Arena Season 18 Episodes

Episode 1

The Graham Greene Trilogy - Part 1: England Made Me

Episode 2

The Graham Greene Trilogy - Part 2: The Dangerous Edge

Episode 3

The Graham Greene Trilogy - Part 3: A World of My Own

Episode 4

Radio Night

Episode 5

The Grateful and the Dead

Episode 6

A Tribute to Dizzy Gillespie

Episode 7

Larry Kramer

Episode 8

Edward Said: The Idea of Empire

Edward Said, a Palestinan writer, academic and exile, talks about his book "Culture and Imperialism" and explains how the attitudes forged over the last 200 years continue to enforce the relationship between the west and the developing world.

Episode 9

The Last Soviet Citizen

Documentary that follows three decades of Soviet space culture, from the glory days of Yuri Gagarin to the saga of Sergei Krikalev, the Soviet citizen who was stranded in space for ten months as the Soviet Union was dismantled.

Episode 10

Derek Walcott

60 mins

Episode 11

Zhang Yimou

Director of Ju Dou, Red Sorghum and Raise the Red Lantern is interviewed from within China whilst making a commercial for Philip Morris (China is one of the largest consumers of cigarettes in the world). Although many of his films have been banned inside his native China, Zhang Yimou is fast becoming the most celebrated Chinese director in the world.

Episode 12

Philip Roth: My True Story

Episode 13

Only the Names Have Been Changed....

Episode 14

Weegee/Duchamp's Fountain

In 1917 a white porcelain object curiously entitled "Fountain" was entered into an exhibition of new work by independent artists in New York. The object was a common lavatory urinal bought from a sanitary appliance store, and the artist was eventually revealed as Marcel Duchamp. It was to become one of the most provocative and influential artworks of the twentieth century.

Episode 15

Edgar Reitz: Return to Heimat

Episode 16

Tales of Rock 'N' Roll: Peggy Sue

28 mins

Peggy Sue Gerron Rackham tells how Buddy Holly's songs Peggy Sue and Peggy Sue Got Married came to be written. She went to the same high school as Holly and married drummer Jerry Allison. Other people recall the era, including Donna Fox who inspired Ritchie Valens' song, Donna.

Episode 17

Not a Bad Girl - Brenda Fassie is South Africa's answer to Madonna

Episode 18

Tales of Rock 'N' Roll: Heartbreak Hotel

32 mins

Tells how the lyrics of Elvis Presley's first million-selling release, Heartbreak Hotel, came to be written. The idea for the song arose when the song's writers noticed a story about a suicide in a newspaper. The man had left a short suicide note. It read: I walk in a lonely street.

Episode 19

Tales of Rock 'N' Roll: Walk on the Wild Side

90 mins

Tells the story behind Lou Reed's song Walk on the Wild Side. The characters named in it were people who frequented Andy Warhol's studio in the late 1960s. Holly Woodlawn and Joe Dallesandro are the only "superstars" who have survived and they are interviewed in the programme. The programme presents a snapshot of a certain moment in the life of New York's underground culture.

Episode 20

Tales of Rock 'N' Roll: Highway 61 Revisited

Investigates Bob Dylan's origins in Hibbing, Minnesota and takes a musical and historical journey down Highway 61 itself. John Bucklen, a teenage companion of Bob Dylan, provides some new insights into Dylan's earliest musical experiments and the journey Dylan himself undertook from a middle- class rock'n'roller in Hibbing to fashionable protest singer in New York.

Episode 21

Radio Night: The Seven Ages of Radio

Ian McKellen ruminates on the history of radio, characterized as Shakespeare's seven ages of man.