nightclubs with aspiring comics and amateur nude contests. Then the famous 'strip' and Hollywood's legendary coffee shop, Schwabs, where, they say, a girl in a tight sweater turned into Lana Turner.
Mar 3, 1984
On 29 June 1982 a man called John Blake appeared mysteriously bidding in the major auction houses of London and New York. He was in reality the Sunday Times journalist, Peter Watson. The Caravaggio Conspiracy is a true story of a remarkable collaboration between dealers, auction houses and the law to transform Peter Watson , an ignorant outsider, into an international art dealer. Tonight Arena, with the help of the participants, traces the story of how Watson, with a fake limp straight from the pages of a thriller, and a potted knowledge from books of art history, conned his way into a world of mafiosi and art dealers and recovered two masterpieces of stolen Renaissance art.
Mar 6, 1984
David Inshaw belongs to a great tradition of English Romantic Painting - the tradition of Stanley Spencer, Samuel Palmer and the Pre-Raphelites. His most famous painting 'The Badminton Game' now hangs in the Tate Gallery. For years he was a member of the Brotherhood of Ruralists, a group of painters, among them Peter Blake, preoccupied with English pastoral themes. But Inshaw's pictures tell their own story - of people, places and objects meticulously and magically recalled. Abandoning conventional interviews and commentary, tonight's film offers a journey into David Inshaw's haunting, imaginative world.
Mar 13, 1984
Tonight, in the anniversary year of Edward Elgar 's death, Arena plays host to KEN RUSSELL 'S classic music documentary. Made in 1962 for the 100th edition of the arts magazine Monitor, it marked the arrival of the dramatised arts documentary and proved to be one of the most popular television films ever made. An unashamedly romantic evocation of the composer's life and inspiration in the Malvern Hills, the film nevertheless foreshadowed Russell's later, more contentious, work with his darkly ironic counterpoint of 'Land of hope and glory' with the battle scenes and graveyards of the First World War. Narrated by Huw Wheldon.
Mar 20, 1984
For the first time on British television, Arena presents a concert by this great legend of rock n roll. Jerry Lee Lewis doesn't sound like anybody else - the voice, the piano and the on-stage antics make an unforgettable combination. He plays and sings today exactly as he did when he made his first records, and as a special bonus the concert is preceded by rare footage of him performing 'Whole lotta shakin" in 1957. Since then he has kept his reputation for wildness, eccentricity and the ability to hold an audience spellbound. Last May Arena's cameras captured him in top form.
Mar 27, 1984
Breyten Breytenbach writes about being an Afrikaner. His poetry was taught in schools and his paintings greatly admired. But in 1975 Breytenbach, living in self-imposed exile in Paris with his Vietnamese wife Yolande - their marriage was regarded as 'fornication' under South African law - decided to return to his native country under a false passport, with the intention of recruiting workers against the Government and its policy of apartheid. Breytenbach was betrayed, arrested and sentenced to nine years. This year, two versions of his horrific experience of South African jails are to be published - Mouroir, a surreal account of his life in prison and True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist. Tonight Arena presents the story of this extraordinary man including some of the poetry and paintings completed in prison and smuggled out of South Africa.
Apr 3, 1984
Tonight Arena profiles the French film director Louis Malle. Malle is a director who has never let himself be tied down to one style of film making. The Lovers, with Jeanne Moreau , shocked the conservative public in 1958 and his Indian documentaries were candid enough to concern the Indian government. Even in the permissive 70s, Malle found ways to provoke, depicting child prostitution in Pretty Baby with Brooke Shields , and corruption in Lacombe Lucien , about a collaborator in wartime France.
May 6, 1984
From the vantage point of his Paris flat, the Czech writer Milan Kundera still obsessively contemplates Prague, the city he was forced to leave nine years ago when, silenced by the pro-Soviet government, his continued life there finally became impossible. Prague has continued to be the setting for all of Kundera's writing. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting brought him to a wide international readership and was compared favourably with Gogol and Kafka. The New York Times wrote: 'It is impossible in this space to do justice to a masterwork. Kundera makes music out of history.' His new book The Unbearable Lightness of Being has been eagerly awaited and on the occasion of its publication Arena talks to Kundera in Paris and seeks reactions to his work from George Theiner , Karol Kyncl , Ian McEwan and Edward Goldstucker.
May 19, 1984
American-born writer and director Joseph Losey died last month in London. He made his home in England in 1952 when he was hounded out of America after the Communist witch-hunt. Tonight Dirk Bogarde, star of The Servant, who first worked with him 30 years ago, remembers Losey and his distinguished career (this is followed by a broadcast of The Servant).
Jul 7, 1984
Tonight Arena presents a musical entertainment set in the streets of New York City, an epic rap which will tap the roots of Hip Hop.... the true story of the most influential popular music culture since punk. Gary 'The Crown' Byrd raps us through the elements of Hip Hop - breakdancing, body-popping, graffiti art, rapping and scratching-and introduces us to its heroes. We meet Cool Hero, its legendary first DJ; the head-spinning breakdancing Dynamic Rockers; romeo rappers the Cold Crush Brothers and white funksters Malcolm McLaren and Mel Brooks. And we take the 'A' Train to Planet Rock-the devastated homeland of Hip Hop , better known as New York's South Bronx-to meet the 'Godfather' himself, Afrika Bambaataa whose wild youth as a member of the notorious Black Spades gang, led him to forsake violence for music and dance and found a new and powerful New York tribe called the Zulu Nation.
Jul 12, 1984
Taught to sing from their earliest years, the brothers were raised in a unique cross-current of musical influences, from Appalachian harmony duos to black country blues singers. Their father Ike was an influential guitar picker and hosted the Everly Family Radio Show in the Mid West in the 40s and 50s. It was here that Don and Phil made their public debut. Arena retraces the Everlys' journey, from guitar picking in Kentucky with Ike's friend Mose Regur to Tennessee where their early hits were penned by Felice and Boudleaux Bryant. Meet their legendary producer Chet Atkins, architect of the 'Nashville Sound', and follow their career from their heyday in the 50s to the present day.
Nov 2, 1984
Tonight Arena presents the first film portrait of the greatest of all the jazz singers. Billie Holiday's tragic story, from her traumatic childhood in Baltimore to her premature death in a New York hospital at the age of 44, is told in the words of her closest friends and colleagues - but mostly through the songs themselves. Arena has assembled an unprecedented number of her filmed performances.
Nov 9, 1984
The legendary Eubie Blake 's career as a ragtime pianist and composer began in 1883. Sadly last year, five days after his 100th birthday he died. This short tribute includes one of the earliest talkies, Eubie's classic 'I'm just wild about Harry' and a visit to singer Alberta Hunter.
Nov 10, 1984
To mark his 75th birthday, Arena presents this exclusive film portrait of the great British painter, Francis Bacon. Despite his world-wide fame, Bacon remains one of the most contentious painters working today, and he still paints the human figure with the same conviction and intensity that startled the art world at his first exhibition nearly 40 years ago. Tonight, amid the spectacular disorder of his Chelsea studio, Bacon talks on film with great candour, to his friend of many years, the distinguished writer and critic David Sylvester.
Nov 16, 1984
This week: a portrait of one of the most individual architectural talents America has produced. Bruce Goff discovered his vocation as a child in Tulsa, Oklahoma, drawing cathedrals and palaces on scraps of paper, and the innocence of those early visionary sketches is evident in all his later work-from the cathedral in Tulsa he designed at the age of 22 to his extraordinary domestic monuments built for the American householder. A friend and disciple of Frank Lloyd Wright, Goff continued to pioneer well into his 70s. Arena went with him to his native midwest to see some of his astonishingly varied and inventive commissions.
Nov 23, 1984
Fela Anikulapo-Kuti is the most popular and controversial musician ever to come out of Africa. Born in Nigeria 47 years ago, he has dominated the African musical scene since the early 70s with his unique fusion of traditional rhythm and jazz melodies known as Afro-Beat. Fela's music speaks of the conflict between the European colonial heritage and the traditional African past and cries out forcefully against corruption, exploitation and cultural betrayal. This programme interweaves Fela's music with the story of his struggle against the Nigerian authorities to retain his position as the musical conscience of independent Africa.
Nov 30, 1984
Arena presents the British premiere of Ingmar Bergman 's new film After the Rehearsal. Written and directed by Bergman last year soon after completing Fanny and Alexander, it continues the autobiographical theme. As theatre director Henrik Vogler sits alone on an empty stage after rehearsal Anna, a young actress, suddenly returns to the theatre to talk about her part.... The director is both cynical and affectionate; he is sick and tired of the theatre but still in love with, and fascinated by, his actors. Bergman refers to it as a chamber-work for television, a meditation on life in the theatre and, even more, on what it's like to be old. Earlier this year After the Rehearsal was shown at the Cannes Film Festival, where it was greeted with great acclaim.
Dec 7, 1984
In the 25th anniversary year of the Revolution, Arena traces the Afro-Spanish roots of Cuba's rich musical history. If, for you, the rumba still means Come Dancing, then it's time you saw the real thing. Meet Enrique Jorrin , creator of the cha-cha-cha; listen to the septet at the Casa de la Trova, Santiago; the jazz of Irakere; the passionate songs of Pablo Milanes , and the evocative music of family groups still carrying on traditions from 100 years ago. Watch exuberant dancing to the music of popular Los Van Van and, in the courtyard of the Folkloric Company, the rumbas -often remarkably similar to breakdancing - whose forms grew out of the sacred rituals and dances of Cuba's unique Afro-Catholic religions.
Dec 21, 1984
Every November musicians from all over Latin America come to take part in the international music festival at Varadero in Cuba. For five days bands from all the 'other' Americas vie with each other in a virtuoso display of music - music which is, astonishingly, almost unknown in Britain. Last month Arena went to Varadero to capture the event and tonight presents the finest in contemporary Cuban and Latin American music. With Irakere and Arturo Sandoval ; Los Van Van, Cuba's most popular dance band; soul calypso by Dimension Costena from Nicaragua; and bands from Venezuela, Puerto Rico, Mexico and Uruguay.
Dec 22, 1984
For many Luciano Pavarotti is the world's greatest tenor - certainly his place is assured among the legends of Grand Opera. In New York on 16 August, he Performed before 20,000 People at Madison Square Garden; it was an unprecedented step for an opera singer, a spectacular succcess. Along with his favourite arias from grand opera, Pavarotti delighted his audience with popular songs from his native Italy. An Arena Special.
Dec 26, 1984
Howard Jacobson the eldest son of MAX JACOBSON the Manchester conjuror, made a late but successful start in the world of fiction. At the age of 41 he published Coming from Behind a scabrous satire of polytechnic life; and now, with his sexual comedy Peeping Tom he has established himself as an important new voice in English fiction. Tonight Arena looks at this Leavisite polytechnic lecturer, shopkeeper and original Jewish humorist on the move from Manchester, Wolverhampton, Cornwall and Australia.
Feb 18, 1985
The artists Julian Schnabel , Markus Lupertz , Sandro Chia , Francesco Clemente and Georg Baselitz command some of the highest prices on today's booming art market. Their paintings, monumental in scale and mainly figurative in style, have begun to fill the walls of private collections world-wide. They have been hailed as the 'New Expressionists' - though some cynical observers accuse them of turning out their pictures to order. As they establish themselves in spacious New York premises, castles in Germany and even retreats in India, Arena examines the real driving force behind today's art world successes.
Feb 25, 1985
Arena this week presents a profile of the man many would consider the greatest living French film director. It introduces a BBC2 season of five of the masterpieces he made with the poet and scriptwriter Jacques Prevert during a decade of collaboration, running from 1936. They gave us such films as Quai des brumes, Le jour se lève, and - best loved of all -Les enfants du paradis. Voted the best French film of all time in 1979, this remarkable film still plays to packed houses. In this first interview on British television, Carne gives a vivid account of his memorable career With additional contributions from Michele Morgan, Jean-Pierre Aumont, Georges Franju and Jean-Louis Barrault.
Feb 27, 1985
Karen Blixen's voyage to Africa in 1913 was a journey away from the 20th century. Kenya was then a semi-feudal society, a land of Masai and Kikuyu, teeming with game. In 1931 she returned to Denmark having lost her farm, her health and her closest friends. Within a decade she had produced her three greatest books Seven Gothic Tales, Out of Africa and Last Tales. Karen Blixen had become Isak Dinesen, the writer. Taking part in tonight's portrait are her former servant Kamante, biographer Judith Thurman, Errol Trzebinski, Sir Laurens van der Post and Elspeth Huxley.
Mar 11, 1985
Tonight Arena and Newsnight join forces to mount a major studio debate between the embattled factions of the arts world. 'The Glory of the Garden' was the Arts Council's blueprint for a redistribution of its grants favouring regional centres over London. Now a head-long battle has developed between those administering funds and those who are the beneficiaries.... or the losers. The National Theatre has threatened 100 redundancies, and the Cottesloe could go dark in April. The English National Opera sees its programme in jeopardy. The Council's Literature Department narrowly escaped the axe, and half of the drama panel have resigned. In this atmosphere of open warfare, how can the garden grow? Has the Arts Council, in the words of its critics, 'betrayed the arts and lent itself to party politics' or have just and sensible policies become the target for partisan hysteria? Tonight the council confronts its critics. Introduced by John Tusa and Joan Bakewell.
Mar 18, 1985
From Chaucer's pilgrims to inter-continental juggernauts, generations of travellers have taken this historical route from Dover to the old City of London. It has become part of London's folklore, living up to its reputation as a place for a good night out; there are still 14 pubs along its two-mile stretch. You can also get a quick suntan or wallow in a Jacuzzi at Sundance City, buy the latest casual wear at Le Pel men's boutique, or sip a "slow comfortable screw up against the wall' in the Dun Cow Champagne Bar. These establishments live happily side by side with Bert's Eel and Pie Shop, the Fishing Tackle Specialists, and the world-famous Thomas a Beckett gym. This film looks beyond some of the shopfronts you'd normally pass down the A2 and reveals a host of unexpected personalities, mostly two-legged but above all Bermondsey born and bred.
Mar 25, 1985
A Musical for the 80s starring Tim Curry, Sting, Alexei Sayle, Gary Glitter and introducing Jason Carter To lig. verb. To gain something for nothing by wit and ingenuity. Young Gordon Shilling arrives in London in search of fame and fortune, only to find himself alone, penniless and hungry. Plucked off the streets by the mysterious Eden Rothwell and initiated in the art of ligging, he begins a picaresque journey through the highlife and lowlife of the nation. Along the way such experts as the Lig of Gentlemen, Peter York, April Ashley, John Bull, Samuel Smiles and Machiavelli show the hero how to help himself in self-help Britain.
Apr 8, 1985
Tony Harrison is the son of a baker, and his poetry relishes, and mourns for the class he comes from. His subjects are sex, love, politics, class warfare, death, all the rituals and performances of our lives. His work is direct, witty, often angry, expressed in the language and idioms of his northern roots. His recent adaptation of the English Mystery plays with the National Theatre Company has been hailed as 'the most moving, solemn and joyful theatrical event in London'. His latest cycle of poems is on an intensely private theme, meditations on his own family life and relationships. Tonight, Arena investigates a unique voice in contemporary literature.
Apr 15, 1985
One of the greatest masters of 20th-century painting died last month at the age of 97. This filmed tribute contains the last interview given by Chagall and charts his life and work from the earliest years in Vitebsk, Russia, through two world wars, and a revolution in his homeland, his time in Paris, and la Ruche, to his last home in the south of France. The programme shows Chagall at work in his studio and painting his monumental windows for Reims Cathedral and follows his account of his life, in his own words and in readings from his autobiography. An Arena presentation.
Apr 22, 1985
'America gave to the world two original art forms: one was jazz, the other was full character animation' (Chuck Jones) In 1908, the comic strip artist Winsor McCay brought to life, on film, his celebrated 'little Nemo' characters. The first words that appeared on the screen were 'Watch me move!' Tonight Arena salutes the pioneers of animation, in a festival of early cinema cartoons: funny, inventive and often astonishingly beautiful. Including unique footage of Gertie the Dinosaur acting with her creator, McCay; the rise and fall of the first cartoon superstar, Felix the cat; the sexy antics of Betty Boob - later toned down by the censor; the earliest Silly Symphonies, Loonie Tunes and Merrie Melodies; and an exploration of the surreal and violent world of the brilliant Tex Avery. Contributing their memories, the creators and animators who gave us these still compelling images, including John Fitzsimmons, Otto Mesmer, Grim Natwick, Friz Freleng, Walter Lantz and Chuck Jones.
Apr 29, 1985
Hugh Masekela 's career as a musician has been dominated by his determination to take the music of black South Africans to the rest of the world. His music is a fusion of sophisticated jazz and the raw but melodic Mbkanga which is to the townships of South Africa, what reggae is to Jamaica. As he became more successful Masekela left South Africa and spent the next 25 years in self-imposed exile in America, vowing never to return until the apartheid regime had ceased. In fact last year he did return - not to South Africa, but to Gaberone, Botswana, just a few miles from the border. Here he has set up a mobile recording studio which has become a magnet for the explosive music of his homeland.
May 6, 1985
Robert Wilson is one of the most revered and controversial talents in contemporary theatre. He first came to prominence in the New York avant garde of the 60s and 70s with a series of huge stage works which astonished and often infuriated audiences, but never failed to impress with their invention and sheer visual power. After seeing Wilson's first major work, Deafman Glance, the leading New York drama critic Clive Barnes declared that he had created 'a new non-verbal, post Wagnerian epic theatre.' Tonight, in the first of two Arena programmes, Wilson talks candidly about his formal upbringing in the American mid-west; his job as a teacher of brain-damaged children in Brooklyn - an experience that changed his life - and about the inspiration behind his extraordinary theatre pieces. Including rare footage from Robert Wilson 's personal archive and contributions from collaborators Philip Glass.
Jul 25, 1985
Tonight Arena presents a cornucopia of the blues from the raw sounds of the Mississippi Delta to the jazz and rock 'n' roll that blues gave birth to. As a crowning delight, the evening is presented from the studio by the most famous exponent of the blues guitar, the acknowledged 'King of the Blues', B. B. King. In conversation with John Walters , he explains the blues, its history and the profound emotions and experiences that created it.
Jul 27, 1985
Blues Night presents rare footage of the harmonica blues player Sonny Boy Williamson, who gave B.B. King his big break in 1948. ‘He was on the radio doing live performances when I first came to Memphis. He put me on his show to do this one song – a lady saloon-keeper hired me that day and I’ve worked ever since,’ King explained to the Radio Times.
Jul 27, 1985
John Walters talks to B.B. King - aided by his guitar Lucille - about his extraordinary life, from a childhood picking cotton in Mississippi to worldwide stardom.
Jul 27, 1985
Harley Cokliss’ classic blues documentary includes performances by Muddy Waters, Junior Wells and Buddy Guy, and shows how the tough urban music of Chicago developed out of the original rural blues.
Jul 27, 1985
The great Chicago broadcaster and journalist Studs Terkel and pianist Blind John Davis meet in a downtown bar to discuss and play the blues. This interview was shot for "Omnibus: Studs Terkel's Chicago" but not shown in the final programme.
Jul 28, 1985
This medley of the blues features Fred McDowell, Thomas 'Georgia Tom' Dorsey, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee. Huddie Ledbetter - better known as 'Lead Belly' - performs 'Pick a Bale of Cotton', and Billie Holiday accompanied by Lester Young, Coleman Hawkins, Ben Webster and Roy Eldridge, performs her own composition 'Fine and Mellow'.
Jul 28, 1985
Hard blues meets film noir as Big Bill Broonzy sings and plays in a Belgian nightclub back in the 1950s.
Jul 28, 1985
An Arena Special. Lubbock is a small town lost in the great plains of west Texas. Her most famous son, Buddy Holly , changed the face of popular music. Tonight Holly is remembered by the Crickets, The Everly Brothers, Keith Richards , and Paul McCartney. The programme features unique amateur film of Holly on tour with the other rock 'n' roll greats and at home with the Crickets in Texas. Arena also premieres the earliest film of ELVIS PRESLEY and the very first record made by THE BEATLES.
Sep 12, 1985
Tonight Arena presents a unique interview with one of the great figures of 20th-century literature, Jean Genet. His first novel, Our Lady of the Flowers, written in prison, moved Jean-Paul Sartre to declare him a saint and martyr. Genet's plays, including The Maids and The Balcony, revolutionised post-war theatre, and his novels, explicit and passionate celebrations of homosexual love, were widely banned. Now 75, Genet remains a self-declared outcast, unrepentant about his past as a thief and prostitute, still questioning society's expectations. In an impassioned outburst, he denounces even the interview itself as 'a piece of bad theatre' and turns the tables on his interrogators, asking them some uncomfortable Questions of his own.
Nov 12, 1985
What do Charles Dickens , Count Leo Tolstoy , Barry Manilow and James Anderton , Chief Constable of Manchester, have in common? A love of the accordion. Tonight Arena investigates the appeal of a much-maligned instrument from its roots in Imperial China, and appraises its bellowings from Cajun to the classics, from Stockhausen to Jimmy Shand. Other sounds from around the world include the heart-throbs of the Indian cinema, Tex-Mex superstar Flaco Jiminez , Soweto's Mahotella Queens, and the Accordion World Cup in Folkestone.
Nov 19, 1985
Francesco Rosi is one of the foremost figures in post-war Italian cinema. His films have an epic sweep covering Mafia crime, political corruption and economic mismanagement in Italy since the liberation of the country from Fascism by the Americans in 1944. Filmed in Naples and his home in Rome, Rosi talks about his development as a film-maker with illustrations from Salvatore Giuliano, Lucky Luciano , Hands Over the City, Illustrious Corpses and Three Brothers.
Nov 26, 1985
Yukio Mishima was one of the outstanding writers of his generation. Nominated three times for the Nobel Prize, he was the author of 40 novels and 18 plays. But his legend rests less on his literary output than on his bizarre suicide 15 years ago by ritual hara-kiri. Mishima's life was filled with contradictions. An intellectual, he was also a right-wing militarist who maintained his own private army. A nationalist who wished to restore the Emperor to power, he was obsessed with Western culture and offended his own people by adopting the image of a Western-style celebrity. In Tokyo, Arena reconstructs the story of this complex and contradictory figure against the background of Japan's wartime humiliation and astonishing post-war recovery.
Dec 3, 1985
The list of artists who have performed at Harlem's Apollo Theater reads like a Who's Who of black American entertainment. No black performer, from Sammy Davis Jr to Charlie Parker, could be considered a star without conquering the Apollo's tough, sophisticated audience. Tonight and next week Arena celebrates the 50th anniversary of the Apollo. But it is more than the story of a single venue. It is the story of Harlem itself and the struggles and triumphs of black America. Tonight's programme begins with the Apollo's infancy, when Bill (Bojangles) Robinson tapped effortlessly to the music of Fats Waller, and royalty like Count Basie and Duke Ellington held court. Honi Coles and the Copasetics, and former chorus girls the Swinging Seniors, re-create the famous dance routines, and Lionel Hampton recalls when the audience went so wild, the upper balcony cracked.
Dec 10, 1985
Harlem's Apollo Theater has been the ultimate testing ground for every black American performer from Duke Ellington to Michael Jackson. Tonight Arena continues its celebration of the Apollo's 50th anniversary. With uncharacteristic modesty, Little Richard describes his fear of the notoriously tough Apollo audience, while Mary Wilson of the Supremes and Gladys Knight recall life backstage. Amid the upheavals of Harlem in the 60s, Solomon Burke and 'Mr Apollo ' himself, James Brown , explain how they took themselves out of the church and on to the stage and renamed it soul. And finally Nile Rodgers. producer of David Bowie and Madonna, and veteran of the Apollo house band, presents the aspirations of the Apollo today.
Dec 17, 1985
Casa Verdi is a rambling mansion in the city of Milan, inhabited by an extraordinary and captivating group of people. Once it belonged to the composer Giuseppe Verdi : now it has become a home tor retired musicians. Once famous divas, composers, and singers from the opera chorus are bonded together by old memories and rivalries, their spirit and joy in their music quite undiminished by age. This film by Swiss director, Daniel Schmid , shared last year's documentary Grand Prix at Florence with Arena's s Sunset People.
Jan 8, 1986
Arena presents the first television showing of a rare and extraordinary classic of the silent cinema, with an original music score by Dimitri Shostakovich. Directors GRIGORI KOZINTSEV and LEONID TRAUBERG. Introduced by Lindsay Anderson. The New Babylon tells the dramatic story of the revolutionary tragedy of the Paris Commune. Like many masterpieces, its first public showing, in 1929, provoked outrage and derision. Shostakovich's brilliant and innovative score baffled the audience, and the conductor was accused of being drunk. The film and its music were banned immediately, and the score itself disappeared for decades until it was rediscovered after the composer's death. For this showing, the score has been reconstructed from Shostakovich's original handwritten copy by Omri Hadari , who conducts the London Lyric Orchestra
Jan 11, 1986
That most erotic and mysterious of dances, the tango, came to life in the suburbs and backstreets of Buenos Aires. This Arena Special traces its colourful and bizarre life story, through the work of its greatest poets, dancers and musicians. At the beginning of the century the tango was danced only in the harbour brothels, then, sophisticated in fashionable nightclubs and adopted by major poets and writers, it entered its golden age in the 30s and 40s. For the Argentines it's more than just a dance - the poet Discepolo calls it 'a feeling of sadness which can even be danced to'. Away from tourists' eyes, in their own cafes and dance halls, today's unknown 'stars' of tango tell their stories, among them the charismatic Juanita 'La Negra'. The strange and magical history of tango is told through the words of poets, rare archive film of its greatest stars of the past, and specially choreographed scenes by a modern master, Juan Carlos Copes.
Jan 18, 1986
From its origins in ninth-century China to its modern incarnation as a Christmas pantomime, Cinderella has endured as one of the best-loved fairytales. But what has made this fable of domestic abuse so popular for so long? Marina Warner, author of several studies on legendary heroines, reinterprets the myth through some of its forgotten versions, and shows how today's simpering weakling has at other times been seen as an innocent victim of incestuous longings, or even as a gutsy fighter who breaks her evil stepmother's neck. Writer Angela Carter , psychologist Bruno Bettelheim and photographer Jo Spence offer their views; and Cinderella appears in the current stage production, in TV ads for soapflakes, tampons and table wines, and in a host of classic screen performances. Tonight Arena looks beyond Cinderella the feminine archetype to discover what really happened after the ball.
Jan 21, 1986
Behind the quiet, gentlemanly exterior of Norman Lewis lies the acute Perception of one of Britain's foremost travel writers and investigative journalists. His fascinating accounts of the cultures of the world cover the Brazilian jungle, the tribes of Indo-China, the villages of Spain and his own eccentric upbringing in Enfield, where his parents ran a Spiritualist church. One of his finest books is Naples '44, describing his experiences as an intelligence officer with the forces that liberated Southern Italy. In tonight's film Lewis returns to this extraordinary region where the ancient Sibyl foretold the fates of emperors and kings, whose local saint can quell the lavas of Vesuvius and where today 600 Mafiosi are on trial. Through Lewis's own idiosyncratic observations, Arena explores the life and work of a very dead-pan Englishman abroad.
Jan 28, 1986
The home of the White House, the Pentagon and the President is also the home of the most exciting soul scene of the 1980s. The raw power of the go-go beat has emerged within a stones-throw of America's palaces of power. Washington DC is 70 per cent black and go-go is more than just a musical trend - it is the lifestyle of Washington's black youth. In tonight's Arena, eminent go-go saxophonist Carl 'Low Budget' Jones, of the band Redds and the Boys, takes a journey around Washington city introducing its musicians and their place within the history of American soul music.
Feb 4, 1986
Novelist, poet, essayist and the first woman to be elected to the Academie Francaise, Marguerite Youreenar lives and writes on her island refuge off the coast of Maine. Her work ranges from a series of celebrated historical novels, including a classic study of the Emperor Hadrian, to translations of blues and gospel songs. Characteristically, Yourcenar is indifferent to public honour. The intellectual elite of the Academy, she says, 'decided to take a woman. It happened that woman was me.' In Arena this week, she talks about her life and work to writer and critic Peter Conrad.
Feb 11, 1986
The American film actress Louise Brooks, who died last summer, was one of the most celebrated beauties in the history of the cinema. Her performance as unrepentant pleasure-seeker Lulu in G.W. Pabst's Pandora's Box made her a legend. KENNETH TYNAN wrote: 'She has run through my life like a magnetic thread, this shameless urchin tomboy ... a temptress with no pretentions, amoral but totally selfless.' Louise Brooks's own life had more than a touch of Lulu's reckless abandon about it. In tonight's Arena, she talks candidly about her greatest days in Paris and Berlin and of the harsh retribution that was exacted by Hollywood. With rare clips from her varied screen performances.
Feb 18, 1986
In 1950 the Grand Prix of the prestigious Venice Film Festival went quite unexpectedly to a Japanese film. It was called Rashomon and the director was Akira Kurosawa. In the years since then he has become celebrated as a unique stylist and storyteller of humanity and compassion, producing a series of film classics like Seven Samurai, Living, Kagemuaha and his latest, Ran. In a rare interview Kurosawa, a reclusive and controversial figure, talks about his early films, about the masterpieces of the 50s and 60s, and about the struggles of his later years to continue his work in the face of mounting indifference and hostility within Japan.
Mar 4, 1986
Critical acclaim for a group of recent art school graduates has put Scottish art, and Glasgow in particular, firmly on the international map. Two people at the forefront of this unexpected renaissance are Stephen Campbell and Adrian Wiszniewski. Within three years of leaving college, their pictures already hang in the Tate Gallery, the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum in New York, and are sought after by museums and collectors in Europe and North America. In this week's Arena, the former classmates meet again to take stock of their meteoric rise and to compare notes on the art scene in Britain and New York.
Mar 11, 1986
Don McCullin 's powerful pictures of the horrors of war and deprivation have made him one of the world's most celebrated photographers. Now, after more than 20 years working exclusively with the stills camera, he has been commissioned by Arena to make his first film. In tonight's programme he turns his eye on life in Britain today, with portraits of Bradford, Harlow and East London. Through the industrial city, the dream of the new town and the capital past and present, McCullin reveals a Britain which is exotic, diverse and often disturbing.
Mar 25, 1986
Linton Kwesi Johnson takes a trip home to Jamaica and files a personal report on the long-standing relationship between the Caribbean and the mother country.
Jun 14, 1986
Calypso from Trinidad's Mighty Bomber, dancing from Nicaragua, Jamaican Bob Marley's 'Could you be loved', Grenadian poet Abdul Malik, and the original 'Peanut vendor' by Rita Montener and Her All-Girl Orchestra.
Jun 14, 1986
The celebrated West Indian poet Derek Walcott joins Linton Kwesi Johnson and Guyanese prodigy Fred D'Aguiar to debate the range and impact of Caribbean poetry. With filmed readings from C.L.R. James, Edward Braithwaite, Michael Smith and Mervyn Morris.
Jun 14, 1986
Out of the archives, a skanking delight from Kingston's Sombrero Club, 1964. Featuring Prince Buster, Toots and the Maytals and Jimmy Cliff.
Jun 14, 1986
Darcus Howe interviews leading Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes and Trinidadian historian John La Rose on the exotic and often bloody story of the Caribbean.
Jun 14, 1986
Despite the dangers and deprivations of war, the people of Bluefields, Nicaragua, still find time to do the Lambeth Walk and dance Maypole. Bluefields, on Nicaragua's east coast, is named after a notorious 17th-century pirate and its stormy past has provided it with a culture which is an anomalous amalgam of Spanish, British, American, Amerindian and African. Arena takes you down 'The Secret River' to this curious corner of the Caribbean.
Jun 14, 1986
Fuentes, La Rose and Howe are joined in the studio by this year's Calypso King David Rudder who tells the true story of the 'Trinidad Trinity' - calypso, steel pan music and carnival. With performances from The Mighty Bomber, Arrow The Renegades and David Rudder himself.
Jun 15, 1986
From the BBC treasure chest, Alan Whicker explores the forgotten comers of the Caribbean, where he meets the Pocomaniacs of Jamaica, the Redlegs of Barbados, and the last of the Caribs.
Jun 15, 1986
Filmed on his recent visit to London, Panamanian salsa star and politician Ruben Blades talks to Linton Kwesi Johnson about Latin music today, ranging from established stars like Cuba's Celia Cruz to the latest contender Wilfredo Vargas, currently taking New York by storm.
Jun 15, 1986
A bedtime treat from 1936: the GPO Film Unit present the Caribbean through the words of W.H. Auden and the music of Benjamin Britten.
Jun 15, 1986
A portrait of the man who made reggae known and appreciated all over the western world and who refused to abandon a message of personal and political liberation. Tonight's programme includes a wealth of his finest performances, from early sessions by the original Wailers to his last rehearsals in Kingston. Interviews with Marley himself and with those who knew him best, including his mother Cedella Booker , his wife Rita Marley , his original partners Peter Tosh and Bunny Wailer , Judy Mowat and Marcia Griffiths from his backing group the 1 Threes, his art director Neville Garrick and Chris Blackwell , founder of Island Records.
Jun 15, 1986
Born in Trinidad in 1901, C.L.R. James came to England in the 1930s and was cricket correspondent for the Manchester Guardian. In this programme the author of the now classic book Beyond the Boundary selects his definitive cricket team. From W.G. Grace to Gary Sobers , C.L.R.'s choice spans seven decades and, using rare archive film, reveals some of the greatest moments in cricketing history.
Jun 16, 1986
In an old church in Havana, the Urfe brothers play Danzones, the first popular Cuban music to emerge from the blend of African and European traditions at the turn of the century. The dance it inspired was considered shocking by colonial Cuban society.
Jun 16, 1986
According to reggae greats Bob Marley and Burning Spear, football and Rastafari are one and the same thing. In the last week of the World Cup Rasta and the Ball takes you to the Marcus Garvey Youth Club, the beaches and Kingston's back-street pitches where reggae music and football are played with equal dedication and enthusiasm in the same spirit of Rastafari. Bob Marley demonstrates his skills on the field and in the recording studio.
Jun 17, 1986
Cuban jazz is rarely heard over here. Tonight Arena redresses the balance with a performance by virtuoso trumpeter, Arturo Sandoval. Much admired by Dizzy Gillespie , he returns the compliment with 'Blues homage'; he then takes to the piano for a dynamic duet with bass player, Jorge Reyes , and finally is joined by brilliant new-wave singer, Donato Poveda.
Jun 18, 1986
'I dreamt there were 72 angels, 72 trumpets, 72 vases of flowers - all things were 72. And then I saw directly the face of God himself. I was summoned to be an artist.' Bishop of his own church, Kapo is also Jamaica's most famous artist. His paintings and sculpture explore the mysterious world of dreams, possession and healing in a rich cultural mix drawing equally upon the spirit world of Africa and the Christianity of Europe.
Jun 19, 1986
Speaking from Henry Moore's own studio in Perry Green, Hertfordshire, John Read shares his personal memories of the artist he filmed six times over 28 years.
Sep 7, 1986
'The only difference between me and a madman is that I am not mad.' So says Salvador Dali one of the most famous painters in the world. Dali now lives as a recluse and has been virtually unseen since his near death in a suspicious fire two years ago. Having courted publicity all his life he is now shrouded in secrecy. Dali is the great showman of Surrealism. As a painter his style is unique, yet perhaps his greatest achievement is his own personality. Dali is a self-pronounced genius. Today Dali lives in the palace museum which he has built as a monument to Ms life, and holds court in the room which he never leaves. .4reKa traces his career through film, much of it from Dali's own private archive, and combines the testimony of his closest associates, including Captain Peter Moore and Amanda Lear, and his Surrealist contemporaries Max Ernst, Luis Bunuel and Man Ray, with Dali's own extravagant account of his life and adventures.
Nov 21, 1986
Following last night's story of Salvador Dali, Arena continues it's Spanish trilogy with this highly-acclaimed profile of the great film-maker Luis Bufiuel. From his collaboration with Dali on Un Chien Andalou in 1928 to his last film That Obscure Object of Desire in 1977, Bunuel's work was always passionate, subversive and entertaining. Arena goes in search of the spirit of this elusive and original man. The film traces his life through Spain, Paris, New York and Mexico and visits his closest friends, his collaborators, his favourite monastery and his favourite bars. With Fernando Ray Catherine Deneuve Jeanne Moreau Carlos Fuentes Jean-Claude Carriere Fr Julian Pablo and unique footage of Bunuel himself.
Nov 22, 1986
Federico Garcia Lorca, perhaps the best-known and loved Spanish poet and dramatist of this century, was brutally executed at the age of 38 during the early days of the Spanish Civil War. Tonight's Arena, in collaboration with the acclaimed Irish writer and Lorca biographer Ian Gibson , evokes his life and unravels the exact circumstances of his death. Close friend of Salvador Dali and Luis Bunuel , Lorca was a charismatic figure - musician, painter, actor, as well as a writer. The roots of his work lie deep in the rich culture, music and landscape of southern Spain. Through the recollections of friends and fellow poets, with singers and theatrical performances, in Spain, Cuba and the United States, this film evokes the passionate and potent spirit of Lorca's work and tragically short life.
Nov 28, 1986
When the Khmer Rouge invaded Phnom Penh, the Cambodian capital, they forced the entire population into the countryside where they were starved, beaten and worked to death on grandiose, impractical 'revolutionary' schemes. Among them was a young man called Someth May, a doctor's son. Ten members of his family died before he managed to escape to Thailand. There he contacted the distinguished journalist and poet, James Fenton , who arranged his release from a refugee camp and brought him to England. For two years, May struggled to write his story with Fenton's help, and over the last 18 months Arena filmed the two writers as they overcame the barriers of language, memory and intense emotion to create a shocking and vivid memoir of his horrific experiences.
Dec 5, 1986
In this week's Arena Gerald Scarfe takes a long, hard look at himself. In his paintings and drawings he mercilessly pillories the powerful and the famous and yet in public he presents an image of docile sociability. In this irreverent investigation of his own personality Scarfe attempts to reconcile his two sides. He traces his progress from an asthmatic childhood through his early days in Punch and Private Eye to the Sunday Times - his days of reportage in Vietnam, electioneering travels with American presidents; he talks to Richard Ingrams Peter Cook , Harold Evans and Roger Waters and explores how his work has developed through sculpture, animation, films such as The Wall, rock and roll with PINK FLOYD to theatre and opera work.
Dec 12, 1986
Fifty years ago Basil Wright and Harry Watts' classic documentary "Night Mail" celebrated the role of the railways as the nation's distributor of goods, mail, food, and other essentials. In 1986 Arena's 'Night Moves' celebrates the role of the trucking industry - the age of steam has become the day of the articulated lorry. Count every commodity on a supermarket shelf, virtually every object you can buy - a lorry put it there. With Timothy Spall as The Fool on the Road and specially written music by Ian Dury, Arena goes trucking. 'Night Moves' creates a kaleidoscope of travel, incident, action and celebrities that will astonish everyone who thinks lorries just block the road.
Dec 19, 1986
Arena presents Bob Dylan, concentrating on his classic songs and backed by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers in his first concert on British television in over a decade.
Jan 2, 1987
Tonight Arena presents the moving story of the first lady of country music. At the age of 44 she's had 35 number one records, three Grammy awards, 50 albums, five husbands, four children, two grandchildren, continuing health problems and 15 operations. Yet she continues her punishing schedule driven by the dream that took her from the Alabama cotton fields to Nashville and now to Hollywood. Filmed in Los Angeles, Nashville and her childhood home in the deep South, she talks with openness about her career and her marriages, especially to country superstar George Jones. She also tells her story in her songs: 'Stand by your man', 'The bottle', 'D.I.V.O.R.C.E.' and "Til I can make it on my own'.
Jan 16, 1987
Night and Day is a 24-hour journey through the streets of London spent in the company of two different and unusual writers. The day is introduced by Spectator columnist Jeffrey Bernard who has turned the humdrum routine of daylight hours into a time of escapade, adventure and other lowlife pursuits in the face of every obstacle, including his own collapse at eight each evening. As his day ends Celia Fremlin's night begins. Fremlin, a 71-year-old thriller writer, stalks London's streets from 11 pm to 5 am in pursuit of what she perceives as a kingdom magically transformed by darkness. Together Bernard and Fremlin present a London that is delightfully personal, mysteriously romantic and usually unexpected.
Jan 23, 1987
'You can open your veins on television more easily than anywhere. It's the last stronghold for the individualist-writer.' Over the last 20 years Dennis Potter has established himself as not only television's most celebrated playwright, but also its most outspoken. His powerful and daring plays, from Stand Up Nigel Barton - written after he stood for parliament in 1964, through Pennies from Heaven, to the triumph of The Singing Detective have provoked extreme reactions both for and against. Above all Potter takes a moral position - he describes himself as a religious dramatist. Throughout his work he mines recurring themes and obsessions - his childhood in the Forest of Dean, illness, his sense of the self, sex, the techniques of television itself. In tonight's Arena he discusses with Alan Yentob the feelings and attitudes that motivate him.
Jan 30, 1987
Tonight Arena tells the story of one of the most extraordinary photographers of the 20th century. Martin Chambi , an Indian born into a peasant family in the remote Peruvian countryside, became a leading figure in the revolutionary artistic and social movements that swept South America in the 1930s. His magnificent photographs of the great Inca ruins were the visual epitome of the quest to rediscover the native culture of the Andes. At the same time his portraits recorded the whole of Peruvian society, the heirs of the conquerors as well as the heirs of the Incas. Shot on location deep in the Andes by Jorge Vignati , cameraman on Herzog's Fitzcarraldo, the film explores Andean life through Chambi's majestic photographs and looks at the relevance of his work 50 years on.
Feb 6, 1987
After Robert Crumb , comics could never be the same again. He came to fame in the mid 60s with characters such as Fritz the Cat and the archetypal guru Mr Natural , wicked satires on the excesses of the Love Generation. In a medium associated with super-heroes, Crumb deals only with anti-heroes, most entertainingly his own self-portrait, a confused, paranoid weakling with an unfortunate taste for big, powerful women. Lost in the modern world, Crumb has found refuge in rural California with his wife and fellow comic artist, Aline Kominsky. Tonight, in a rare appearance before the camera, he talks about his work and his troubles with women, life and himself.
Feb 13, 1987
David Lynch , director of some of the strangest films in today's cinema, including Eraserhead and Elephant Man, guides us through the film works of a peerless group of artists - the Surrealists. Working in Paris from the mid-1920s, such legendary figures as Jean Cocteau, Man Ray and Luis Bunuel were the first to explore techniques so startling that they have passed into the common language of mainstream cinema, video and advertising. Extracts from their classics combine with the lesser-known films by Rene Clair, Fernand Leger, Marcel Duchamp, Hans Richter and Max Ernst to produce a box of unearthly delights. And, to bring us up to date, Arena includes a sneak preview of David Lynch 's Blue Velvet, the most talked-about film of recent years.
Feb 20, 1987
Abdullah Ibrahim formerly Dollar Brand, pianist, composer, arranger, was bom in Cape Town, South Africa, in 1934. When Duke Ellington heard him in 1965 he was so impressed that he arranged for Ibrahim to move to America where he quickly became a leading figure in the jazz avant-garde. He has since lived and worked in exile in New York, developing a blend of jazz and the traditional styles of South Africa that have recently become fashionable in the West. Tonight's Arena moves between New York and the relics of the Cape Town he grew up in, explaining his beautiful, evocative music and the stories and feelings that inspired it.
Feb 27, 1987
In 1986 Andrei Tarkovsky 's remarkable career in the cinema received the accolade of the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival. It sealed his reputation in the west as Russia's greatest living artist. In Moscow, however, his work has been at best ignored, at worst vilified as elitist and wilfully obscure. Official disfavour finally forced Tarkovsky to leave Russia to seek finance. It was only a few months before his recent death that his poetic and haunting films were given official recognition in Moscow. Tonight's Arena reviews Tarkovsky's life and work.
Mar 13, 1987
Jo Spence 's photography defies definition - her work appears in community spaces as well as grand galleries. It deals with social problems, sexuality, myth and power. Tonight's Arena looks at her life and work since 1982, when she was diagnosed as having breast cancer. Without consultation she was marked up for a masectomy and informed it was 'not the good news she had hoped for.' She rejected the treatment offered by the NHS and began a search for alternative cancer treatment. Trying to come to terms with cancer, she began to photograph her own body and, as an extension to co-counselling, began to use the camera to explore the memories of her parents - her mother died of cancer. The work culminated in an extraordinary series of dramatic re-creations of her mother. Jo's camera has become an integral part of her healing process. She calls this practice phototherapy.
Mar 20, 1987
What do the following have in common? Maria von Trapp, whose story became "The Sound of Music"; Bob Guccione, the editor of Penthouse; Martin Scorsese, the director of "The Color of Money" and "Mean Streets"; and the popular singers Mary O'Hara and Tony Monopoly. They all trained to be Catholic priests, nuns or monks. Fr Michael Cleary is a Dublin parish priest and also a comedian and singer; Fr Ernesto Cardenal is Nicaragua's Minister of Culture and one of Latin America's foremost poets. All of them feel that the vocation to the cloth and the vocation to art and entertainment are not dissimilar. Tonight's "Arena" tells their stories and examines the rich artistic traditions of Catholicism.
Mar 27, 1987
(Lino Brocka 's Philippines) Lino Brocka is the most influential film director in the Philippines, and a leading figure in the civil rights movement. Throughout the period of martial law, he opposed the Marcos regime. In 1985 he was jailed on a trumped-up charge of sedition. Now Cory Aquino is president, but poverty and intimidation are firmly entrenched, and the communist guerrillas, the New People's Army, continue to gain in number. Brocka led a clandestine expedition into the mountains to film interviews with the NPA, and Arena went with him, at a time when real-life events were becoming as dramatic as a Brocka film.
Apr 3, 1987
What is a chat show - a forum for stimulating conversation and the exchange of ideas or just an economical way of filling the airwaves? Gus Macdonald becomes host for an evening and invites his guests Russell Harty , David Frost and Kenneth Williams to discourse on the art of the chat show. Simon Dee talks about the legendary moment when he was given his own chat show and Jackie Collins sets off on the long promotional haul, knocking off one chat show after another. And Quentin Crisp and Malcolm Muggeridge consider why we should want to watch strangers talking on television.
Apr 10, 1987
Twenty-one years after his death Evelyn Waugh looms larger than ever over the English literary scene. In the course of three programmes Arena uses the testimony of his friends and foes to explore the man and his work. The first programme covers the period of his early life and his arrival in his 20s on the literary horizon with the publication of Decline and Fall and Vile Bodies. Among those appearing are the dedicatees of his first two novels, Sir Harold Acton and Lady Diana Mosley, and fellow writers Anthony Powell, Peter Quennell and Graham Greene.
Apr 18, 1987
The second of three programmes looks at Evelyn Waugh 's most productive period as a novelist, journalist, travel-writer and man of action. His exotic journeys from the coronation of Haile Selassie in Addis Ababa to the deepest jungles of Brazil are recalled by fellow correspondent, William Deedes. His commanding officers in the war, Lord Lovat and Sir Fitzroy Maclean assess the disastrous military career which ironically produced his romantic masterpiece, Brideshead Revisited. This is the period in which Waugh's finest work was published. John Mortimer , Kingsley Amis and Graham Greene consider his literary achievement.
Apr 19, 1987
Last of three programmes. When Waugh died on Easter Sunday 21 years ago his friend Graham Greene felt 'as if one's commanding officer were dead'. During his last 20 years he retreated from the outside world, increasingly obsessed with mortality - at the same time cultivating the cantankerous personality that became his abiding image. With contributions from his priest, neighbours and family, Arena looks behind the public mask of Evelyn Waugh.
Apr 20, 1987
Joseph Beuys was one of the most prominent and controversial German artists of the past 30 years. Sculptor, performance artist, teacher and maverick politician - when he died last year Beuys left behind him a unique and provocative inheritance. Paradoxically his irreverent art now fills the museums of the world and is bought and sold for fortunes. Tonight's programme follows Beuys's remarkable career from World War LT, when as a Stuka pilot he crashed in the Crimea, to his increasingly political role in post-war Germany as co-founder of the Green Party. Did he achieve his goal and help to heal the wounds of German history through art, or was he finally a charlatan? Arena investigates.
Jun 6, 1987
by Leslie Megahey A story of intrigue and romance in 16th-century Venice. Starring Paul McGann, Simon Callow, Michael Gough, Diana Quick When Cariani the painter falls in love with the beautiful girl who receives mysterious visitors in the rooms below, he is drawn into a web of danger and deceit. With Louiza Livingstone, Robert Goodman and the voice of Charles Gray as the storyteller A Screenplay/Arena presentation
Aug 5, 1987
The Arena season opens with a profile of Diego Rivera , considered to be the most famous painter in the history of Latin America, and also the most notorious. He was a Rabelaisian figure of far-flung proportions, who claimed to have been a confidant of Lenin, the true father of Rommel, and to have tasted human flesh on a number of occasions. He was a maverick, a compendium of contradictions and irrationalities. A self-proclaimed revolutionary, who sought in mural paintings a new public art form to broadcast social change to the people of Mexico, he was also the man who accepted commissions from the yankee-dollar capitalists, Rockefeller and Ford. This portrait compiles testimony from Mexico's leading novelist, Carlos Fuentes ; ex-model and lover, Dolores Olmedo ; and Jose Luis Cuevas , one of the most successful of Mexico's contemporary painters. There is also extraordinary archive footage of Zapata, Trotsky and Rivera himself and, of course, the epic murals, filmed on location.
Nov 20, 1987
For 200 years British writers have achieved great success with their accounts of life on the Indian subcontinent. Less well-known are the writings of those Indians who travelled to Britain and recorded their observations throughout the same period. Hardly any of this work has ever been translated, yet it represents a fascinating perspective on how the Indians have seen us. The film includes the witty observations of Mirza Abu Talib, a guest of the aristocracy, on the British class system in 1799; the slavish admiration for Victorian industrial might expressed by Sir Sayyid Ahmed Khan ; the disillusion which set in during the 30s with the writing of Sajjad Zaheer ; and the introspective poetry of Mazhar Tirmazi - an outstanding poet of a new generation of writers who have settled or were born here. With specially commissioned translations Arena presents this extraordinary testament for the first time.
Dec 4, 1987
Art Spiegelman is one of America's leading comic-strip artists. Earlier this year he created a stir with Maus, a novel in strip form. Maus tells of a young Jewish couple who are arrested and transported to Auschwitz - where Spiegelman's parents endured and survived the war. The Jews are depicted as mice and the SS guards as cats. The story is told by an elderly mouse to his young son who asks him about his life. The unlikely, perhaps provocative, form of the comic-strip has produced an extremely moving book which has had huge success on both sides of the Atlantic. Tonight's film follows Spiegelman's journey with his wife and child to Auschwitz for the first time.
Dec 18, 1987
he legend of Woody Guthrie - the rambling guitar player who discovered America from the roof of a freight train - was an inspiration to two decades of Americans, from the Weavers to Bob Dylan, from Jack Kerouac to Bruce Springsteen. If anyone seemed to fulfil the prophecy of a 'Shakespeare in overalls' it was this diminutive 'Okie', driven west by the great duststorms of the 30s to become, like John Steinbeck , the spokesman for the exploited migrant workers of California. Guthrie's most celebrated anthem, This Land Is Your Land, still stands as a poignant retort to God Bless America. Arena has compared that legend with Woody's own far from romantic life; it has talked to the hobos who still ride the freights and his friends and family, including Pete Seeger, Ramblin' Jack Elliot, Alan Lomax and, of course, Arlo Guthrie.
Jan 8, 1988
Tonight Arena presents, on the occasion of their 50th anniversaries, a tribute to those great British institutions, the Beano and the Dandy. In their pages, the Softie has fought an unending losing battle against the likes of and the cow pie and the slap-up feed remain the just rewards for good behaviour. Arena visits Dundee in Scotland, where the current editors give their rendition of 'The Lost Highway' to the strumming of the Beano guitar. The film also includes such stalwart fans as the acerbic Steve Bell on the sources of his inspiration, Joan Armatrading , who not only wrote a song about the Beano but actually guest-starred in a strip, and leading young fogey A. N. Wilson on his admiration for Desperate Dan.
Jan 15, 1988
Broadway is one of the most famous streets in the world. Legendary for bright lights, musical comedy, and the dreams of stardom, the myths and cliches of the theatre have influenced every mile of this great thoroughfare. From immigrants in sweatshops to yuppy speculators in chic apartments, Broadway symbolises a state of mind, a way of looking at life; it's the road to success. Following an old Indian trail, it runs 146 miles from the financial jungles of Wall Street, past the theatres and sleaze of Times Square and into rural upstate New York. Arena travels the length of Broadway and talks to songwriter Jerry Leiber, 100-year-old George 'Mr Broadway' Abbott, beat poet Allen Ginsberg, Indian chief Lone Bear, Lena Horne, Ben E. King and Rip Van Winkle. They explore the legends of the Great White Way.
Jan 22, 1988
The first of two programmes featuring the work of a major figure in contemporary literature and journalism. In three decades, reporting from Latin America, Africa and the Far East, Kapuscinski has witnessed 27 revolutions. His portraits of Haile Selassie and the Shah of Iran, The Emperor and Shah of Shahs, have brought him worldwide recognition. As a prominent Solidarity member, he has been unable to write for the Polish media since the imposition of martial law. He has chosen to remain in Warsaw and is now working on the last volume of his trilogy on 20th-century despotism -Amin.
Jan 29, 1988
Arena presents JONATHAN MILLER 'S acclaimed production for the Royal Court Theatre of RYSZARD KAPUSCINSKI's play. Adapted for the stage and television by MICHAEL HASTINGS and JONATHAN MILLERTranslated by WILLIAM R. BRAND and KATARZYNA MROCZKOWSKA-BRAND Haile Selassie , Emperor of Ethiopia, was one of the great enigmatic figures of the century. Five actors bring to life memories of the corruption and double-dealing at the emperor's palace just before his final overthrow.
Feb 5, 1988
The Queen of Salsa, Celia Cruz has been the most adored and dynamic singer in Latin America for more than four decades. Since she left Cuba at the time of the Revolution with her band Sonora Matancera, she has lived in New York and risen to international fame with the seminal Latin bands of Tito Puente and Johnny Pacheco the creators of salsa. To the Hispanic immigrants there, she is little less than a goddess, who still evokes the glamour of Havana in the 1950s, but back home in Cuba, like all voluntary exiles, she's persona non grata under the Castro regime. Tonight Arena presents a profile of a spectacular artist who invokes the power of the saints. With testimony from her friends, her dressmakers, her fellow professionals and the Spanish-speaking people of New York - and most of all her own stunning performance at the Apollo Theatre.
Feb 12, 1988
Today is Shrove Tuesday, in French, Mardi Gras , and tonight is the night before Lent. While the British celebrate with pancakes, the Latin world explodes in a riot of music and spectacle. Tonight, live for the first time, Arena presents the world's three biggest carnivals. At 10.45pm the programme moves to BBC1.
Feb 16, 1988
Continued from BBC2. From the Toulouse Cafe in the heart of downtown New Orleans where the day's t festivities climax with the cream of New Orleans rhythm and blues. One last burst of indulgence before forty days of abstinence.
Feb 16, 1988
The novelist and poet Jack Kerouac died in 1969, a chronic alcoholic, at the age of 47. He was already something of a legend, not simply for his style of writing but for the style of life that he chronicled. He travelled back and forth across America and his most famous novel On the Road became the bible for what he called 'the Beat Generation'. Tonight's Arena presents Richard Lerner's celebrated cinema profile What Happened to Kerouac? with testimony from fellow Beats Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, William Burroughs, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, his first wife Edie Parker Kerouac, Carolyn Cassady, Ken Kesey, film of his alter-ego Nial Cassady, his idols Charlie Parker and Slim Gaillard and Kerouac himself reading from his works.
Feb 26, 1988
The flamenco of southern Spain is more than music and much more than an exhilarating dance for the tourists. It's the soul of a culture, and its roots go back to the 15th century when gypsy travellers made their way via Asia and North Africa to Spain. Today the real flamenco is kept alive by the gypsy families of Andalucia. Through their private family rituals, baptisms, marriages and fiestas, the new generation of Andalucian gypsies learns flamenco from its elders, the great solo cantores and the most powerful and accomplished dancers of flamenco in the world. Today the families are no longer travellers - they are integrated, socially and economically, with the population. But they keep alive their traditions with pride, and in this film Arena travels to meet them and to see and hear the real flamenco. Tonight the journey from Seville to Utrera.
Mar 4, 1988
The flamenco of southern Spain is more than music. It's the soul of a culture and its roots go back to the 15th century, when gypsies travelled to Spain via Asia and North Africa. Today the real flamenco is kept alive by the gypsy families of Andalucia. Through marriages, baptisms and fiestas, the new generation of Andalucian gypsies learns flamenco from its elders. In the second of two films, Arena travels further through Andalucia from Jerez to Cadiz, where the journey ends with a gathering of gypsy families for a grand flamenco fiesta.
Mar 5, 1988
This month the National Portrait Gallery opens its doors to the controversial photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. As the epitome of New York style he is less celebrated for his portraits than for the notorious photographs that chronicled the chic gay world of Manhattan. His studies of nude black men are a shameless affirmation of gay sexuality while at the same time recalling the great male icons of classical painting and sculpture. As one of the most successful photographers of modern times, his work has been instrumental in the restoration of the male nude to a primary place in mainstream art. In this exclusive film profile of the man and the people whose fast-track existence he chronicled, Arena talks to the formidable first lady of body-building Lisa Lyons , his friend and singer Patti Smith , novelists Kathy Acker and Edmund White , and others who inhabit his world.
Mar 18, 1988
The English Thoroughbred In the late 17th century the fastest, most elegant racing machine known to man was developed by the English aristocracy. The English gentry crossed their hardy mares with three delicate Arab stallions and it is from these horses that all today's thoroughbreds descend. 'Good breeding' is as much a watchword for the horses as for their owners and has culminated in such legendary animals as Nijinsky, Mill Reef and Oh So Sharp. The price tags on the world's best bloodstock drip noughts like great works of art. The film's equine guests include the triple crown winner Oh So Sharp, Dancing Brave, Adjal and Reference Point. Humans include owners His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al Maktoum and Lord Howard de Walden, trainers Vincent O'Brien, Mr and Mrs Henry Cecil and jockey Walter Swinburn.
Mar 25, 1988
Each season Arena invites a distinguished figure in the arts to direct a film. This year's guest director is John Byrne, painter and author of Tutti Frutti. In this diverse and inventive autobiography, Byrne travels from his youth, through his art school years to the period of his stage and TV plays, and on to his death sometime in the future. With him is Robbie Coltrane as himself and as a shamus invented by Byrne, who discovers there are as many aspects to the author as there are actors playing him.
Apr 1, 1988
Randy Travis is the hottest new singer on the country music scene today. In June of this year he played his first British concert at the Royal Albert Hall. Arena filmed him and tonight Rhythms of the World presents the best in 'back to basics' country music. Tonight's performance showcases some classic country songs and includes his American hit singles, 1982, On the Other Hand and Diggin' Up Bones.
Oct 2, 1988
Arena's new season begins with a special anniversary edition and a chance to see again some classic moments from the past ten years. Dame Edna admits to keen enthusiasm for women in art, William Burroughs demonstrates his stainless steel cobra, Mel Brooks falls over a film crew and Jean Genet interrogates one, Roy Plomley is stranded on his Desert Island and Bunuel and Bob Marley discourse on God and redemption. Along with contributions from Orson Welles , Dennis Potter , Tammy Wynette , Dali, the Everly Brothers, Ken Russell and a host of others who have appeared over the decade. Tonight's programme is introduced by Brian Eno , the composer of the Arena signature tune, and guest appearances from Gerald Scarfe and John Byrne , who painted their own self-portraits, Alexei Sayle , who learned how to steal a Ford Cortina, and Luck and Flaw, who subjected Mrs Thatcher to some drastic cuts.
Nov 25, 1988
Dirty Harry and the other characters in the Eastwood repertory have dominated the box office for over 25 years. He has made over 40 films and directed 14 of them, invariably starring in them as well. With his new film. Bird, he stayed behind the camera to tell the story of jazz great Charlie Parker - a significant departure in Eastwood's extraordinary career. Despite the commercial success of his films, critical acclaim has sometimes eluded him, particularly in his own country. Bird, however, has opened to rave reviews from all the American media. The Village Voice called it 'the best jazz movie ever made'. Arena goes to Nevada to talk to Clint Eastwood about the new film and about his career as a director. He feels no resentment of the critics who are now reassessing his reputation. 'I survived them,' he smiles.
Dec 2, 1988
Born in Sri Lanka in 1943, educated in Dulwich and now living in Canada, Michael Ondaatje has criss-crossed the world in a search for what he calls the 'unofficial story'. Ondaatje takes mythical characters like the outlaw Billy the Kid and the mysterious Buddy Bolden , father of New Orleans Jazz, and reconstructs their stories using 'prose, white space and photographs' with a style that has won him critical acclaim from all over the world. It is a style that has been described as 'cinematic, like a dream and like the notes that stuttered out of Buddy Bolden 's cornet'. Rob Walker , director of Dead Head and Blind Justice, evokes the elusive world of Michael Ondaatje through dramatisation and testimony from the author himself.
Dec 9, 1988
From Dundalk to Dungannon, Ballycastle to Belfast, Field Day, Ireland's foremost touring theatre company, journeys past checkpoints and critics with Brian Friel's controversial new play Making History. Arena follows the trail of actor Stephen Rea and fellow Field Day directors, Seamus Heaney and Tom Paulin, on a personal mission to investigate the distortion of Ireland's history by the work of poets, priests and politicians.
Dec 16, 1988
When Nat King Cole died in 1965, the world lost its greatest ballad singer. Last year, 22 years after his death, When I Fall in Love reached number 4 in the British charts. This portrait traces the singer's life from his birthplace in Alabama through his early career as a brilliant young jazz pianist in Chicago to world famous vocalist. Tonight's programme includes vintage film of Cole talking and performing his best loved songs with contributions from his wife Maria, and his daughter Natalie, and from friends and colleagues including Harry Belafonte, Ella Fitzgerald, Quincy Jones, Buddy Greco, Eartha Kitt, Oscar Peterson and Frank Sinatra who says: 'I just wanted to sound as good as Nat - I don't know if! made it'.
Dec 23, 1988
Award-winning director Jana Bokova presents a typically idiosyncratic portrait of Europe's most fashionable city. An equally eccentric and fascinating collection of characters offer a personal view of Barcelona, where a new cosmopolitan awareness sits alongside the proud Catalan sense of place and history. Tony Miro is one of Barcelona's top fashion designers, Tito makes gigantic sculptures out of human hair, and Carmen de Roca Sastre is a wonderfully imposing 80-year-old Catalan who lives in Gaudi's magnificent La Pedrera. They are joined by performance artist, Albert Vidal; futuristic designer, Louis Fortes; and transvestites Emmy and Liberty. As they tell us about their lives, they reveal the more bizarre side of the city that has become Spain's gateway to Europe.
Jan 6, 1989
With more visitors than the whole of Greece and more holiday beds than Portugal, Blackpool is Europe's most successful holiday resort. Growing to prominence in the Industrial Revolution it was a town 'built for fun'. Arena takes a look at this town, famous for its Tower, illuminations, formidable landladies and party political conferences. Exploring the British at work and play we visit the nightclubs, clairvoyants, politicians and guesthouses. Forty-two members of the George Formby Society playing musical tribute to their hero, memory man Tom Moreton, John Cole, Tony Benn, Norman Tebbit, Paul Theroux and a 50s' film star retracing her past are all beside the seaside.
Jan 13, 1989
Breasts/bosoms/bust/boobs/bristols/knockers... we live in a breast-obsessed society and 'tits' are by no means the preserve of the tabloids; the symbolism of the breast is expressed in film, fashion and filth. From body beautiful to breast bondage these twin peaks have become a fountainhead of contradictions. The film looks at the ways in which the bosom is idealised and the means by which it is trivialised and denigrated. In her lifetime a woman will see her breasts transformed from sexual to maternal and perhaps, ultimately, dispensable objects. It is dealing with breast cancer that is 'the tip of the iceberg' for women, who have grown up feeling ambivalent and estranged from part of their own bodies. Contributors to the film include Barbara Windsor, Jane Russell, Marina Warner, Sheila Kitzinger, American poet Andre Lorde, Vivienne Westwood, Anna Raeburn and Russ Meyer. Feature: page 48
Jan 27, 1989
Arena presents two films by award-winning director Georg Troller , made for West German television's leading arts programme Personenbeschreibung. Sir Laurens van der Post is the subject of the first film. Known in the popular press as a friend and mentor of Prince Charles, Sir Laurens has devoted his life to drawing the world's attention to the plight of Africa's threatened tribes. The second film is a portrait of Texan criminal Albert Sample whose autobiography Racehoss tells the harrowing story of his 16-year sentence for armed robbery in a notorious Texan prison and subsequent rehabilitation.
Feb 3, 1989
eyond the familiar world of Wall Street and Madison Avenue, there is another New York, whose roots lie in West and Central Africa. Successive waves of newcomers of African descent have brought to the world's most glamorous city their own gods, myths and rituals. Robert Farris Thompson , Professor of Art History at Yale University, has been tracking down the survival of African traditions in New York. This film follows his exploration of Haitian vodun, the rituals which lie behind salsa music, the Brazilian martial art capoeira and hip-hop. It discovers how the lives of men and women, including a psychologist, a social worker, a businessman and an artist, have been affected by contact with African-derived religions.
Feb 10, 1989
The absurdity of life has been Eugene lonesco's theme and preoccupation since he wrote the first of his 33 plays and, alongside Beckett and Genet, created a revolution in the theatre. Ironically, that first play, The Bald Prima Donna has become the Parisian Mousetrap, running non-stop for over 30 years and 10,000 performances. Tonight's Arena assesses the life and work of one of the century's outstanding dramatists, who, at 77, remains an unrepentant champion of the Theatre of the Absurd. Peter Hall , who directed the first Ionesco play in this country, talks about the playwright's relevance today, and Jonathan Miller ponders the difference between French and English nonsense. If, as Ionesco says, 'God created the world as a joke, our only response can be to laugh'.
Feb 17, 1989
Actor and director, John Cassavetes, who died earlier this month was one of the few truly independent movie-makers working out of Hollywood. In this tribute to an influential and innovative artist, friends, associates and fellow directors remember the man and his work. From his revolutionary "Shadows" (1959) which won the Venice Film Festival critics award he established a unique working relationship with his repertory of actors, including Peter Falk, Ben Gazzara and Gena Rowlands. He said that he was more interested in the people he worked with than the finished film. In 1970 Cassavetes allowed a BBC crew onto the set of "Husbands" to watch him at work. The results, intensive, intimate, and sometimes frenetic, are included tonight. ("Husbands" is at 12.05 am)
Feb 24, 1989
Ten years ago, Vernon Oxford turned his back on the bright lights of Nashville and a life as a popular country singer, and gave himself to the Lord. Today, he is a gospel preacher in Franklin, Tennessee but his congregation extends beyond his own community in the southern states of America. He takes his mission to his spiritual cousins in Northern Ireland, who share the same fundamentalist Protestant beliefs. Tonight's film follows Oxford from Nashville to Belfast as he pursues his healing mission through the houses of God and of the Devil. He sings his songs of redemption in the streets, the churches and the drinking dens, and finally to the prision officers of the Maze. Power in the Blood is a passionate journey to the heart of the province and reveals a Northern Ireland that remains hidden from the cameras and news reports.
Mar 3, 1989
Elton John's jukebox sold at Sotheby's for £16,000. It has come a long way since it left the Wurlitzer factory in 1942. It is the same with most jukeboxes; they once entertained bars, diners and roadstops throughout America, but are now highly collectable artifacts, fulfilling the dreams, memories and fantasies of their proud owners. The Americans are celebrating the 100th anniversary of the jukebox this year, but some say an Englishman by the name of Charles Adams-Randall pipped the Americans to the post when he patented a coin-operated phonograph in 1888. Since then the jukebox has found a special way into the Englishman's heart. Arena explores the world of the jukebox in England and finds that an Englishman's home is his castle and surely no castle could be complete without one of these fine articles. Record: the Arena' theme music is now available as a CD single (CDT41) on Editions EG, from retailers.
Mar 17, 1989
Arena continues its centenary celebration of the jukebox with a special edition of one of the original pop music programmes. Juke Box Jury is 30 years old and was essential weekend viewing for every pop music fan throughout the 60s. David Jacobs is back in the chair spinning this week's new releases in the famous Rock-ola. On the special jury for the music world this evening are Pete Murray and Dusty Springfield, who were regular panellists on the original series, and newcomers Phil Collins and Sarah Jane Morris.
Mar 19, 1989
Born in Georgia in 1901, Berthold Lubetkin is one of the most outstanding and influential architects in Britain. His life has spanned the Russian Revolution and two World Wars. Finally, in 1982 he was awarded the highest honour the RIBA can grant - the Royal Gold Medal, in belated recognition of his achievements. Best known for the abstract elegance of the Penguin Pool at London Zoo, he remains an isolated figure constantly fighting bureaucracy and indifference; he has remained an unapologetic champion of the ideals of modernism while fiercely attacking many of its most celebrated exponents. In tonight's Arena Richard Rogers, Peter Palumbo , Lord Zuckerman and others assess the unique influence that Lubetkin has had on generations of architects.
Mar 31, 1989
Ever since its noisy birth out of the primitive fuzzboxes of the 1960s, heavy metal music has been maligned and misunderstood by public and critics alike. But, to its millions of fans worldwide, heavy metal is the only form of popular music with any integrity, the true keeper of the eternal flame of rock 'n' roll. This is an exploration of the music in all its aspects, from its origins in the blues to the Black Country and beyond, with the aid of a truly unbeatable line-up including Jimmy Page, Ozzy Osbourne , Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, Motorhead, Guns 'n' Roses, Iron Maiden, Deep Purple, Metallica, Megadeth, Slayer, Jimi Hendrix, Kiss, David Lee Roth and Napalm Death. Plus an oblique look at heavy metal's event of the year; Castle Donington, where the fans gather as devotedly as pilgrims to Canterbury.
Apr 7, 1989
For some 25 years the author Graham Greene found himself the victim of a bizarre masquerade. A man calling himself Graham Greene opened hotels in Jamaica, courted high society in the south of France and was entertained in India by tea planters convinced that he was the real author. The other Graham Greene has left few traces behind, letters and the occasional photo, collected over the years by Graham Greene like clues from one of his own thrillers. But is 'the other' perhaps a decoy, invented by the secretive Greene to confuse and deceive his chosen biographer Norman Sherry? On the 25th anniversary of BBC2 Greene himself joins Arena on the trail of his Doppelganger, in a search for the real Graham Greene.
Apr 21, 1989
'Look at the clocks - it doesn't matter if they're wrong. Somewhere in the world the time is right.' A typical line from Slim Gaillard. He became a jazz legend, collaborating with Charlie Parker ; he was a Second World War bomber pilot; Marvin Gaye 's father-in-law; and is fluent in Greek, Arabic, Spanish and his own 'Vout-o-Reenee' language; he appeared in 25 films including Hellzapoppin' and Roots; and drove a hearse for the notorious Purple Gang. Since he was stranded alone in Crete, aged 12, on a voyage from his native Cuba, Slim's life has been a spectacular, and sometimes traumatic, adventure. He tells his amazing story over four episodes with Dizzy Gillespie , Van Morrison , his and Marvin Gaye 's family, Frankie Laine (whom he discovered) and the peanut that went to the moon. An Arena special.
Oct 22, 1989
In 1938 jazz legend and international star Slim Gaillard went to Hollywood to appear in Hellzapoppin: and then war broke out. Gaillard became one of America's first black bomber pilots; this week he recalls that profound and traumatic experience. With the help of Van Morrison he re-enacts a famous encounter with his beat disciple, novelist Jack Kerouac; he settles an old score with Little Richard; appears on America's craziest chat show; and meets the peanut that went to the moon. An 'Arena' special
Oct 29, 1989
This week Slim Gaillard cooks dinner for his old friend Dizzy Gillespie. They discuss the English language and their contributions to it — 'bebop' and 'Vout-o-reenee'. They also recall working with Charlie Parker and conjure up the ghosts of the other great names of 52nd Street in its jazz heyday. And from Hollywood - memories of the days when the likes of Bob Hope and Marlene Dietrich were swapping items from Gaillard's Vout-o-reenee dictionary.
Nov 5, 1989
Some people see the pig as representing dirt, sloth and obesity; others view it with affection. In this film we see them all: farmyard pigs, performing pigs, pigs as pets, piggy banks, pigs on film - in all its many rotund forms.
Dec 16, 1989
A film version of Heathcote Williams 's epic poem, an impassioned hymn of praise to one of nature's most magnificent creatures, and a lament at man's folly of hunting it to near extinction. The poem is read by its author, intercut with extraordinary film of elephants, and accompanied by a specially composed soundtrack from the BBC Radiophonic Workshop.
Dec 16, 1989
The animals in wildlife films have always been vying for attention with that eccentric breed - the animal presenter. This medley of classic clips of wildlife films from the last 50 years celebrates the naive enthusiasm of these rare creatures and charts the changing attitudes to animals on television.
Dec 16, 1989
In the 1920s a middle-aged spinster went to buy a yard of ribbon and came out with a baby gorilla. He was the first gorilla to survive captivity. His uncanny intelligence and versatility became legendary, inspiring King Kong stories. But he came to a tragic end when he was shipped to the Barnum and Bailey circus in New York where he pined for his owner and then 'died of a broken heart'.
Dec 16, 1989
What does Sam get up to when he's left on his own all day? This verite portrait looks at an ordinary day in the mysterious life of a very ordinary dog.
Dec 16, 1989
Novelist Julian Bames, philosopher Nicholas Humphrey and French historian Dr Michel Rousseau help to uncover one of the most bizarre chapters in criminal history: the judicial prosecution and capital punishment of animals throughout Europe during the Middle Ages and beyond.
Dec 16, 1989
Speciesism, vivisection, vegetarianism, farming, sport, zoos, circuses and pets will be some of the topics discussed in a live debate chaired by Donald MacCormick at the Royal Institution of Great Britain. Writer Germaine Greer and philosophers Tom Regan and Mary Warnock are among the speakers who debate the motion: 'The animal kingdom needs a bill of rights'.
Dec 16, 1989
The phenomenal career of the Rolling Stones has taken them from being the bad boys of rock 'n' roll to becoming proteges of the establishment. They now tell their own story ... The programme includes previously unseen performances from the Stones's own archive and is introduced and narrated by the band themselves.
Dec 27, 1989
So says Gregory Chaitin, one of the world's three leading mathematicians, addressing the camera from the deep recesses of the IBM building in Yorktown Heights, New York State. He cheerfully proposes that he has proved nothing is fixed in a shifting universe. However, for others numbers promise pattern and certainty - Rabbi Dr Tali Lowenthal believes everything has numerological significance up to and including the Name of God too holy to be written; to record producer Andy Richards all music comes down to the number 4; to Janet Street-Porter, numbers give a lift to the nomenclature of her TV output, and to Michael Gardner 666 is truly the Mark of the Beast. Most of us take numbers for granted - Arena takes a second look.
Jan 19, 1990
Oblomov is a slob. Even Gorbachev is said to have denounced him from the podium: 'We must stamp out the Oblomovs from our society.' The lazy aristocrat of Goncharov's 19th-century masterpiece has become a Russian folk-hero. After 100 years asleep, Oblomov is re-awoken in modem-day Russia - this time as a lazy party bureaucrat. Perestroika, quite frankly, bores him. He was more at home in Brezhnev's 'Period of Stagnation'. Oblomov's foul-tempered chauffeur, Zachar, narrates this bizarre tragi-comedy: for the story of Oblomov's vain attempts to raise himself from his bed is the story of Russia. Filmed on location in the Soviet Union.
Jan 26, 1990
This is the story of 'the Killer', the ultimate wild man of rock, from his phenomenal success at the age of 20 with Whole Lotta Shakin' Going On to the present. After more than 30 years, Lewis remains unapologetic and unique. A product of the Bible belt, Lewis's life has been a strange, tormented conflict between his excesses and his religious fears. His cousin, Jimmy Lee Swaggart, devoted many a sermon to the recovery of Jerry Lee's soul. Lewis has seen the deaths of two wives, two children and a brother, shot his bass player and been arrested for causing a disturbance outside Elvis Presley's mansion in Memphis. Arena tells his story with help from Sam Phillips, the man who first recorded Lewis and Presley, Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, Jimmy Lee Swaggart, Lewis's wife Myra, Paul Anka and Chuck Berry.
Feb 2, 1990
The great Italian film director, who died in 1977, was the founder of 'neo-realism'. Following the international success of his films dealing with the Second World War - Rome, Open City and Paisa - he turned in the 50s to psychological drama. His affair and subsequent marriage to Ingrid Bergman created a major scandal. Eventually he abandoned the cinema for a series of documentaries on historical figures as part of a great mission to educate the world. Bearing witness to his genius will be his daughter Isabella, son Gil, directors the Taviani brothers, Carlo Lizzani and Lindsay Anderson. There is also rare footage of Rossellini.
Feb 9, 1990
Traditional Jewish humour flourished in adversity. Religious persecution and life in the ghetto nurtured its own kind of bitter comedy which, in 20th-century America, has developed into a recognisable and acclaimed style of humour. Arena examines this rich heritage of comic genius, and includes contributions from Milton Berle , Jackie Mason , Joan Rivers and Billy Crystal.
Feb 23, 1990
Salif Keita - the golden voice of Mali - is one of the firstà African world superstars. He can trace his lineage directly back more than 700 years to its founder, the warrior king Sundiata Keita. Salif Keita's story is an exceptional one - not only for breaking away from these traditions, but for overcoming the stigma of being born albino. Arena returns with Salif to his village birthplace in Djoliba, through the insidiously beautiful surrounding plains and to the mystical cliffs of Bandiagara - all sources of his underlying deep spirituality and his haunting music.
Mar 2, 1990
Fred Zinnemann, best known for the classic western High Noon, has had a career in movies spanning 65 years. In an exclusive interview with Arena, Zinnemann talks about his life from his early training in Paris, via Berlin, to his arrival in Hollywood in 1929. One of the great Hollywood mavericks, working both in and out of the studio system, he generated a body of work impressive in range and quality, as well as bringing to the screen for the first time such names as Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift, Grace Kelly, Meryl Streep and John Hurt. With films like From Here to Eternity, Oklahoma!, A Man for All Seasons, Day of the Jackal and Julia, Zinnemann became known as the director's director and talks disarmingly about his failures as well as his successes.
Mar 9, 1990
Actor and director Spike Lee joins actress Debbie Allen on a journey in search of the perfect vocal performance. They travel through Brooklyn as different groups duel, jam and rehearse together, without the benefit of an instrument other than their own voices, culminating in an all-star a cappella concert. The film, the directorial debut of cinematographer Ernest Dickerson , features contemporary vocal groups such as the Persuasions and Ladysmith Black Mambazo.
Mar 16, 1990
Now in her 80s, Peggy Ramsay is the most powerful and unconventional play agent in Britain. She started her agency in the mid-50s in a converted brothel in the West End and has been responsible for the careers of over 70 writers including David Mercer, Robert Bolt, John Arden, David Rudkin, Edward Bond, Willy Russell and Joe Orton. Ramsay was played by Vanessa Redgrave in the Orton biopic Prick Up Your Ears. This film shows her working with playwrights David Hare, Caryl Churchill, Stephen Poliakoff and Christopher Hampton, follows her on an outing to the Barbican and taking a trip to Scarborough to visit Alan Ayckbourn.
Mar 23, 1990
The term 'English rose' conjures up a variety of images which fall somewhere between the delicate pink roses of high summer and the fair complexion of a young girl. Either way, the term is synonymous with beauty and innocence, and through the centuries has been absorbed into our heritage. Arena goes in search of the perfect English rose in a journey through fact and fairy tale, history, religion and the back garden. Are we looking for a girl or a perfect exhibition bloom? Contributors include Jack Harkness, OBE, breeder and rose grower; Don Charlton, rose-growing champion; Barbara Daly, make-up artist and creator of 'the face' of Princess Diana for her wedding; Cyril Fletcher and Jane Asher, both of whom have given their names to famous roses.
Mar 30, 1990
They call themselves the 'Children'. By day they are cycle-messengers, assistants in department stores, prostitutes or unemployed; by night they are members of clubs or houses with such exotic names as the House of Chanel, the House of St Laurent and the House of Ninja. They gather together on the streets and in each other's apartments, where they do battle - not by violence, but by their dancing and the clothes they wear. Arena follows a band of devotees as they dance from House to House, in styles such as the acrobatic dance form 'Vogueing', competing furiously for trophies and fame for a day.
Apr 6, 1990
On 4 July 1967, Private Raymond Griffiths was killed in Vietnam. He was 19 years old - the average age of US combat troops in the war. He was one of more than 30,000 American service personnel killed or wounded in eight years of vicious fighting, which also saw the deaths of a million and a half Vietnamese soldiers and civilians. This powerful documentary tells the stories of the GI's in their own words, words they wrote home in letters from Vietnam. They were young and, like all soldiers, they wanted to return home alive.
Apr 13, 1990
Cuba's legendary capital, once a playground for the rich, has an extraordinary faded beauty with its grand colonial palaces decaying into crumbling tenements. Since the popular revolution 30 years ago, Cuba has been viewed by the west as the acceptable face of communism, with Dr Fidel Castro seen as a folk hero and a benevolent dictator. But Cuban writers and artists in exile tell a different story - one of unspoken repression and intolerance. This Arena special goes behind the once great city's public face, persuading its inhabitants to speak intimately about their lives and revealing a Havana previously unseen. The film tells its story through the work of Cuba's greatest writers and artists, both in exile and at home, but mainly through the eyes of the people of the city of Havana.
Apr 15, 1990
Niccolo Machiavelli 's infamous The Prince is a short book about power - how to get it and how to hang on to it. But if 'he' were changed to 'she' throughout, would Machiavelli's masterpiece provide an insight into the remarkable success of a considerable number of women today, not least this century's longest surviving Prime Minister? Arena tests this phenomenon against the world's greatest power manual and wonders what has happened to feminism at the end of the 80s.
Apr 20, 1990
Krzysztof Kieslowski is the foremost director to have emerged in Poland since Andrzej Wadja. His two most recent features, A Short Film about Killing and A Short Film about Love, shocked western audiences and critics with their pessimism and brutality. Shot during the final months of communist rule they are actually two in an extraordinary cycle of films made for Polish television. Each uses one of the Ten Commandments to explore the morality of Polish society - their subjects range from suicide to stamp-collecting, from incest to home computers. Arena talks to Kieslowski about these parables of contemporary life and his role as a modern-day Moses.
May 4, 1990
Paris's love affair with the black world stretches from the Cubists' discovery of African sculpture at the beginning of the century to the present day appreciation of rap and African popular music. This programme celebrates black culture and its lasting contribution to the artistic life of a great city. Appearing in the film: Louis Armstrong , Brigitte Bardot, Sydney Bechet, Jean Cocteau and many others.
May 11, 1990
Tonight's programme looks at the Soviet cinema since perestroika and examines the work of some of its most important film directors who are working again after years of enforced silence. Through film clips and interviews, Arena discusses the work and problems of directors Rustam Khamdamov, Kira Muratova and Sergei Paradzhanov , and one of the first westerners to work on a Russian production, French film star Jeanne Moreau. Will they be able to sell their concept to a population brought up on undemanding mass cinema?
May 18, 1990
When Lenin told the newly formed Communist Party of Great Britain that its survival depended on having a daily paper, he could not have forseen that after 60 years of heroic struggle the Daily Worker, renamed in 1966 the Morning Star, would come perilously close to extinction because today's leader of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, had cancelled half its subscription. Beatrix Campbell, who worked on the paper for ten years during the turbulent 60s and 70s, talks to the people who sustained it during its glorious triumphs and constant crises, and in its pages finds a unique reflection of the history and culture of Britain.
May 25, 1990
Considered by many to be our greatest living stand-up comedian, the incomparable Francis Alick Howerd holds a special place in the hearts of the British public. Born during a snowstorm, the shy young Howerd managed to construct a unique comedy persona from his stammering, stumbling manner. A spectacular debut on radio's post-war hit Variety Bandbox was followed by celebrated forays into film, theatre and even opera, although perhaps he is still best remembered as the devious slave Lurcio from television's Up Pompeii. Of late, he has become popular with an entirely new generation of young adults, whom he calls his 'Frankie Pankies'. Tonight Arena examines the style of this inimitable performer with the help of friends and colleagues including Eric Sykes, Johnny Speight, June Whitfield and Ned Sherrin.
Jun 1, 1990
This Arena Special celebrates the centenary of Dame Agatha Christie's birth with the first film biography of the world's most widely read author. Total sales of her crime novels are calculated in billions, but the creator of Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot remains an enigma. During her lifetime Christie guarded her privacy jealously, avoiding interviews and giving little of herself away in her writings. From the narrow confines of a solitary Edwardian childhood to the enduring mystery of her strange disappearance in 1926, Arena Special investigates the contradictions in this shy and outwardly respectable English lady who spent her professional life devising the perfect English murder.
Sep 20, 1990
A new musical, Township Fever, is about to open on Broadway. Written by Mbongeni Ngema , the co-author of Woza Albert , it is vibrant and funny, but also quite shocking and controversial - because it goes right into the heart of the violence in South Africa. This Screenplay/Arena film explores how the musical was created and features striking extracts from it. A Distant Horizon production in association with BBCtv
Sep 29, 1990
Tonight Arena brings you an evening of short films and a debate devoted to that most universal of subjects, food. Spitting Image has created your hosts, Meat and Two Veg. From their kitchen/diner they talk to an a la carte menu of delicacies including Colin the Couch Potato and Russell Sprout.
Dec 15, 1990
Today's hypermarket is an Aladdin's cave compared to the grocery store of 30 years ago. Food Night looks at the ever-increasing gulf between what appears on the supermarket shelf and the original ingredients.
Dec 15, 1990
A salute to four great thinkers. If Rossini had not preferred food to music there would have been no Tornados Rossini. If Nellie Melba had not become so fat through eating too many of the Peach Melbas created for her by Escoffier, he would not have had to remedy the situation by inventing Melba Toast. If he hadn't lost his all on that last turn of the cards, would the Earl of Sandwich have found inspiration for a snack? Today, would a champion of the people like Garibaldi have to share the honours with a biscuit called the 'Mandela'? Bernard Bresslaw, aided by David Troughton and Christopher Ryan, brings these food heroes to life.
Dec 15, 1990
Food has had a part to play in religion, politics, science and war, and throughout history has underlined the social divide between prince and peasant. Today food remains as divisive as ever.
Dec 15, 1990
Some lessons in manners from the silver screen - Five Easy Pieces, Tampopo, Oliver Twist and more.
Dec 15, 1990
This film explores the application of kosher dietary laws which have helped to preserve the separate identity of the Jewish people.
Dec 15, 1990
Louisiana State Penitentiary recently released a list of the last meals ordered by prisoners about to be executed. One man, whose crime was shooting a grocery store attendant, requested Jalapeno peppers, two boxes of Frosties and a pint of milk. Food Night examines the custom of using food as a final consolation and last rite for those condemned to death.
Dec 15, 1990
With the help of potato experts from all over the world Food Night pays homage to this nutritious, delicious, maligned and sometimes despised vegetable - the paradoxical potato.
Dec 15, 1990
A chance to sample some favourites from the kitchens of such legends as Fanny Cradock, Zena Skinner and Delia Smith. Director Sarah Mortimer
Dec 15, 1990
Mealworms served in a cherry tomato, grasshoppers rolled in bacon - these are just a few of the nourishing dishes served up in this film which explores repulsion and revulsion in food taste.
Dec 15, 1990
Left to your own devices, what do you eat, when do you eat it and how much of it do you eat?
Dec 15, 1990
As Christmas approaches, time to contemplate self-denial.
Dec 15, 1990
As the evening's climax, Arena assembles a forum of distinguished politicians, economists, nutritionists, moralists and senders and receivers of aid to debate the international politics of food.
Dec 15, 1990
A spectacular musical celebration of life, capturing evolution in all its glorious diversity, and the rhythms of nature in all its beauty, delight, and horror. From the raging furnace of volcanoes to frozen glaciers, deserts and humid rainforests, Lifepulse is a dramatic visual journey, starting in primeval chaos and ending with the rise of the primates and of man, who now threatens the environment that nurtured him. A specially composed soundtrack by the Startled Insects is enhanced by the use of natural sounds.
Dec 28, 1990
Nelson Mandela, since his release, has become one of the most famous people in the world. Everyone has heard of the leader, but Mandela the man remains an enigma. For the first time he talks about his life and times from a personal standpoint. Arena invited Arthur Miller, veteran of half a century of meditation on moral and social issues, to Soweto and to talk to Mandela. In the intimate setting of his home, they discuss Mandela's life and their hopes and fears for the future of South Africa and the world.
Jan 18, 1991
Derek Jarman is a uniquely British outsider: a painter, film-maker and a self-appointed enfant terrible with a paradoxical affection for tradition. He makes films as a painter or poet, rather than as a conventional film-maker; his subject matter includes Shakespeare's Tempest, a critique of Great Britain in Jubilee year and Sebastiane, an openly gay interpretation of the saint's martyrdom. The programme includes clips from all his work, including his latest film, The Garden.
Jan 25, 1991
Kiefer is Germany's most controversial and reclusive artist. He is also its most successful. The millions his work commands in the auction houses and his popularity with collectors belies the sombreness of the subject matter - Germany's past. Through Wagnerian legend, historical conjecture and ancient mythology, Kiefer offers a personal view of Germany today that is both an exorcism and a warning. Never before filmed, Kiefer has collaborated with Arena in an unusual portrait in which he sets out to 'disinter some corpses from Germany's past'.
Feb 1, 1991
On 3 February 1967, Joe Meek, composer of Telstar and pioneer independent producer, shot his landlady and then himself. With Humphrey Lyttelton, Screaming Lord Sutch, Heinz, Jonathan King, John Leyton and Jess Conrad, Arena charts this Ortonesque tale.
Feb 8, 1991
Rocky is the name of American artist Robert Rauschenberg's pet turtle. It is also the name of an epic and visionary project which in the last eight years has taken Rauschenberg around the world a dozen times: Roci - the Rauschenberg Overseas Cultural Interchange. The resulting work is shown in a huge exhibition, ending in a retrospective in Washington in spring of this year.
Feb 22, 1991
December 1990: a rusty ship drifts silently in the North Sea. As the Government and its Broadcasting Bill close in for the kill, Radio Caroline could be silenced for ever. For Ronan O'Rahilly, its founder, it was always part party, part social revolution. Today Caroline is kept alive by a group of devotees called the Caroline Movement. To them the ship is a temple, to visit, to photograph, to dream of working on. Meanwhile O'Rahilly plans his next move.
Mar 1, 1991
This profile of Keith Waterhouse follows him through his hectic diary. As a columnist for the Daily Mail he reports from the Conservative conference in Bournemouth and the Labour conference in Blackpool, where he slips away to become a tram driver. As the playwright of Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell he tutors the real Jeffrey Bernard in the delicate art of making eggs fly into beer glasses. As a novelist he does research in Haywards Heath. And while one play ends, another one - Bookends - opens in Brighton. He also finds time for his favourite hobby, lunch.
Mar 8, 1991
It has been said that the English hoard words like misers and the Irish spend them like sailors. Tonight's Arena presents three great Irish masters of the English language, Flann O'Brien, Patrick Kavanagh and Brendan Behan. Anthony Cronin, poet, friend and fellow-drinker, recalls their genius and their wild exploits in Dublin.
Mar 15, 1991
For more than two decades, Van Morrison has been fusing different musical influences, creating a style of his own. In this programme he duets with Bob Dylan and plays harmonica with blues legend John Lee Hooker. He leads the Danish Radio Big Band, sings with Irish folk group the Chieftains and relives the heyday of 60s r 'n' b with the Georgie Fame Band.
Mar 16, 1991
This one-man show based on the life of Oscar Wilde was the jewel in the crown for Irish actor Michael MacLiammoir 's career. The programme was first shown on St Patrick's Day 1964.
Mar 17, 1991
Roci Rocky is the name of American artist Robert Rauschenberg 's pet turtle. It is also the name of an epic and visionary project which in the last eight years has taken Rauschenberg around the world a dozen times: Roci - the Rauschenberg Overseas Cultural Interchange. The resulting work is shown in a huge exhibition, ending in a retrospective in Washington in spring of this year.
Mar 22, 1991
When Kenneth Anger first published his classic expose of Hollywood's best-kept secrets and scandals, it was immediately banned. The underground film-maker struck a raw nerve in 'tinsel town'. Tonight he goes for a 'walk on the wild side' with Marianne Faithfull, the man who embalmed Marilyn Monroe and American comic Mike McShane who plays the god of Hollywood. Irreverent but affectionate, Anger reveals the origins of the casting couch, why James Dean was 'the human ashtray' and the truth behind Fatty Arbuckle's public disgrace.
Apr 5, 1991
Top US crime writer Elmore Leonard 's street-wise characters range from violent hoodlums in and around Detroit to low-life hustlers on Florida's Gold Coast. Arena travels with him as he visits some of the colourful and contrasting people and places that have been the inspiration for his bestselling books, meeting homicide cops, a Hollywood producer, a circuit court judge and the mermaids of Weeki Wachee.
Apr 12, 1991
In the last of the current series of Arena, musical performance artist Laurie Anderson presents an examination of mankind's obsession with its own image. For thousands of years artists and scientists have attempted to unravel the enigmas of the human face. The disembodied head is a symbol of humanity, conveyor of information and portrayer of emotion. Now modern computer technology may be on the verge of unlocking some of the mysteries of the human face.
Apr 19, 1991
A show as big as the Lone Star State this is an epic voyage through the wildest state in the union - from the honkytonks and dancehalls to the hill country and burning deserts; from big cities to towns so tiny they're not even on the map. A departure from the style of Arena's previous TV nights, this programme takes the form of one continuous film with three intermissions. The guide for the evening is Texas's only Jewish retired country singer turned detective - Kinky Friedman. In the spirit of his mystery novels, he goes on a quest deep into the heart of Texas to find out what makes it so darn different from everywhere else.
Apr 24, 1991
Brutalised at home and school, John Healy drinks a promising boxing career into the "grass arena" - the savage community of vagrant alcoholics. He drifts towards certain death, until a fellow prisoner teaches him chess. His striking new talent leads him to compete in championships where he plays for recognition and a chance to belong. This film won the Michael Powell Award for Best Feature Film at last year's Edinburgh Film Festival and the Grand Prix at the Dinard Film Festival in France.
Jan 19, 1992
The first of a special three-part presentation in which American film director Billy Wilder discusses his career with German film maker Volker Schlondorff. From Marlene Dietrich to Marilyn Monroe. Humphrey Bogart to Gary Cooper , Wilder has directed the film industry's greatest legends. Normally a private man, tonight he reminisces about his early years in Hollywood with fellow emigres Fritz Lang and his mentor, Ernst Lubitsch (the programme's title is derived from a sign in Wilder's office which asks: "Lubitsch, how did you do it?"), and describes working with Dietrich on his emotional return to post-war Berlin.
Jan 23, 1992
Second of three in-depth conversations with the film director and writer Billy Wilder. He recalls his memories of the great Hollywood stars - "Mae West walked out of the door all white gold and feathers. She looked like a locomotive." He talks about working with silent film star Gloria Swanson on Sunset Boulevard, the tensions of working with Humphrey Bogart and the consummate artistry of Gary Cooper.
Jan 24, 1992
Last of a special three-part presentation in which American director Billy Wilder discusses his career. He remembers working with Marilyn Monroe on Some Like It Hot "With Monroe life was a surprise - sometimes she knew eight pages of dialogue by heart, sometimes she had a total block." He discusses the craft of screenwriting, the problems of working with Raymond Chandler and Agatha Christie, and the creative pleasure of improvising with his lifelong collaborator, I.A.L. Diamond.
Jan 25, 1992
When pop artist Peter Blake confessed in a magazine article that his fantasy was to be the mysterious masked wrestler Kendo Nagasaki, who never speaks and never removes his mask, little did he know what the consequences would be. Poet and television producer Paul Yates, also fascinated by the persona of Nagasaki, read the article and proceeded to research the possibility of Blake painting Nagasaki's portrait as a centrepiece for a film which would also, he hoped, include an exclusive interview with Nagasaki himself. Does he exist outside the ring and, if so, who is he? Masters of the Canvas follows Yates's quest for the sitting, the interview and the man behind the myth.
Jan 31, 1992
A portrait of the controversial American film director, Oliver Stone, whose work often arouses the fiercest passions in both supporters and critics. In a revealing interview, Stone looks back on his life and work, reminiscing about his difficult childhood, the effect of his parents' divorce and his decision to travel to Vietnam, first as a teacher and then as a soldier. Featuring clips from his movies and film of him at work on scenes in JFK - his latest film, about the assassination of President Kennedy.
Feb 7, 1992
On 14 February 1989 Salman Rushdie was sentenced to death by the Ayatollah Khomeini. Tonight, on the third anniversary of the fatwa, a gathering of international writers and artists re-asserts the surpassing value of freedom of expression.
Feb 14, 1992
In 1983, David Hampton was arrested for pretending to be the son of actor Sidney Poitier and conning his way into the homes of some of New York's most powerful and influential families. Seven years later this case became the inspiration for the critically acclaimed Broadway play Six Degrees of Separation. Now Hampton is using Richard Golub , one of New York's best-known lawyers, to sue the playwright and the play's producers for millions in a precedent-setting case to see if anyone retains the rights to their own life.
Feb 21, 1992
Rockstar Dean Read was the biggest rock star the communist world had ever seen. Virtually unknown in his native America, the "Red Sinatra" was the first pop musician Mikhail Gorbachev ever heard. He sang My Yiddishe Momma to Yasser Arafat in Palestine, performed for Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua, and was awarded the Lenin Prize in recognition of the millions of records he had sold. In June 1986, he was found dead in a lake in East Berlin, the mysterious circumstances sparking rumours of a KGB plot, a CIA assassination, jealous husbands, or fascist revenge against his communist career. Reggie Nadelson, journalist and author, searches for the truth.
Feb 28, 1992
This film asks how the culture of a country survives amid gunfire. Ivan Rabuzin , the 71-year-old Croatian artist, says his paintings stand as accusations. "They show an image of earthly heaven and they are based on the real world in which I feel happy, in which I paint. But if that real world is being destroyed, then how can I make any links to the ideal, the earthly heaven?" While Rabuzin paints, other artists from the performing and visual arts have joined the fighting in more dramatic ways.
Mar 6, 1992
"I'll either be famous or infamous," declared the controversial German painter who died in 1969. His subjects range from tranquil landscapes to frenzied sex murders, from brutalised war criminals to religious allegories. In his lifetime he found little favour on either side of his divided country. He was hauled before the courts on charges of obscenity, and his paintings were burned by the Nazis as being degenerate, and yet he has more recently been hailed as the "last great German artist of our times". Arena examines the work of an artist who, in the new Germany, is seen as both an influential and unifying figure.
Mar 13, 1992
Refused entry to America from China in 1958 because of the embargo on "communist goods", the giant panda Chi-Chi came to London Zoo - a constant object of media attention and public adoration. Eight years later she was sent on a diplomatic mission to Moscow to mate with the Russian panda An-An, though this attempt to start a thaw of the Cold War failed on day one when she hit An-An. Among those recalling this bizarre tale of sex, spies and the media are Desmond Morris, Sir Denis Forman and Edward Heath, who remembers his own brush with pandas when he was prime minister.
Mar 20, 1992
Tales of the City first appeared in the 70s as a daily column in the San Francisco Chronicle. Armistead Maupin's stories about life in San Francisco as seen through the eyes of a zany cast of characters had such a massive following that he adapted them into a series of six bestselling novels. Tonight's film examines Maupin's varied and controversial career, including his lifelong involvement in gay rights. It also discovers some of the people who provided the inspiration for his characters and visits the city's walkways and backwaters that are the setting for his novels.
Mar 27, 1992
A self-portrait of photographer and film maker Robert Frank. Often called the "eyes of the Beats", Frank's work spans 45 years from his influential book of photographs The Americans in the 1950s to a controversial Rolling Stones documentary in 1972 and a recent photographic assignment in Beirut. For this new film, Frank took personal friends, actors and a film crew to Harlem to create a dramatised exploration of his idea that we all carry a gallery of people in our heads. He believes that a portrait of them is a portrait of the person who chooses to remember them.
Apr 3, 1992
Javier Mariscal is an artist who cannot be categorised - a designer who thinks a Camel cigarette packet has as much value as a Picasso. Phillipe Starck , the doyen of the design world, calls him "the Andy Warhol of Spain". Mariscal himself says, "I make cultural sandwiches for the brain." Always a controversial figure, he has come a long way from his early days peddling underground comics in the bars and streets of Barcelona. Since winning the design commission for the Olympic Games, he has attracted heavy criticism for his commercial exploitation of Cobi, the Olympic mascot. Tonight's film takes a look at the man and his diverse work - comics, animation, sculpture, furniture, interiors, paintings. Whatever the medium, Mariscal's message is invariably enigmatic, eclectic, and above all fun.
Apr 10, 1992
Three films which take a journey through the rich musical heritage of Argentina. The story begins just south of Buenos Aires in the Pampas. This is the land of the gaucho - the solitary hero on his horse, the symbol of Argentinian identity. Today the gaucho might seem to be more a figure of legend than reality, yet just a few miles from the Argentinian capital men and horses keep this tradition alive. With guitar and songs the gauchos continue to tell stories of their lives, their horses and their land.
Apr 17, 1992
Three films which take a journey through the rich musical heritage of Argentina. In the vast regions from the plains of the Pampas to the provinces of the north, three distinct styles of music and dance evolved: the zamba, the chacarera and the chamame. Their precise origins are lost, but they developed in the 19th century from pre-colonial dances and the instruments and music brought by the European settlers and their African slaves. These traditional styles are still the popular music of the whole of northern Argentina where some of the musicians are professional and some are workers who play at festivals and at the weekend, sometimes just for their own families.
Apr 18, 1992
The Calchaquies valleys in the Andes and the Humahuaca canyon form the most underdeveloped and remote region in Argentina, with traditions going back beyond the Inca conquest. The far north with its small mountain villages like Molinos and Cachi is more closely linked to Bolivia and Peru than to the rest of the country. The people of the mountains say their music can be described simply as the "man with the drum". Every year they celebrate a carnival devoted to the honour of Pacha Mama , the Goddess of the Earth. Legend has it that the mountain people were once told "You are the lord of the land", to which they replied "No, sir, we are the sons and daughters of the land".
Apr 19, 1992
Few activities in modern life can rival sport for creating excitement, passion and commitment. Arena takes a look at how the tensions and glories of sporting life are turned into prose by the sportswriter. Hugh Mcllvanney, many times winner of the Sportswriter of the Year Award, and the only sportswriter so far to be named Journalist of the Year, covers three major sporting events - a world title fight in Las Vegas, an England football international and the Cheltenham Gold Cup - and investigates the essence of good sports writing.
Jul 18, 1992
In her first television profile, Linda McCartney talks about her life in photography and, with husband Paul, about the difficulties of being married to a Beatle and how she has coped over the years with a mixed press. She is probably better known for being the wife of a Beatle and a committed vegetarian than for the photographic career she's followed for 30 years. But in the late 60s she was a pioneer of early rock photography and when Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison or the Beatles wanted pictures taken, they would ask for Linda Eastman , as she then was.
Dec 26, 1992
Arena's 1993 season opens with this three-part exploration of the life and work of the enigmatic writer. Greene's obsessions with the seedy world of love, sex, betrayal, disloyalty and failure influenced millions of readers over 60 years. With extracts read by Sir Alec Guinness. England Made Me (1904-39) Tonight's film examines the failures and successes of Greene's early career; investigates his conversion to Catholicism; and explores his intense but unhappy marriage. It includes the first interview with his widow Vivien.
Jan 8, 1993
Disloyalty, secrecy and spying fascinated Greene both in his work and in his private life. Tonight's film charts the hidden years of his life when his marriage broke down and he became involved in a series of intense and turbulent affairs. It begins in 1940 when Kim Philby recruited him as a spy. There is some rare archive footage of Greene in the Belgian Congo, an interview with Kim Philby , and contributions from his widow Vivien, Jocelyn Rickards , Auberon Waugh and John Ie Carre.
Jan 9, 1993
Last of the biographical films, with extracts read by Sir Alec Guinness. A World of My Own (1961-91) Passionately promoting the link between Catholicism and communism, defending Kim Philby , supporting guerrillas in central America or fighting the Mafia in Nice - these were some of the more controversial activities Greene was involved in during his last 30 years. With contributions from Jeffrey Bernard , Koo Stark , John le Carre , Anthony Burgess, Vivien Greene, and interviews with his confessor Father Leopoldo Duran and his companion Yvonne Cloetta.
Jan 10, 1993
In the 1980s American artist J S G Boggs stunned the art world by holding an exhibition of banknotes, drawn by himself. In one go, he broke moral, artistic and legal taboos-counterfeiting money, poking fun at the art world, and raising the question, "Is this art?" The film follows this controversial artist on a journey funded by his hand-painted banknotes through railway stations, supermarkets, restaurants, wine bars and art galleries, as he attempts to evade arrest and discover the real value of money - and art.
Jan 15, 1993
The story of the unlikely and unpublicised relationship between a 60s American rock band and some of Britain's little-known orchestral composers. Once the icons of the San Francisco hippie scene, the Grateful Dead are still a leading touring band. But behind their continuing success, the group hide a secret cause: through their Rex Foundation, they have been anonymously - and usually to the astonishment of the recipients - funding British composers ignored or neglected in their homeland. This mysterious foundation has helped to finance recordings of Havergal Brian's 32 symphonies, for example. And it has enabled the likes of Robert Simpson, Michael Finnissey and James Dillon not only to write their music but to perform and record it as well. This film contrasts the Dead's extravagant shows with the private lives and music of the composers who benefit.
Jan 22, 1993
Elder statesman of jazz and a co-founder of the style that became bebop in the 40s, John Birks "Dizzy" Gillespie will be remembered by many as the trumpet player with ballooning cheeks and a misshapen horn. His career began in the 30s in Philadelphia, taking him on to New York where he met and jammed with two other young jazz greats, Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk. From these improvisations grew the radical new style that revolutionised jazz. He continued to experiment, and in the latter part of his career he took his music to the developing world, incorporating the sounds he found there into his own work. Arenapays tribute to the trumpeter, composer and bandleader who died earlier this month.
Jan 29, 1993
One of the world's leading figures in the battle against Aids is not a doctor, scientist or politician, but a writer - Larry Kramer - who says: "Aids has given me my life's work." A novelist, playwright and screenwriter, Kramer first came to prominence in the 1960s with his screenplay of the film Women in Love. His 1970s novel Faggots caused widespread controversy as he attacked his contemporaries in the gay community for their regime of casual sex and easy promiscuity, earning him the title "the angriest gay man in the world". In the 1980s, when the Aids epidemic began to decimate the community, he was one of the first people to take a political, active stance in bringing it to the attention of the world. In recent years - and with the discovery of his own HIV-positive status - Kramer has withdrawn from activism to concentrate on writing, and his new play, the autobiographical The Destiny of Me, has opened off-Broadway to rave reviews.
Jan 5, 1993
Palestinian writer, academic and exile, Edward W Said takes a journey into the worlds of history, literature, ideas and imagination to explain how he wrote his most recent book, Culture and Imperialism. Opening in New York, "the city of exiles", Said's passionate and challenging TV essay ranges from Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness to the Gulf War. In it, he shows how attitudes forged over the last 200 years continue to enforce the relationship between the west and the developing world. Challenging the barriers imposed by race, religion and nationalism, he argues that the experience of empire connects us all - whoever we are, wherever we are from - that our histories overlap, that all our cultures are hybrid and impure.
Feb 12, 1993
For three decades the Soviet Union's obsession with space stirred the soul of the nation like a secular religion - from the first space star Yuri Gagarin to the sad saga of cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev who circled the planet for almost a year, a helpless spectator of the momentous events back home on earth. Exploring the spiritual force of this grand obsession, Arena talks to Krikalev and the first cosmonauts, and ventures into the world of relics, icons and the memorabilia of the Soviet space venture.
Feb 19, 1993
An interview with the poet who last December won the Nobel prize for literature, and whose current novel-length poem has caused him to be dubbed the "Homer of the Caribbean". He talks to Stuart Hall on the Caribbean island of St Lucia where he was born about how his family, the people of St Lucia and the physical beauty of the island have inspired a brilliant career as poet and playwright spanning more than 40 years. With Europe's current political and ethnic turmoil, the Caribbean mixture of cultures, religions and peoples are, for Walcott, a positive example. He reads from Omeros, which reflects the lives of the St Lucian fishermen today as well as the island's colonial history through the adventures of the mythical characters of classical Greece described in the Odyssey.
Feb 20, 1993
One of China's most successful film directors, Zhang Yimou , talks about his life, his work, and his views on China. The stunning photography and quintessential "Chineseness" of his films - from Red Sorghum, Judou and Raise the Red Lantern to the forthcoming The Story of QiuJu - have won him enormous acclaim in the west, and yet have been met with harsh censorship in China.
Mar 12, 1993
To mark his 60th birthday, and the publication of his new book Operation Shylock, Philip Roth breaks his long silence and talks to Arena about his life, books, and some of the links between the two. Since his outrageous comic novel Portnoy's s Complaint appeared in the late 1960s, Roth's chronicles and comedies of Jewish America have established him as one of the most important writers of his generation. But success has brought hostile criticism and, until now, he has refused every request for a television interview, preferring to present himself in his books in the guise of fictional alter egos.
Mar 19, 1993
To the innocent reader, the characters in a work of fiction are the author's inventions. To those in the know, it is often more complicated. Arena investigates the effect novels can have on those people who do see a resemblance between themselves and a fictional character and asks whether or not it is "entirely coincidental".
Mar 26, 1993
Chronicling New York low and high life, Weegee's photographs have often shocked the world. His wife, Wilma Wilcox , talks about the man behind the myth.
Apr 2, 1993
In 1917, Marcel Duchamp entered a white porcelain object in a New York exhibition. it was a urinal. Arena unearths the origins of this extraordinary story with an account from Duchamp's lover of the time, ceramicist Beatrice Wood.
Apr 2, 1993
An Arena special which documents the making of Reitz's second great German epic, The Second Heimat, which begins on BBC2 next Saturday. When Jewish writer Carole Angier watched the original Heimat (recently repeated on BBC2), she was so moved she wrote to its creator; Reitz responded that she had understood his work better than anyone. She later saw the making of his next epic, the 26-hour Second Heimat. Tonight's programme is a record of Angier's extraordinary experiences witnessing two years of writing and four years of filming.
Apr 12, 1993
The arts series returns with four films tracing the origins of classic rock songs. The inspiration behind Buddy Holly's famous song - Peggy Sue Gerron Rackham - now runs a drainage company in Sacramento, California. Arena takes her back to Lubbock in Texas, where she went to the same high school as Holly and where her marriage to his drummer Jerry Allison inspired a second tribute, Peggy Sue Got Married (Francis Coppola's film of the same name is being shown tomorrow at 10.15pm). She tells how both songs came to be written and provides some fresh insights into Buddy Holly's tragically short career. Among the other people recalling this era is Peggy Sue's neighbour Donna Fox, who also inspired a 50s classic - Ritchie Valens's Donna.
Apr 17, 1993
Brenda Fassie is South Africa's answer to Madonna. A black singer for black people, she is streetwise, outrageous and aiming to be an international star. With her new album I'm Not a Bad Girl, this Arena special shows Brenda Fassie in performance and meets the musicians and media-manipulators working with her in an ever-changing South Africa.
Apr 18, 1993
The second documentary in this Arena series telling the true stories behind classic rock songs is devoted to Elvis Presley's first million-selling release, Heartbreak Hotel. This film tracks down the song's writers, schoolteacher Mae Axton and Country musician Tommy Durden, and discovers that Heartbreak Hotel was inspired by a real-life suicide in Miami in 1955. The lyrics of the song actually incorporate the suicide note found by police at the scene. Heartbreak Hotel launched Elvis into international stardom but the song came back to haunt him at the end of his life, which - alleges controversial biographer Albert Goldman - also ended in suicide. This documentary looks at both his meteoric success and his later decline, through the words and music of the song that made it all happen.
Apr 24, 1993
All the characters named in the song were real people who frequented Andy Warhol's studio in the late 60s. Trans-sexual Holly, and Jackie and Candy, who were transvestites, starred alongside street hustler Joe Dallesandro, in the low-budget films Warhol was making at the time. Lou Reed was another regular visitor to the artist's studio and Walk on the Wild Side is a description of the bizarre and sometimes sordid world inhabited by Warhol's "superstars". Of those named in the song, only "Holly" Woodlawn and "Little Joe" Dallesandro have survived to tell the tale and both are interviewed in the film. An examination of a significant chapter in New York's underground culture, it also includes unseen archive footage of Max's Kansas City, the notorious club made popular by Warhol in the late 60s.
May 1, 1993
Last programme in the Arena series tracing the origins of classic rock songs. This musical journey travels the famous highway that has inspired successive generations of musicians, including Bob Dylan and his 1965 song. One of the longest roads in the USA, Highway 61 runs from the Canadian border, passing by Dylan's home town of Hibbing, Minnesota, en route to New Orleans in the south. The film takes a guided tour of Hibbing in the company of John Bucklen, Dylan's high school friend, who provides some new insights into Dylan's earliest musical experiments. As well as recordings of conversation and music that the two teenagers made in 1958, there are clips of the musicians who have been associated with Highway 61, from Bessie Smith to Elvis Presley and Little Richard.
May 8, 1993
Your television and radio are cast as personalities (played by Peter Cook and Josie Lawrence) in this night of themed programmes showing how the two media have competed over the years, and which medium does what best. To make the most of the evening, as David Attenborough explains in his introduction, you need to have your radio and TV in the same room, so that they can "talk to" each other, although there are times (marked with a dagger) when you can choose between listening and viewing. There's nostalgia, science, drama and documentary. And linking it all, some lively sparring between the spirits of your radio and television, barely controlled by announcer Peter Donaldson.
Dec 18, 1993
Ian McKellen ruminates on the distinct eras of radio broadcasting, characterised as Shakespeare's seven ages of man, with the aid of Professor Asa Briggs.
Dec 18, 1993
Dec 18, 1993
Dec 18, 1993
Alistair Cooke, whose weekly epistle has been broadcast on radio since 1946, explains why it is the best medium for him.
Dec 18, 1993
The story of early radio's method of broadcasting live football, referring to a numbered grid - published in the Radio Times - on which listeners followed the action.
Dec 18, 1993
Dec 18, 1993
Family Sunday meals conjure up for many Family Favourites, Round the Home and The Billy Cotton Band Show.
Dec 18, 1993
Dec 18, 1993
On just one estate in east London there are five pirate stations, battling to stay on air.
Dec 31, 1993
Dec 18, 1993
Does TV steal radio's best comedy ideas? Included in the debate are Frank Muir, Denis Norden, Armando Iannucci and the voice of Spike Milligan.
Dec 18, 1993
Dec 18, 1993
Harold Listings, a frustrated radio technician, takes revenge.
Dec 18, 1993
Dec 18, 1993
Nasa scientists are using giant radio antennae to pick up communications from ET.
Dec 18, 1993
Dr Carl Dolmetsch finds out why the pips changed pitch.
Dec 18, 1993
The tragic story of the lone yachtsman and his radio.
Dec 18, 1993
Live on TV for the first time, Fisher, German Bight, Dogger.
Dec 19, 1993
Concluding BBC2's Arena Radio Night, a film drama starring James Whitmore, Nancy Davis (later Reagan). Joe and Mary Smith are shaken one night when they hear what seems to be the voice of God coming from their radio.
Dec 19, 1993
An exploration of the phenomenal popularity of L Frank Baum 's famous children's story The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, written in 1900. About 20 film versions of the story have been made (including a 1925 one with Oliver Hardy), and the programme includes clips from a selection of these, plus the first TV showing of Baum's own 1908 film and missing footage from the Judy Garland movie.
Jan 29, 1994
In the 1980s Vladimir Pozner , once dubbed "Ivan the Telegenic", became the second most celebrated communist in the west. Carrying Gorbachev's message to western television screens, he intrigued and troubled millions of viewers. But who is he, this unrepentant propagandist and ex-Soviet correspondent who is now a talk-show host in America? Arena follows him over a dramatic year and explores the contradictions in his extraordinary life.
Feb 5, 1994
The new stars of ragga and gangster rap - Shabba Ranks, Ice Cube, Public Enemy, Buju Banton - have become as notorious as they are successful. They command huge audiences and record sales but they have been accused of hating women, inciting violence against gays and encouraging the use of guns. Award-winning film maker Isaac Julien is gay and black and he confronts them.
Feb 12, 1994
For centuries, bare-knuckle boxing has been going on behind closed doors. Nigel Finch's unusual film investigates this illegal activity by following one hopeful as he prepares for a fight against the "Cyclone", the Northern Ireland bare-knuckle boxing champion (unlicensed). Softly spoken Paul Lynch does not conform to the tough image of a street fighter. But he says "it's show business... it's in my blood." Lynch has already found some fame as the world's two-armed, one-armed and one-fingered press-up champion. Now, in a corrugated-iron barn a short sprint from the Irish border, he has the chance for recognition in his own community. Ultimately, the film probably gives as much of an insight into the making of an arts documentary as it does into bare-knuckle boxing.
Feb 26, 1994
During the 1970s and 1980s Derekjarman kept a Super-8 film diary, chronicling the cultural high life and low life of London. The footage ranges from William Burroughs reading aloud at the nightclub Heaven, to candid behind-the-scenes footage of his most controversial feature films including Jubilee and Sebastiane. The original music is written by his long term collaborator Brian Eno. Glitterbug, his last film, is shown as a tribute to Jarman who died on 19 February.
Mar 5, 1994
In 1960 an American film called Primary changed the notion of what a documentary could be, using techniques never before seen on TV. It was made by Robert Drew , whose role in the movement that has become known as cinéma vérité has gone largely unrecognised. Tonight's programme tells his story.
Mar 12, 1994
Seventy million Kalashnikov (or AK-47) guns are scattered across the world. It was the Russians' Cold War weapon and is still the first choice of terrorists, guerrillas and mercenaries. Through the story of Mikhail Timofeyevich Kalashnikov, Arena asks whether the AK-47 is a cultural icon or just a killing machine.
Mar 19, 1994
On 1 April 1984 former Motown star Marvin Gaye provoked his father once too often, and was shot dead in his bedroom. It was the tragic finale to an extraordinary series of events in the life of one of the major talents of pop music in the 70s. From being down and out in London in 1980 he had been restored to tentative health, far away from drug dealers, in the Belgian port of Ostend. Video footage of this calm period forms the basis of this bleak documentary - bleak, because all along we know that his final hit Sexual Healing will draw him back to America and death.
Mar 26, 1994
The idea that power exists in the remains of heroes and the things they leave behind is the focus of an Arena trilogy broadcast this weekend and introduced by this programme. Religious devotion is not the only source of modern-day relics. Pop stars and politicians achieve cult status, with fans paying huge sums for their memorabilia. The series will investigate three modern-day examples, starting tomorrow night at 7.55pm with Einstein's brain. Tonight's programme attempts to establish the notion of what a relic is.
Mar 31, 1994
"Move Albert Einstein ," declares Japanese professor Kenji Sugimoto at the start of a bizarre journey in search of the great one's missing brain. Sugimoto would not look out of place in a Pink Panther film as he grunts and mutters his way across America on his curious mission. Einstein's brain was apparently removed for medical study after his death but the owner failed to carry out the research and was subsequently sacked. The brain went with him. Sugimoto, whose deep regret is that he never met the scientist, has long dreamed of the next best thing - making contact with his grey cells. The result is a farcical series of encounters with a curious cast of experts, policemen and relatives. Relics is the first in a three-part series from the makers of Arena, recognising the power of hero-worship. Tonight's puckish programme is well placed. (The second Arena Relics programme tomorrow focuses on the search for Charlie Chaplin 's dead body after it disappeared).
Apr 1, 1994
A film drama set against civil war in Peru. When Ortiz, a professional graverobber, stumbles across the huge golden disc of the ancient sun god Atahualpa lost for years, he sets off for Lima where he hopes to sell it for a high price. Chained to the shield, he looks like a giant firebeetle as he crosses the dramatic mountains in Peru pursued by characters with a special interest in the shield. Spurred on by greed, Ortiz's fate becomes inextricably linked to that of the sun god.
Apr 2, 1994
In 1978 Charlie Chaplin 's coffin was stolen from his grave in Vevey, Switzerland, and a large ransom was demanded of his widow Oona. This fictional film inspired by those events follows the east European characters responsible. A Screen Two/Arena collaboration, it is written and directed by award-winning documentary film-maker Paul Pawlikowski.
Apr 3, 1994
The author of the stories behind Blade Runner and Total Recall grew up in California at a time when an agricultural idyll was fast being replaced by motorways, shopping stores and junk culture. Philip K Dick drew inspiration for his 42 science-fiction novels and countless short stories from the neighbourhood growing up around him and the advertisements on television.
Apr 9, 1994
Robben Island is South Africa's Alcatraz. For three decades Nelson Mandela , Walter Sisulu and hundreds of other political prisoners were held in its maximum security prison for opposing the apartheid regime. Conditions were harsh and prisoners were treated like animals. The island itself has a tragic history as a dumping ground for convicts, lunatics, lepers and enemies of the state. It became a bizarre microcosm of the rest of South African society. In an extraordinary tale of survival, Mandela and his fellow ex-prisoners reveal the strategies with which they transformed life on the island and the vision they created for a new South Africa.
Apr 23, 1994
Using herself as the model, American artist Cindy Sherman has produced hundreds of photographs exploring the use of female stereotypes. Most recently she has addressed the theme of sexuality and Aids. Renowned for her secrecy - this is the first documentary on her work - Sherman talks about her influences and reveals her working methods through her video diaries.
Apr 24, 1994
Brazil's major slave-trading port for nearly three centuries, Bahia has a black population of over 80 per cent which maintains the legacy of African tradition at every level of daily life. Jana Bokova's vivid film portrait captures the spirit of the Bahian people, their music, culture, and most of all their religion - candomble - a fusion of Catholic and African religious beliefs. The film culminates in the annual celebration of carnival.
May 7, 1994
Sandra Bernhard 's outrageous one-woman show deals with many normally taboo subjects and controversy runs through her personal life: she was once Madonna's lover and is a lesbian pin-up, but she also posed for Playboy. In this country, however, she is perhaps best known as the bisexual Nancy in the Channel 4 comedy Roseanne. Bringing together archive clips, footage of her sell-out New York show and interviews, this sometimes explicit film explores how Bernhard has become a cult icon of female sexual power.
May 20, 1994
This Arena special profiles sculptor Louise Bourgeois, who has suddenly become fashionable at the age of 84, and has been chosen to represent America at the Venice Biennale, the world's most prestigious art exhibition.
Aug 6, 1994
Arena returns with a three-part special, presenting a film portrait of one of the world's great comic actors, incorporating home movies, film clips and interviews.
Feb 11, 1995
The second of a three-part film portrait of one of the world's great comic actors.
Feb 18, 1995
The last of a three-part film portrait of one of the world's great comic actors. Tonight's film begins in 1964, with Sellers at the peak of his success. Dr Strangelove and The Pink Panther are filling cinemas throughout the world and his marriage to Britt Ekland is making the headlines. Then it all goes wrong - he nearly dies of a heart attack and his film fortunes nosedive with a series of flops. Sellers's career is rescued ten years later by The Return of the Pink Panther, but his private life is still chaotic, with two more marriages and the constant fear of another heart attack.
Feb 25, 1995
In August 1975, the face of British rock music was fundamentally changed: the Sex Pistols were formed. A host of colourful characters, including the Damned's Captain Sensible, Richard Hell, Jerry Nolan from the New York Dolls, and the legendary Bromley Contingent, remember the halcyon days of the movement that influenced a generation.
Aug 20, 1995
The passion fans had for his music was matched only by the passion Elvis Presley had for his food. This documentary records his inexhaustible appetite for fast foods, the team he had working around the clock to satisfy his gastronomic excesses, and asks if over-indulgence may have contributed to his death at the age of 42.
Jan 1, 1996
What is a nation? From Corsica to Kashmir, from Quebec to Bosnia, violent separatist movements are fighting to form their own nation states. This edition of Arena explores the fabric of national identity, and follows four of the world's leading commentators on the subject - Eric Hobsbawm, Eqbal Ahmad, Desmond Tutu and Maxine Hong Kingston - as each embarks on a personal investigation into the different stories their nations told them.
Jul 14, 1996
At 70 years of age, singer Tony Bennett has been dubbed the King of Cool by the MTV-watching generation. Arena reveals the man behind the silky voice as Tony Bennett - civil rights activist, jazz enthusiast, painter and New Yorker - takes a tour around his native city and the world of American music with reporter Reggie Nadelson. Featuring politician Mario Cuomo, painter David Hockney, songwriter Elvis Costello and jazz musician Wynton Marsalis.
Dec 22, 1996
The legendary Sid Caesar was one of America's favourite TV stars in the fifties. His writing team, which include Mel Brooks, Carl Reiner and Neil Simon, was probably the first ever to be assembled in one room. The team recently reunited with Caesar before an audience in Los Angeles, and, here, Hollywood star Gene Wilder, who is currently playing Caesar in Laughter on the 23rd Floor in London's West End, introduces the hilarious meeting.
Dec 24, 1996
On 22 October 1995, for the first time, all the world's leaders gathered together in the United Nations in New York to have their photograph taken for the beginning of the UN's 50th anniversary celebration.
Jan 2, 1997
A portrait of the Italian film-maker Michelangelo Antonioni , who has directed such films as L'Awentura, which follows immediately, LaNotte and Zabriskie Point. The work of the director is known for its studies of alienation and its experiments with cinematic techniques. In his eighties, Antonioni has recently had a museum open in his honour in Ferrara, Italy- his birthplace.
Jan 18, 1997
Sports writer Hugh Mcllvanney presents the first of a trilogy of programmes for the Easter weekend about three great football managers; Matt Busby. Jock Stein and Bill Shankly. Tonight's film takes a look at the early careers of these men, who were born within a few miles of each other in the coal mining district south of Glasgow and who subsequently became folk heroes, known and admired beyond the world of football.
Mar 28, 1997
Hugh Mcllvanney presents the second in a trilogy of programmes about three great football managers; Matt Busby , Jock Stein and Bill Shankly. Tonight's film focuses on 1945-60, the period when the three former miners were all to become managers.
Mar 29, 1997
Concluding the three-part series presented by sports writer Hugh Mcllvanney about three great football managers; Matt Busby, Jock Stein and Bill Shankly. This film charts the incredible success that these three men brought to their clubs during the sixties and seventies, and examines their later years.
Mar 30, 1997
Tonight's programme considers musa sapientum, the fruit of the wise. The Velvet Underground's John Cale tells the story behind Andy Warhol's famous LP cover, Auberon Waugh and John Walters recall their first encounters with the fruit after the war and footballer Brendan Batson considers how they became a symbol of racism hurled from the terraces.
Dec 24, 1997
In 1962, before John F Kennedy signed the embargo banning the importation of cigars into America from Cuba, the President ordered 1,200 Havana cigars, according to Pierre Salinger, his former press secretary. Tonight's programme follows the story of the cigar - from the tobacco fields west of the Cuban capital of Havana into the factories where poetry and daily newspapers are read aloud to workers; to Hollywood cigar bars and the gentlemen's haunts of St James's, London. With contributions from actors James Belushi, George Wendt and Peter Weller, plus Lord Grade and politician Kenneth Clarke.
Dec 25, 1997
The first of a three-part profile of the writer, composer and actor covers Coward's meteoric rise from suburban south London to the world's highest-paid author by the time he was 30.
Apr 11, 1998
The second of three programmes celebrating the life and career of Noel Coward focuses on the journey through the Far East which inspired his most famous song, Mad Dogs and Englishmen. Coward's own home movies - being shown on television for the first time - capture him on trains in Japan, rickshaws in Peking and elephants in Ceylon. During the war years, an inspired partnership with director David Lean produced the acclaimed film In Which We Serve, with Coward playing a role based on Louis Mountbatten. This was followed by Brief Encounter, the classic film co-written by Coward and based on his play Still Life. With contributions from John Mills, John Gielgud, Judy Campbell and Richard Attenborough.
Apr 12, 1998
Concluding the three-part Easter special with a look at the last 30 years of Noel Coward's life. His post-war eclipse as a dramatist gave way to a new career as a highly successful cabaret performer in London and Las Vegas and in numerous film cameos. In the fifties he became the first celebrity tax exile and lived in Switzerland and Jamaica. Finally knighted at the age of 70, he died three years later and was buried on a mountain-top in Jamaica. Arena visits Coward's two homes, Firefly and Chalet Coward, and meets those who were closest to him, including Graham Payn, his partner for more than 30 years and Joan Hirst, his last secretary. Plus interviews with Arnold Wesker, Neil Tennant and Lionel Bart.
Apr 13, 1998
Arena explores the rise of the legendary crooner Frank Sinatra from his early family background to overwhelming showbusiness success. Interviews with friends, family and associates reveal a star-studded career in music and film alongside a fascinating private life of four marriages, liaison with the Kennedy family, Las Vegas business interests and an alleged association with the mafia.
May 15, 1998
The first of a two-part documentary telling the story of Brian Epstein. Gay when homosexuality was illegal, a gambler, shopkeeper and failed actor, he was also the pop king with the Midas touch who, in the sixties, was as well known as the band he managed - the Beatles.
May 25, 1998
Concluding the two-part profile of the pop manager who brought global success to the Beatles. By the mid-sixties, the group's fame meant Epstein had little time to devote to the other acts under his control. He was also being increasingly lured into a lifestyle fuelled by gambling, sex and drugs. After the Beatles decided in 1966 to stop touring, Epstein began to lose touch with the group whose lives he had organised for five years. He set out to broaden the business interests of his company and bought a historic country mansion in Sussex. But, in August 1967, he was found dead in his London home - killed by a mysterious drug overdose aged just 32.
Dec 26, 1998
Jan 2, 1999
Newsreel footage from 1962, when Fidel Castro's arrangement with then-Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev to install nuclear-weapon sites triggered off the Cuban missile crisis.
Jan 2, 1999
Cuba's baseball prowess has been long estabished. Fidel Castro himself was once scouted by a US team, and in 1992 Cuba surpassed even the Americans to win the first Olympic baseball gold medal. With many top Cuban players offered lucrative US contracts, this film shows how the patriotic fervour whipped up by the Cuban national sport has acted as a barometer for the country's political relations with the USA.
Jan 2, 1999
Cuba's place in world politics, from mid-sixties to mid-eighties.
Jan 2, 1999
Homer swaps jobs with Fidel Castro, who goes to work at the nuclear power plant in Springfield.
Jan 2, 1999
The effects of the demise of the dominant political ethos in the east.
Jan 2, 1999
Since his death in 1967, the face of Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara has stared down from posters and banners around the world, the most reproduced image since the Mona Lisa. This programme, written by Reggie Nadelson, explores the industry he unwittingly spawned.
Jan 2, 1999
Cuba's relations with the United States in recent times.
Jan 2, 1999
In Salman Rushdie 's new novel The Ground beneath Her Feet. singer Vina Aspara is caught up in an earthquake on Valentine's Day 1989, and never seen again. On that day Rushdie's own life was in unheaval as Ayatollah Khomeini pronounced the fatwa upon him. Rushdie talks to Francine Stock about the novel. There is also an interview with U2 singer Bono, who has based a song around lyrics from the book, and performs it with guitarist the Edge.
Apr 22, 1999
The Iron Curtain ran north to south through Europe and divided the world for 50 years. American writer and broadcaster Reggie Nadelson joins former Soviet Union spin doctor Vladimir Pozner in an attempt to retrace the chilling and strange route of history's most astonishing border.
Nov 7, 1999
The legendary 18th-century lover has been immortalised in books, films and on television, but are these fictionalised accounts historically accurate? Novelist Josephine Hart investigates the truth behind the many myths surrounding this enigmatic figure, and finds that, during his lifetime, he was famed for much more than sexual exploits. She provides evidence that Casanova was a charming man with a razor wit and fluent in three languages. Not only that, but he was also an astrologer, Freemason, businessman, writer, winner and loser of fortunes, and, last but not least, prison escapee.
Dec 20, 1999
In 1957, Jayne Mansfield was riding high as the most photographed woman in the world. Yet, ten years later, she was reduced to stripping in seedy nightclubs to finance a serious alcohol problem and support her five children from three broken marriages.
Dec 24, 1999
This second blonde-bombshell profile focuses on Britain's home-grown prototype, Diana Dors. The Rada-trained actress emerged as a sex symbol in the fifties through a run of low-budget British comedies. Hollywood success, however, proved elusive and, as her looks faded, Dors was reduced to cabaret appearances in northern clubs, although a series of cameo roles on stage and celluloid hinted at the talent that might have been.
Dec 26, 1999
Perhaps best remembered as the shapely blonde who waded into the Trevi Fountain in La Dolce Vita, fifties sex symbol Anita Ekberg became a Hollywood icon and a cult figure in European cinema. This portrait, which concludes the documentary trilogy about screen sirens, tracks down the reclusive Swede in Italy and traces the path of a career that began to take off when she won a Miss Sweden beauty contest. Ekberg talks candidly about growing old, surviving personal disappointment, and the pressure that comes with being recognised as one of the world's most beautiful women.
Dec 27, 1999
Actor Dennis Hopper plays the eccentric host to this guide to the world of commercial creativity. The programme analyses advertising's true place in modern-day, media-obsessed popular culture, highlighted by clips from some extreme and powerful examples of the genre featuring such talents as Leslie Nielsen , Dudley Moore and John Cleese. Offbeat contributions come from film directors Tony Scott, Spike Lee and Alan Parker, actor Anthony Quinn, musicians Dave Stewart and David Bowie, and top advertising executives, who discuss the rise of commercials as an art form and their considerable influence on feature films.
Jan 2, 2000
More and more young Muslim women today are wearing the veil, saying that it frees rather than oppresses them. This one-off Arena explores how a simple piece of cloth has endured in the eastern and western imagination.
May 20, 2000
An edition in the occasional arts documentary strand. Wisconsin Death Trip. Inspired by a book of the same name, film-maker James Marsh tells the haunting tale of murder, madness and suicide that took place behind the thin veil of respectability in small-town America at the end of the 19th century. Drawing on reports in the weekly newspaper, plus archive photographs and re-enactments of events, this film chronicles the tragedies that befell residents and neighbours of Black River Falls, Wisconsin.
Jul 2, 2000
The first of a two-part Christmas special profiling the Hollywood actor and director Clint Eastwood. Eastwood recalls his tough childhood, and looks back at his early career, from Rawhide to Dirty Harry and the spaghetti westerns. With contributions from Don Siegel , Sergio Leone , Eli Wallach and Martin Scorcese , plus an exclusive interview with his mother Ruth.
Dec 24, 2000
Concluding the two-part profile of the life and work of Hollywood actor and director Clint Eastwood. The story continues with Eastwood's directorial debut, as he completed Play Misty for Me in five weeks before going on to huge success in Dirty Harry. Featuring actors Gene Hackman and Meryl Streep, director Martin Scorsese, plus Eastwood's mother Ruth, and wife Dina.
Dec 25, 2000
The art strand Arena returns with a new seven-part series. Best known for such novels as LA Confidential, The Black Dahlia, and the autobiographical work My Dark Places, crime writer James Ellroy has recently moved beyond his genre to create a fictional version of America's last 50 years. The Cold Six Thousand, the newly-published second volume in his "underworld America" trilogy, looks at the years between the assassination of President Kennedy and that of his brother Robert Kennedy. Following Ellroy to Las Vegas and Dallas - the twin locations of the trilogy - and observing him at home in Kansas and with members of the LAPD, this documentary gives viewers the chance to see the world through Ellroy's eyes.
May 6, 2001
There is seemingly no endeavour for which there is not an award, from Preacher of the Year to Streetsweeper of the Year. Arena asks what lies at the heart of our fascination with awards and prizes, and society's desire to pick winners and losers. Featuring contributions from, among others, Glenda Jackson MP and Nick Park.
May 13, 2001
Eighty-six-year-old novelist Budd Schulberg talks to old friend Hugh McIlvanney about his life and his long and varied career - including his screenplay for the multiple Oscar-winning film On the Waterfront.
May 19, 2001
Tonight's film dramatises the story behind the leading artists who personified the Beat Generation, which saw its roots in the meeting of Allen Ginsberg , Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs in the forties. Examining their bohemian life in the fifties through a set of vignettes, featuring Dennis Hopper as Burroughs, Johnny Depp as Kerouac and John Turturro as Ginsberg, it also charts the subsequent San Francisco and West Coast renaissance, the hippie, political and spiritual movements of the sixties and seventies, and their influence in today's popular culture.
May 28, 2001
During the past 30 years the photographic work of Brazilian-born Sebastiao Salgado has helped to bring conditions of famine and poverty to international attention.
May 30, 2001
Joseph Stalin is seen outside his native land as one of history's most deplorable tyrants, but throughout the former Soviet states a cult of Stalin still exists. This film documents Stalin's development from would-be provincial priest to ruthless autocrat, and shows how he exploited the repression of the Russian Orthodox Church, using visual propaganda, to reinvent himself as a quasi-religious idol.
May 31, 2001
A one-off film in which author Beryl Bainbridge chronicles the extraordinary relationship during the 18th century between Samuel Johnson and Hester Thrale, the wife of rich London brewer Henry Thrale, which forms the basis for her latest novel, According to Queeney. Johnson lived with the Thrales for most of the last 20 years of his life, during which time Hester nursed him through his bouts of melancholia and gout - until she ran off with her daughter Queeney's Italian singing teacher. Jim Carter and Susannah Harker read extracts from letters Johnson and Mrs Thrale wrote to each other. Beth Goddard and Bainbridge herself read from According to Queeney.
Oct 6, 2001
Writer, performer and director, the late Eric Sykes was the renaissance man of British comedy. This episode of Arena opens the doors of the room that was his creative home for forty years. Post-war Britain saw Sykes catapulted to fame in the hugely successful 'Variety Bandbox' and 'Educating Archie'. He quickly became the country's highest paid comedy writer. The film takes him through a day at his beloved office, an Aladdin's Cave of triumphs and treasures. There he muses on his life and career, and the other greats he knew and worked with.
Dec 26, 2001
Charlie Drake is perhaps best known as the "little man" taking on the world in such films as 'The Cracksman' and television series like 'The Worker'. Drake himself had much to overcome: marital, financial and career troubles dogged him, but, after reinventing himself as a "straight" actor, he won acclaim for roles in Harold Pinter's 'The Caretaker' and a BBC production of 'Bleak House'. At his home in south London, Drake recalls his highs and lows.
Dec 25, 2001
The sketch, first shown in 1967, that took the Golden Rose at Montreux. Drake plays the conductor and all of the musicians in an orchestra.
Dec 25, 2001
Since a 1951 breakthrough appearance on the long-running radio series 'Educating Archie', Bygraves has proved a hit with the British public, whether he performs as an actor, a comedian or a ballad singer. He still entertains today, dividing his time between Britain and a second home in Australia. Tonight's Arena finds out what makes the entertainer tick.
Dec 25, 2001
In 1986, Dirk Bogarde burnt most of his personal papers at his home in southern France. However, 12 cans of home movies, shot mostly by Bogarde's long-term partner Anthony Forwood, survived the flames. This two-part Arena special draws on this footage to present for the first time a comprehensive portrait of the reclusive actor, who died in 1999. The first film chronicles Bogarde's idyllic Sussex childhood and charts his meteoric rise to "idol of the Odeons" status in the fifties. Bogarde's sister, brother and grandmother, and Anthony Forwood's son Gareth offer their recollections.
Dec 26, 2001
The second of Arena's two-part film about Bogarde plots his progress to the forefront of European cinema in films such as Joseph Losey's 'The Servant' and Luchino Visconti's 'Death in Venice', before retiring from acting to become a writer. Tributes come from co-stars James Fox, Michael York and Charlotte Rampling.
Dec 26, 2001
As the 2001 winner, the Baltic state of Estonia, prepares to host this year's Eurovision Song Contest, this documentary explores the dramas, dreams, and dilemmas of what many see as a festival of kitsch, but which to the Estonians could be the key to membership of the European Union and NATO.
May 18, 2002
First in a two-part profile of Japanese film-maker Akira Kurosawa, looking at his childhood, early career and emergence as a major director during the American occupation. Kurosawa's samurai roots and traumatic early experiences influenced many of his films, including 'Rashomon', which brought him international fame after it won the Golden Lion at the 1951 Venice Film Festival.
Jun 15, 2002
Concluding the profile of Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa. International acclaim followed masterpieces like the influential 'Seven Samurai', but success at home was elusive. Unable to find funding for his epic films in Japan, Kurosawa attempted suicide in 1971. To make his late films 'Kagemusha', 'Ran' and 'Dreams' he accepted help from foreign admirers like George Lucas, Francis Ford Coppola and Steven Spielberg.
Jun 22, 2002
Arena revisits its 1995 BAFTA-nominated Sellers trilogy, this time using only film shot by the late comic, who died in July 1980. Sellers is seen at home, on set, on holiday and in carefully stage-managed scenarios in this revealing treasure-trove. Includes previously unseen footage featuring Princess Margaret and Lord Snowdon, and of Prince Charles at Sellers's home, all three royals appearing very much at ease. Also featured are family and friends including his wives Anne Levy, Britt Ekland and Lynne Frederick, Orson Welles, Sophia Loren, fellow Goon Spike Milligan, Pink Panther co-star Herbert Lorn and director Blake Edwards.
Aug 24, 2002
This edition chronicles Pinter's East End childhood, his work as an actor, the critical appraisal of his work, and his passion for cricket. The film looks at the various rooms in which Pinter formulated his ideas and wrote his early works, and features footage shot at the Almeida Theatre of a recent production of Pinter's first play 'The Room', featuring Lindsay Duncan, Keith Allen, Lia Williams, and Henry Woolf, and which was directed by Pinter himself.
Oct 26, 2002
This programme focuses on the relationship between the public and private aspects of Pinter's life and work. The film includes footage from two Pinter stage productions - 'One For The Road' with Pinter himself in the lead role, and 'Celebration', which was directed by Pinter.
Oct 26, 2002
Harold Pinter takes the lead role in the Gate Theatre, Dublin's production of his play, produced by Michael Colgan and directed by Robin Lefevre. In an unnamed police state, Nicolas, who works as a torturer, interrogates three members of the same family.
Oct 26, 2002
A 70th birthday tribute to Harold Pinter in three parts. The first section acknowledges Pinter's involvement in highlighting political injustices and puts his writing in its political context. The second installment sees the playwright in conversation with Nigel Williams, while the third is a new reading of The Dumb Waiter.
Oct 30, 2002
An anxious recluse deals with the pressures of the outside world. A play by Harold Pinter, filmed in New York's Almeida Theatre in 2001
Nov 5, 2002
In a world of mimicry and satire, do the Dead Ringers team know who they really are? Meet Jon Culshaw, Jan Ravens, Mark Perry, Kevin Connelly and Phil Cornwell, whose impressions of everyone from Anne Robinson and Sven-Goran Eriksson to George Bush and Tony Blair recently made the move to TV.
Dec 26, 2002
Not many can talk for a minute without hesitation, repetition or deviation - but, for 35 years, Just a Minute panellists have done just that. Paul Merton, Clement Freud, Linda Smith and Ross Noble continue the story, with referee Nicholas Parsons forever trying to keep the unruly quartet under control.
Dec 26, 2002
The story of Mikova, the remote Slovakian village where the family of icon Andy Warhol came from.
Jan 14, 2003
Gillian Kearney plays the author in an Arena docudrama. With Anna Chancellor.
Jun 12, 2003
As he becomes an octogenarian, a two-part Arena special celebrates the life and distinguished career of one of Britain's best-loved public figures. Lord Attenborough's film CV as actor stretches from Brighton Rock to Jurassic Park, while as director he has been responsible for Oh! What a Lovely War, Shadowlands and Gandhi. He has also been integral to the work of many charities, while his support for minority groups has led to the building of a Centre for Disability and the Arts. Part one examines his early career, and follows Attenborough as he visits his childhood home, travels to Brighton and Hove, and reminisces with brothers John and Sir David.
Aug 24, 2003
The conclusion to this two-part profile, which accompanies the Attenborough at 80 season of films this week, looks at Attenborough's career as Britain's most distinguished film director, whose biopic Ghandi won eight Oscars in 1982, including Best Director. It also explores his other lives as chancellor of Sussex University and vice-president of Chelsea FC, and examines the political commitment behind films such as Cry Freedom and 10 Rillington Place.
Aug 25, 2003
The huge and enduring popularity of John Lennon 's song, Imagine, is examined in this documentary. Yoko Ono , who is now acknowledged as the co-author of the song, is filmed as she continues her mission to spread Lennon's message using "any means I can". Analysis of the song's power - the lyrics are shown to be appreciated by people with different beliefs - also includes contributions from academics, and psychiatrist Raj Persaud even goes so far as to claim the song fills the void left by the decline in organised religion. There's also space given to detractors, including journalist Robert Elms , who openly detests the track.
Sep 20, 2003
In the 50th year since his tragic death, author and broadcaster Nigel Williams examines the work and legend of one of the most famous poets of the 20th century-Dylan Thomas. Born in 1914 in Swansea, he was an unruly child, yet determined to become a poet. Though cited by Bob Dylan, John Lennon and other cultural icons as a profound influence, it was his death that truly made him a legend. But did Thomas really die after drinking 18 straight whiskies? Starting with his death, Arena works back through his life to find the man behind the myth.
Nov 22, 2003
Buffalo Bill was instrumental in transforming the Wild West into the caricatured setting portrayed in countless films and novels. Using archive footage, this part-dramatised documentary tells story of a man who was variously prairie scout, buffalo hunter and creator of the Wild West Show.
Dec 19, 2003
The acting career of Alec Guinness spanned more than five decades. Although readily identifiable in character, the real man avoided the trappings of fame, preferring a secluded life in the country with his wife Merula. This film profile, the first comprehensive one of its kind, has access to his private journals and letters, and research material from Piers Paul Read , Guinness's biographer.
Dec 29, 2003
For 40 years, Luciano Pavarotti has been hailed as one of the greatest tenors of all time, an artist fit to rank alongside the great Caruso. As his career reaches its climax, this documentary, showing as part of the BBC's Summer of Opera, chronicles his background and upbringing, and follows him as he performs to sell-out audiences on three continents, culminating with his valedictory performances of Tosca at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. Backstage in LA, the tenor greets celebrity admirers, including Michael Caine and Dustin Hoffman , in Berlin he's reunited with Three Tenors group members Jose Carreras and Placido Domingo , while in his Italian hometown of Modena the maestro gathers top names in rock and pop, such as Bono, Queen, Ricky Martin and Andrea Bocelli , to raise money for the children of Iraq. Narrated by Sir Ian McKellen.
May 29, 2004
Country singer Jim White takes a road trip through the rural white American South in in an Arena documentary. Driving through a terrain of truck stops and churches, he finds a community fiercely holding on to their religious beliefs - the perpetual struggle between Satan and God.
Jul 9, 2004
Examining the battles between the film's producers, and the demands of star Orson Welles.
Oct 2, 2004
A documentary chronicling the series of Amnesty International fundraising concerts, which brought together a wealth of comedy talent and paved the way for future events such as Comic Relief. Plus music from Bob Geldof, Joan Armatrading, Phil Collins and Sting.
Dec 9, 2004
The Potter at the BBC strand marking the 10th anniversary of his death starts with this feature-length profile. It charts his childhood, time at Oxford, bid for parliament and rise as a constantly controversial TV dramatist who was loved and loathed in equal measure. As well as clips from The Singing Detective, Pennies from Heaven and Blue Remembered Hills, Potter's three children and sister talk on screen for the first time about life with him.
Dec 25, 2004
How the playwright used popular songs as a powerful dramatic device and to express the depth of his characters in Pennies from Heaven and The Singing Detective.
Jan 2, 2005
A portrait of the late playwright, featuring extracts from his work - read by Keith Barron - and interviews with Potter himself.
Jan 9, 2005
From Elvis to Norah Jones , Hank Williams 's songs have been recorded more often than those of any other country music writer. Dirt-poor and rail-thin, he blazed out of Alabama in the late 1940s with the fervor of a man whose days were numbered. By 25 he was country's first superstar - but four years later he was gone; an icon yet an enigma even to those who thought they knew him best. With family and friends, Arena examines the real Hank Williams.
Feb 5, 2005
Cited as being the most beautiful star in the Hollywood firmament during the 1930s and 40s, Hedy Lamarr's talents as an accomplished physicist who also engaged in perfecting radar systems made her no average screen goddess. Her research wasn't made public until a few years before her death in 2000, and here her son Anthony goes in search of the truth behind his mother's memory.
Feb 12, 2005
Haunting and ferocious, Francis Bacon's paintings made an indelible impression on art history. His life - as outrageous as his work - is recalled by Arena in the only documentary exclusively permitted by Bacon's estate since his death in 1992. With original music by Brian Eno. Contains footage of bull-fighting.
Mar 19, 2005
Bob Dylan, Jean Genet, Orson Welles and Francis Bacon are among the subjects in a look back at memorable editions of the past 30 years. With film makers Alan Yentob, Anthony Wall and Nigel Williams.
Sep 3, 2005
Director Martin Scorsese enlists the help of Dylan himself, Joan Baez , film-maker DA Pennebaker , Greenwich Village folk icon Dave Von Ronk , and beat poet Allen Ginsberg , for an emotional, musical and intellectual journey through the singer/songwriter's early career, up to the controversial 1966 tour of the British Isles. From being a rock 'n' roll loving kid in the Midwest. Dylan tells how he became smitten with folk music and what influenced him. As his fame and notoriety grew, his skill as a performer matured rapidly and the songs began to flow: Blowin' in the Wind; Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall; Masters of War; Don't Think Twice, It's All Right.
Sep 26, 2005
Martin Scorsese delicately balances Dylan's internal world with signpost images from the external as he follows the newsworthy phenomenon of a 23-year-old star laden with expectations - from the old left to become a political activist, and from the media to articulate the concerns of America's youth. But Dylan was already on the move, finding a new musical vocabulary with which to capture the complexity of a seismic cultural shift, injecting a heightened sense of poetry into his writing and committing the crime of adding electricity to his music. By 1966 Dylan's personal world had become a never-ending journey of touring and press conferences - with no direction home.
Sep 27, 2005
Surprisingly, Bob Dylan first came to the attention of the British public through his role in a 1963 BBC TV play, The Madhouse on Castle Street. The tape was later wiped and has since become the holy grail of missing Dylan works. Joining the hunt, Arena uncovers rare Dylan tracks and the fascinating story of his first time in London. Featuring writer Evan Jones, director Philip Saville, and fellow musicians Martin Carthy and Peggy Seeger.
Sep 28, 2005
An incredible 22.8 million viewers were agog as Diana, Princess of Wales spoke candidly of her marriage into the royal family. Ten years on, the secrecy and tensions behind this seminal interview - and the impact it had on the public and the House of Windsor, are revealed.
Nov 8, 2005
Documentary celebrating one of London's great characters, the bus conductor. The film tells the stories of five extraordinary conductors from five decades of London's history (original title "Little Platform, Big Stage").
Dec 10, 2005
Hancock's Half-Hour and Steptoe and Son - two persuasive reasons for making Ray Galton and Alan Simpson pre-eminent among Britain's postwar comedy writers. In their first full-length profile, the duo, who met as teenagers in 1948 when they were both convalescing from tuberculosis in Milford sanatorium, talk about their distinguished body of work to author and broadcaster Nigel Williams.
Dec 25, 2005
A one-off documentary following six months in the life of Libertines and Babyshambles frontman Pete Doherty - the musician who currently throws the British tabloid press into a frenzy like no other due to his drug addiction and relationship with supermodel Kate Moss. With access that included footage with his son and interviews with close friends, the film also features intimate conversations with Doherty himself.
Nov 12, 2006
The phenomenon of sanctity is examined in a documentary asking what makes a saint, comparing the Catholic Church's well-known practices with those of Hinduism and Buddhism.
Dec 17, 2006
Marking its 56th year on the air, Arena examines the enduring appeal of Radio 4's rural soap, which began in 1951 as a public service programme to help Britain's farmers get back on their feet. The everyday tale has evolved slowly over the years, but reached new heights in November with its 15,000th episode about a love triangle.
Jan 1, 2007
Documentary about the Tube, the world's oldest underground system, with its own unwritten rules of behaviour and protocol, and used by three million passengers every day.
Mar 18, 2007
The year 1977 was a crucial one in the life of reggae superstar Bob Marley. After an attempt on his life in his home that he was lucky to survive, he was forced to move from Jamaica to London. But despite his exile, it was the album that Marley made in London, his first outside Jamaica, that was to prove the springboard that propelled his music and his message of Rastafari across the planet, and which Time magazine would vote as the album of the century.
Jun 3, 2007
Examining the life and work of film director Ingmar Bergman , through people who know and have spoken to him, including Melvyn Bragg and Marie Nyrerod , producer of Bergman and Faro Island.
Jul 13, 2007
In his remote home at the seashore on Sweden's Faro Island, Ingmar Bergman talks about the childhood that shaped him.
Jul 13, 2007
Ingmar Bergman examines his cinema career, which began when his first script was filmed in 1944. He is also joined by journalist and director Marie Nyrerod to look at his private archive.
Jul 14, 2007
Britain's postwar cinema was not well looked upon by many critics. The melodramas, crime films and horror shockers were almost all derided by contemporary critics. Unearthing a wealth of vibrant extracts from forgotten and over-looked movies, this documentary celebrates the British cinema of the 1940s and 50s when films of the era tended to deal with the difficulties and occasional traumas of women and men as they come to terms with the postwar world.
Sep 2, 2007
The earliest surviving episode in the BBC archives of The Archers, originally broadcast 11th March 1952, is repeated here in its entirety along with archive film of the period.
Oct 4, 2007
Affectionate documentary that goes behind the scenes of the Limelight Club in Crewe, where for ten years tribute acts to the likes of Jimi Hendrix, Kurt Cobain and Phil Lynott have been providing a post-industrial town the chance to hear some legendary live music.
Oct 6, 2007
Live performances by tribute bands such as Limehouse Lizzy, Are You Experienced, The Jamm and ABCD, at Crewe's Limelight Club.
Oct 6, 2007
A look at the Newport folk festival and the American folk revival of the 60s, which encompassed old time mountain music, blues and gospel.
Oct 14, 2007
Murray Lerner's documentary features Bob Dylan's performances at the Newport folk festival between 1963 and 1965 - the time when Dylan changed the music of the world.
Oct 14, 2007
Arena goes in search of the Bob Dylan starring 1962 BBC drama Madhouse on Castle Street, wiped in 1968.
Oct 14, 2007
A tribute to the Liverpudlian comedian, who turned 80 last month. Here, he discusses his 50-year career and the influences on his comedy style. Featuring film clips of his early performances and footage of his latest tour.
Dec 24, 2007
Profile of the Nobel Prize-winning British writer, VS Naipaul. Filmed in Wiltshire, India and his native Trinidad, he remains as incisive, forthright and controversial as ever.
Apr 10, 2008
Documentary which gets to the heart of that much-maligned and stereotyped character, the London cabbie, using archive footage, music and film, as well as the drivers themselves.
Jul 26, 2008
Writer Philip Hoare embarks on an epic journey to investigate humankind's ongoing fascination with the whale. He travels from Southampton to the whaling ports of America, before concluding his study in the Azores, exploring the significance of the mighty mammals to each community. He then brings these relationships into focus through Herman Melville 's classic novel Moby-Dick.
Sep 20, 2008
BBC4's Whale Night begins with an insight into the the construction of the Blue Whale exhibit at the Natural History Museum.
Sep 21, 2008
Author and whale-watcher Philip Hoare takes us into the world of baleen whales, the largest animals ever to have lived and the order including blue, fin and humpback whales.
Sep 21, 2008
Author and whale-watcher Philip Hoare takes us into the world of toothed whales, from the plight of the captive killer whale to the fate of the stranded London whale.
Sep 21, 2008
Philip Hoare follows the historical trail of the whale hunters to the frozen seas of the North Pole, where he finds the bowhead, the white beluga and the tusked narwhal.
Sep 21, 2008
Legendary, reclusive and controversial, Phil Spector changed the face of pop with his reverbladen "wall of sound" production techniques, working with artists including the Ronettes and John Lennon. Here, Spector explains his creative process in a rare interview from 2007, plus footage from his high-profile trial of the same year.
Oct 25, 2008
A host of theatrical greats pay tribute to the accomplished actor, who died in March this year aged 86. Featuring extracts from some of his most famous roles, including Sir Thomas More in the 1966 film A Man for All Seasons and his masterful King Lear in the 1962 stage production.
Dec 24, 2008
Crooner Tony Bennett reflects on his life with his friend and jazz enthusiast Clint Eastwood. Bennett traces his musical lineage, highlighted by concert footage.
Feb 14, 2009
Archive film shows how American jazz culture spread across the world in the 1940s and 50s, representing a movement that started in the clubs of New York and LA.
Apr 3, 2009
The Poetry Season continues with this in-depth look at the life of one of the 20th century's most important literary figures. As well as uncovering the many sides of the Nobel Prize winner who was a poet. playwright, children's writer, critic and publisher, the film examines his extraordinary body of work and assesses its continuing relevance today. In a television first, his widow Valerie, with whom he spent the last years of his life, opens her personal archive, which includes the private scrapbooks and albums in which he documented their life together.
Jun 6, 2009
A performance of his critically acclaimed 1958 play about a man tormented by two mysterious strangers.
Jul 26, 2009
Brian Eno, former Roxy Music keyboardist and a pioneer in ambient music, engages with fellow minds in conversations on science, art, systems analysis, producing and cybernetics.
Jan 22, 2010
In June 2009, a group Britain's leading actors gathered for one night only to perform a celebration of the work of Harold Pinter at the National Theatre, directed by Ian Rickson.
Jan 24, 2010
Documentary telling the story and examining the legacy of Johnny Mercer, one of America's greatest songwriters and a man at the heart of the Great American Songbook.
Apr 4, 2010
Profile of the influential jazz pianist Dave Brubeck as he approaches his 90th birthday, who had one of the biggest popular hits in jazz history with Take Five.
Dec 3, 2010
Arena enlists supermodels Lily Cole and Lizzy Jagger and actresses Dervla Kirwan and Emer Kenny to help Rolf Harris achieve a painting ambition.
Dec 29, 2010
Profile of record producer Sir George Martin, with his wife Judy, son Giles, Sir Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr and Michael Palin among the many contributors.
Apr 25, 2011
Martin Scorsese's portrait of George Harrison, which traces his life from his beginnings in Liverpool to becoming a world-famous musician, philanthropist and filmmaker.
Nov 12, 2011
Martin Scorsese's portrait of George Harrison looks at his post-Beatles days as a member of the Travelling Wilburys and a solo artist, as well as his non-musical ventures.
Nov 13, 2011
An exploration of Charles Dickens's contribution to the history of film and television, using archive footage of classic and less familiar adaptations from 1898 to the present day.
Jan 10, 2012
Documentary about the great saxophonist Sonny Rollins, built around his 80th birthday concert, where he is joined by the likes of Roy Haynes, Jim Hall and Ornette Coleman.
Feb 17, 2012
Newly-discovered film footage of tenor sax legend Sonny Rollins at Ronnie Scott's in 1974, with a band featuring guitarist Yoshiaki Masuo and soprano saxophone player Rufus Harley.
Feb 17, 2012
An insight into the private obsessions and insecurities of the author of Lord of the Flies. With contributions from his daughter and son and bestselling author Stephen King
Mar 17, 2012
Documentary exploring the life of Sir Jonathan Miller CBE, theatre and opera director, humorist and television presenter. With contributors including Kevin Spacey and Eric Idle.
Mar 31, 2012
Documentary telling the story of the day Amy Winehouse recorded a stunning acoustic performance in a church in the small Irish fishing village of Dingle in 2006.
Jul 23, 2012
The making of The Beatles' controversial 1967 film, featuring previously unseen archive footage.
Oct 6, 2012
Fully restored and with a remixed soundtrack, 'The Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour comes out of the shadows and onto the screen.
Oct 6, 2012
Documentary about the early female movie stars: Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Rita Hayworth, Marilyn Monroe - immortal goddesses made by Hollywood to reign over the silver screen.
Dec 22, 2012
Documentary telling the personal story of Sister Wendy Beckett, who travelled the world telling the story of Christian art and painting in the 1990s, quickly becoming a star.
Dec 25, 2012
To mark the centenary of his birth, Arena examines the glamorous life and exceptionally long career of pioneering photographer and eccentric English gentleman, Norman Parkinson.
Apr 21, 2013
First of two documentaries celebrating the National Theatre's 50th anniversary, with contributions from artistic directors, playwrights and stars such as Dame Joan Plowright.
Oct 24, 2013
Peter Hall, Richard Eyre, Trevor Nunn and Nicholas Hytner talk about running the new National Theatre from its opening in 1976 to the fulfilment of Olivier's original dream.
Oct 31, 2013
Documentary telling the story of the genesis of the satirical puppet show Spitting Image, with contributions from caricaturists Peter Fluck and Roger Law and producer John Lloyd.
Mar 20, 2014
Made specially for schools, this version of Arena examines the history and purpose of the National Theatre as it celebrates its 50th anniversary.
Apr 2, 2014
Martin Scorsese's documentary film charting literary, political and cultural history as per the New York Review of Books, America's leading journal of ideas since 1963.
Jun 29, 2014
Profile of Nicolas Roeg, examining his personal vision of cinema as evidenced in his films, including Don't Look Now, Performance, Walkabout and The Man Who Fell to Earth.
Jun 26, 2015
To celebrate Arena's 40th anniversary, a new film made entirely from its own archive, evoking the one experience common to all - the 24-hour cycle from dawn to dusk to dawn again.
Nov 22, 2015
With contributions from her family and fellow musicians, now in her early eighties and still going strong, country music singer-songwriter Loretta Lynn looks back at her life.
Mar 18, 2016
Documentary exploring the rich, global history of Shakespeare in the cinema, with a treasure trove of film extracts and archival interviews with their creators.
Apr 24, 2016
Documentary marking the year pop music and popular culture ripped up the rule book, as restless experimentation and the search for new forms of expression took hold.
Jul 24, 2016
The tragicomic rollercoaster story of a unique venue, the Roundhouse in north London, which has hosted virtually every big name in rock and alternative theatre since 1966.
Oct 23, 2016
Arena spends the summer with supercool self-confessed rock chick, Chrissie Hynde. Featuring a glorious live performance at one of London's most intimate venues.
Feb 10, 2017
Series telling the stories of the pioneers of American roots music. The 1920s saw record companies travel rural America to record the music of ordinary people.
May 21, 2017
Series telling the stories of the pioneers of American roots music. The second episode explores gospel, the songs of the coal mines and the Mississippi Delta blues.
May 28, 2017
As Desert Island Discs reaches 75, today's custodian of the island, Kirsty Young, introduces the 1982 Bafta-winning Arena classic.
May 29, 2017
The story of the pioneers of American roots music explores Hawaiian music, Cajun music and Mississippi John Hurt's blues.
Jun 4, 2017
Today's music superstars use a lovingly reassembled old machine to record in the same way that their early predecessors did - with no edits, no overdubs and no retakes.
Jun 9, 2017
Exploring the relationship of artist Stanley Spencer's daughters, Unity and Shirin, as they try to understand and reclaim their father and investigate their family's archaeology.
Feb 4, 2018
A Bob Dylan performance of songs expressing his new-found Christianity in the late 70s, enhanced by a series of sermons between the songs, written by the actor Michael Shannon.
Mar 30, 2018
A chance to hang out with Eileen Atkins, Judi Dench, Maggie Smith and Joan Plowright and enjoy sparkling conversation spliced with a raft of astonishing archive.
Jun 2, 2018
Multimedia artist Rachel Maclean takes a satirical look at the contradictory pressures faced by women today.
Nov 4, 2018
A year in the life of abstract artist Sean Scully, one of the world's wealthiest painters. Little known at home but a superstar abroad, Sean flies around the world to open 15 major museum exhibitions - a journey that also reveals his extraordinary life story.
Apr 6, 2019
A long-lost film of the creative community formed by Peter Beard, Jackie Kennedy's sister Lee Radziwill and her relatives, the Beales of Grey Gardens, in 1970s New York.
Jul 7, 2019
A rare insight into the work of Cindy Sherman, one of the world's leading, and most elusive, contemporary artists.
Jul 28, 2019
Documentary profiling Japanese contemporary artist Yayoi Kusama whose work, including her much-visited Infinity Mirror Room installations, defies classification.
Sep 1, 2019
When legendary writer and adventurer Bruce Chatwin was dying of Aids, his friend and collaborator Werner Herzog made a final visit to say farewell.
Sep 21, 2019
Documentary that exposes a darker, less well-known side of film director Ingmar Bergman, focusing on the landmark year of 1957, which saw Bergman direct two films and four plays.
Sep 22, 2019
This feature-length documentary for Arena by acclaimed director Vanessa Engle tells the remarkable story of a charlatan art dealer who swindled over $50 million from the art establishment before going on the run.
Sep 23, 2019
Haunting film about Britain and the nuclear age, from the first bomb tests to our potentially futile preparations for attack during the Cold War.
Nov 4, 2019
Contemporary artist Gillian Wearing celebrates the legacy of Victorian novelist George Eliot in an experimental film made up of a diverse cast of people.
Nov 10, 2019
Born into a farming family in rural Northern Ireland, Seamus Heaney became the finest poet of his generation and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995 - but his career also coincided with one of the bloodiest political upheavals of the 20th century, the Troubles in Northern Ireland.
Dec 30, 2019
Made across six months in the run-up to publication of 'The Mirror and the Light', the final book in Hilary Mantel’s Booker-winning Tudor trilogy on the life of Thomas Cromwell, this film enjoys exclusive and extensive access to one of the world’s greatest living writers, delving into Mantel's past and present as she describes a vivid imagination active from an early age and recounts with candour a tale of growing up with a dark family secret.
Mar 7, 2020
In 1974, Ike White recorded an album while serving life for murder. The album became his ticket to freedom. But, just as he was on the cusp of stardom, Ike disappeared.
May 18, 2020
Through the words of James Baldwin, this film touches on the lives and assassinations of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr and Medgar Evers.
Jun 20, 2020
The definitive story of international art sensation Keith Haring, told using previously unheard interviews. Haring blazed a trail through the art scene of 80s New York and revolutionised pop culture.
Jul 4, 2020
xclusive testimony reveals the multifaceted man behind the maverick performer Fela Kuti, who created a sound for a continent - Afrobeat.
Nov 21, 2020
For decades among the foremost names in documentary, Nick Broomfield has often implicated himself in the film-making process with honesty and candour. Yet never has he made a movie more distinctly personal than this complex and moving film about his relationship with his humanist-pacifist father, Maurice Broomfield, a factory worker turned photographer of vivid, often lustrous images of industrial post-WWII England.
Mar 21, 2021
Docudrama portrait of Delia Derbyshire, the electronic sound pioneer behind the Doctor Who theme tune, exploring the idea that this extraordinary composer herself lived outside of time and space.
May 16, 2021
British-Nigerian poet and activist Femi Nylander travels to West Africa to discover the modern-day impact on its people of atrocities that took place over a century ago.
May 22, 2021
An exploration – from Jean-Michel Basquiat to Grace Jones – of how black artists use the sci-fi genre to examine black history and imagine new, alternative futures.
May 29, 2021
How a US lifer survived long-term solitary confinement through a remarkable pen-pal friendship and the making of beautiful little paintings from M&M's.
Oct 31, 2021
An investigation into the extraordinary life and work of B. Catling, an eye-popping insight into the late-flourishing career of a maverick artist, teacher and performer.
Nov 21, 2021
An Arena documentary about the life and work of video art pioneers Steina and Woody Vasulka, which reveals the profound effect they had on the American avant-garde.
Nov 28, 2021
Documentary that follows Björn Andrésen, the boy catapulted to fame when Luchino Visconti chose him to play Tadzio in his screen adaptation of Thomas Mann's Death in Venice.
Feb 13, 2022
River takes its audience on a journey through space and time spanning six continents, showing rivers on a scale and from perspectives never seen before.
Jul 25, 2022
A hundred years after its publication, this film reveals the tawdry, shocking, poetic, uplifting and gloriously kaleidoscopic humanity of James Joyce’s masterpiece, Ulysses.
Sep 7, 2022
2022 marks the centenary of one of the defining poems of the 20th century, 'The Waste Land'. TS Eliot's groundbreaking work first exploded into the world on 15 October 1922 and has continued to resonate with successive generations. But in 2020, there were dramatic new revelations that demonstrated how, behind Eliot's mask, there was a much more personal story to be found within 'The Waste Land' – which can now at last be explored
Oct 22, 2022
A visually arresting feature documentary, set in the present but which tells the rich story of Haiti’s past, that follows a number of carnival performers in the lead-up to, and during, the annual Jacmel Mardi Gras. This is not the carnival of sequins and sound systems found elsewhere in the Caribbean, but a celebration of rebellion and resistance resonating through the centuries.
Nov 27, 2022
he life and career of the pioneering musician, a black artist who grew up in the segregated American South and broke down barriers and took 1950s America by storm. The Beatles and the Rolling Stones supported him and took inspiration from his musicianship and stagecraft, and he went on to influence artists as diverse as David Bowie, Elton John, Michael Jackson and Prince.
Apr 22, 2023
With unique access to Karl Lagerfeld’s inner circle - many having never spoken publicly before - and his beloved cat, this film opens up the extraordinary world of the man known as Kaiser Karl.
Apr 26, 2023
A look at the relationships and rivalries within The Rolling Stones in their formative years, as well as the creative musical genius of Brian Jones, key to the success of the band.
May 15, 2023
A profile of artist and activist Nan Goldin, using slideshows, interviews, photography and rare footage to tell the story of her personal fight to hold the Sackler family accountable for the opioid overdose crisis.
Jun 4, 2023
Gabrielle 'Coco' Chanel transformed women's fashion, a truly revolutionary designer whose influence is still evident today. Her designs called into question the role of women, sex and power, and ignited a whole new way of dressing. Yet her life remains shrouded in mystery. This feature-length Arena documentary weaves together the story of Chanel’s creations - from the little black dress to the tweed suit and the iconic chain handbag - over the contours of her colourful life.
Sep 15, 2023
Poet, rapper, playwright and recording artist Kae Tempest is one of the most viscerally exciting artists working in Britain today. They are the youngest ever recipient of the prestigious Ted Hughes prize and have been nominated for both Brit and Mercury music prizes. This unique Arena film, shot over several years, gains a rare insight into their life and creative process.
Nov 29, 2023
A celebration of the unique life and talent of Caroline Aherne, featuring unseen photographs and contributions from a cast of her lifelong friends, including Steve Coogan, Jon Thompson, Craig Cash and producer Andy Harries.
Dec 25, 2023
The story of Noel Coward, the most prolific writer, director and entertainer of the 20th century, told in his own words.
Dec 26, 2023
In this new film from Arena, a cast of musical experts and admirers uncover the truth about the Maria Callas myth and the gift of her extraordinary voice.
Dec 29, 2024
In May 2024, Alan Bennett turned 90. This film celebrates the life and long career of one of Britain's best-loved playwrights. Part frank reflection on the ageing process, part remembrance of the joys of youth, Alan is aided by the films he has written and the documentaries he has presented in his quest to understand the person he has become.
Dec 13, 2024
