Arena (British TV series)

Arena
Message in a bottle title sequence used by Arena since 1975.
Genre	Documentary
Created by	Humphrey Burton
Written by	Various
Directed by	Various
Opening theme	"Another Green World" by Brian Eno
Country of origin	United Kingdom
Original language	English
No. of episodes	over 600
Production
Editors	Mark Bell (2018–present) Anthony Wall (1985–2018) Anthony Wall and Nigel Finch (1985–1995) Alan Yentob (1979–1985) Leslie Megahey (1977–1978) Various (1975–1977)
Running time	60 minutes
Production company	BBC Arts
Original release
Network	BBC Two (1975–2011) BBC Four (2003–present)
Release	1 October 1975 (1975-10-01) – present

Arena is a British television documentary series, made and broadcast by the BBC since 1 October 1975. Voted by TV executives in Broadcast magazine as one of the top 50 most influential programmes of all time, it has produced more than six hundred episodes directed by, among others, Frederick Baker, Jana Boková, Jonathan Demme, Nigel Finch, Mary Harron, Vikram Jayanti, Vivian Kubrick, Paul Lee, Adam Low, Bernard MacMahon, James Marsh, Leslie Megahey, Volker Schlondorff, Martin Scorsese, Julien Temple, Anthony Wall, Leslie Woodhead, and Alan Yentob.

History

The arts strand Arena was initially created in 1975 by the BBC Head of Music & Arts at that time, Humphrey Burton, when he founded a magazine named Arena exploring art, design, filmmaking, and theatre. In 1977, under producer and director Leslie Megahey, the strand divided into Arena Theatre and Arena Art and Design, and Arena became less of a magazine and more a home for short, distinctive and stylish films about mainly British theatre and visual arts. In 1978, Megahey became editor of Omnibus and Alan Yentob, who had been supervising Arena Theatre, took over and the two themes were merged. The series, relaunched in January 1979 and renamed simply Arena, began to adopt a format of single subject essays. It earned great critical acclaim for its enthusiasm for the popular as well as the high arts. During Yentob's time as editor, Arena had six BAFTA nominations and three BAFTA awards.

A group of radical directors, notably Nigel Finch and Anthony Wall, gathered around Yentob and Arena, including Nigel Williams and Mary Dickinson. Hits from 1979 included Who Is Poly Styrene?, La Dame Aux Gladiolas, a portrait of Edna Everage, and most notably the groundbreaking My Way, an examination of the appeal of the song, by Finch and Wall. It was the first of their collaborations, which developed a new kind of arts film, taking an unlikely subject and building a poetic meditation on its various aspects - further examples include The Chelsea Hotel (1981), The Private Life of the Ford Cortina (1982), Desert Island Discs (1982). Other successes included Megahey's portrait of Orson Welles (1982), Williams's study of George Orwell (1982), Yentob's portrait of Mel Brooks (1981) and Wall's four-part documentary on Slim Gaillard (1989).

On Yentob's move to become Head of Music & Arts in 1985, Finch and Wall took over as joint editors of Arena until Finch's death in 1995. Following a period of uncertainty concerning the future of the arts strand, series editor Wall protected the series in a reshuffle of the BBC. Since then Arena has been transmitted outside the conventional weekly broadcast strand on BBC Two and BBC Four, and latterly on BBC Four.

Under Wall and Finch, Arena developed the idea of the themed evening, beginning with Blues Night (1985), followed by Caribbean Nights (1986), Animal Night (1989), Food Night (1990), Texas Saturday Night (1991), Radio Night simulcast with BBC Radio 4 (1993) and Stories My Country Told Me (1995), a three-and-a-half-hour presentation on Nations and Nationalism. Since then Arena has won numerous awards with regular screenings at the BFI Southbank and has continued to cover the arts and culture at the highest level, with films on Bob Dylan, Harold Pinter, The National Theatre and Spitting Image, to name but a few.

Arena developed a substantial online presence featuring the Arena Hotel, a site that turns the 600-film Arena archive into a resource to build an online hotel for the stars. The Arena Hotel was nominated for a Focal International Award in 2013. Werner Herzog has praised the series as "the oasis in the sea of insanity that is television".

Wall retired in 2018, and the strand is now overseen by commissioning editor Mark Bell.

Branding

The programme's theme music is taken from the title track of the 1975 album Another Green World by Brian Eno, himself the subject of a 2010 Arena film subtitled Another Green World.

The Arena opening titles were voted among the "Top 5 Most Influential Opening Titles in the History of Television" by Broadcast magazine in 2004.

Series editors

Anthony Wall edited Arena since 1985. He joined the series in 1978 and became one of its leading directors.

Awards and nominations

Arena has won a Primetime and International Emmys, a Grammy, nine BAFTAs, six Royal Television Society Awards, a Peabody and the Prix Italia. Arena also won the Sundance Grand Jury Prize for Paris Is Burning (1990), the Best Performance Award for Lili Taylor's role in I Shot Andy Warhol (1996) at the Sundance Film Festival, and the SFFIF's Mel Novikoff Award.

Selected filmography

Year	Films	Director
1979	Now and Then - Anthony Green	Nigel Williams
1979	My Way	Nigel Finch
1980	Making The Shining	Vivian Kubrick
1981	The Comic Strip Hero	Anthony Wall
1981	Chelsea Hotel	Nigel Finch
1981	Brixton to Barbados	Anthony Wall
1982	The Orson Welles Story	Alan Yentob L. Megahey
1983	Burroughs	H. Brookner
1983	Borges and I	D. Wheatley
1985	Old Kent Road	M. Dickinson
1985	Saint Genet	Nigel Williams C. Chabot
1986	C. L. R. James' First Cricket XI	C. Pattinson
1987	The Confessions of Robert Crumb	M. Dickinson
1987	Evelyn Waugh Trilogy	Adam Low
1987	Stop Making Sense	Jonathan Demme
1988	Kapuściński	Adam Low
1989	The Other Graham Greene	Nigel Finch
1989	Slim Gaillard's Civilisation (Episode 1) - "A Traveller's Tale"	Anthony Wall
1989	Slim Gaillard's Civilisation (Episode 2) - "How High The Moon"	Anthony Wall
1989	Slim Gaillard's Civilisation (Episode 3) - "My Dinner With Dizzy"	Anthony Wall
1989	Slim Gaillard's Civilisation (Episode 4) - "Everything's OK in the UK"	Anthony Wall
1990	Paris is Burning	J. Livingston Nigel Finch
1991	Miller Meets Mandela	B. Marcus Nigel Finch
1991	Kenneth Anger's Hollywood Babylon	Nigel Finch
1991	The Human Face	Nichola Bruce Michael Coulson
1993	Edward Said	F Hanly T. May
1993	The Last Soviet Citizen	Leslie Woodhead
1994	Kalashnikov	Paul Lee
1994	Marvin Gaye	J. Marsh
1995	Punk and the Pistols	P. Tickell
1995	Stonewall	Nigel Finch
1996	Stories My Country Told Me: The Meaning of Nationhood - Eric Hobsbawn and Slovakian Nationalism	Frederick Baker
1996	Stories My Country Told Me: The Meaning of Nationhood - Desmond Tutu and the Rainbow Nation	T. May
1996	Stories My Country Told Me: The Meaning of Nationhood - Eqbal Ahmad on the Grand Trunk Road	H. O. Hazareth
1996	The Burger & the King: The Life & Cuisine of Elvis Presley	James Marsh
1996	I Shot Andy Warhol	M. Harron
1997	The Football Men	F. Hanly
1999	Cuba Night	P. Esterson J. Shinner
1999	Salman Rushdie	M. Dickinson
1999	Looking for the Iron Curtain	Anthony Wall
2000	Wisconsin Death Trip	James Marsh
2000	Clint Eastwood	Anthony Wall B. Ricker
2001	Salgado: Spectre of Hope	P. Carlin
2002	Kurosawa	Adam Low
2002	Harold Pinter Season at the BBC	Anthony Wall Nigel Williams Martin Rosenbaum
2003	Imagine Imagine	Frederick Baker
2003	Dylan Thomas: Grave to Cradle	Anthony Wall
2004	Pavarotti: The Last Tenor	Frank Hanly
2004	Shadowing the Third Man	Frederick Baker
2004	Painting the Clouds: A Portrait of Dennis Potter	Martin Rosenbaum Nigel Williams
2005	Calling Hedy Lamarr	Georg Misch
2005	Bacon's Arena	Adam Low
2005	No Direction Home: Bob Dylan	Martin Scorsese
2005	The Princess and Panorama	Samantha Peters
2006	Pete Doherty	Ashtar Alkhirsan
2007	Underground	Zimena Percival
2007	Bob Marley's Exodus '77	Anthony Wall
2007	Encountering Bergman	David Thompson
2007	Bergman and the Cinema	Marie Nyrerod
2008	V.S. Naipaul: The Strange Luck Of...	Adam Low
2008	Phil Spector	Vikram Jayanti
2009	T. S. Eliot	Adam Low
2010	Brian Eno: Another Green World	Nicola Roberts
2010	Harold: A Celebration	Anthony Wall
2010	Dave Brubeck: In His Own Sweet Way	Bruce Ricker
2011	Produced by George Martin	Frank Hanly
2011	George Harrison: Living in the Material World	Martin Scorsese
2012	Dickens On Film	Anthony Wall
2012	Sonny Rollins: This is Who I Am	Dick Fontaine
2012	The Dreams of William Golding	Adam Low
2012	Jonathan Miller	David Thompson
2012	Amy Winehouse: The Day She Came to Dingle	Maurice Linnane
2012	The Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour Revisited	Frank Hanly
2012	Screen Goddesses	David Thompson
2012	Sister Wendy and the Art of the Gospels	Randall Wright
2013	AKA Norman Parkinson	Nicola Roberts
2013	The National Theatre	Adam Low
2014	Whatever Happened to Spitting Image?	Anthony Wall
2014	The 50 Year Argument: The New York Review of Books	Martin Scorsese David Tedeschi
2017	The American Epic Sessions	Bernard MacMahon
2017	American Epic	Bernard MacMahon

See also

• Storyville, a similar documentary series by the BBC

Sources

• Vahimagi, Tise. British Television: An Illustrated Guide. Oxford: Oxford University Press / British Film Institute, 1994. ISBN 0-19-818336-4.

External links

• Arena at BBC Online
• Arena Hotel site at The Space
• Arena at IMDb