Arena Season 2008
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.
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Arena Season 2008 Full Episode Guide
Arts documentary series. Leading theatrical greats, including Peter Brook, Vanessa Redgrave and John Hurt, pay tribute to the outstanding British actor Paul Scofield.
Arts documentary series. Interview with music producer Phil Spector, looking back over a 50-year career.
Acclaimed writer Philip Hoare confronts our fascination with one of the most mysterious animals in the ocean, the whale. Travelling in the footsteps of Ishmael, the narrator of Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, the great American novel, he visits the whaling ports of New England. New Bedford was once the richest city in the USA, and the island of Nantucket is where the whaling industry began. Hoare searches for the truth behind the story of Moby-Dick and draws an eerie parallel between Captain Ahab's crazed pursuit of the great white whale and today's war on terror. He enters a world haunted by a bloody and violent past, and, in the three mile-deep waters of the Atlantic, has his own encounter with the legendary sperm whale.
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, rich with period music and archive.
Documentary about the life of Frankie Howerd, with help from friends and colleagues and including highlights from his TV and film career.
