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.

George Melly looks at how they sold the 70's and a report on the opening of the Space Studios.

An interview with Howard Barker, author of 'Stripwell', and an extract from same; commentary by Kenneth Tynan; and an investigation of 'Birds of Paradise'.

Cartoonist Mel Caiman on the New Yorker magazine and its artists, Richard Hamilton at the Serpentine Gallery, and a new documentary exhibition from Jarrow.

Peter Hall talks about the history and new South Band location of the National Theater, where he is artistic director.

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.

Extract from a contemporary play and Kenneth Tynan opines.

Shirley Conran is the guest columnist; fashion photographer Barry Lategan is filmed working; and Victorian painter Edward Burne-Jones' London exhibition.

Deborah Norton reviews British stage events, a play extract, and Kenneth Tynan opines about the theatre.

Guest columnist Terry Measham; a look into the work of painter and poet Charles Tomlinson.

Mikhail Baryshnikov and Natalia Makarova rehearse for a BBC New Year Gala Performance; Kenneth Tynan draws a portrait of Albert Finney.

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.

Deborah Norton returns with reports, interviews and extracts from what is liveliest and best in the British theatrical scene.

Jonathan Miller introduces this week's look at what is most stimulating and enjoyable on the theatrical scene.

A look at American photographer Paul Strand and recent trends in British photography.

Arena goes to Scarborough for the British premiere of a new Alan Ayckbourn play "Just Between Ourselves".

Arena looks at aspects of community art and the work of painter Keith Grant, artist-in-residence at the New Charing Cross Hospital.

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'.

Arena talks with Robert Janz and Dante Leonelli about incorporating time into sculpture.

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.

Arena presents the work of British and American video artists.

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.

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.

Alumni of the Royal Court celebrate its 20th anniversary.

Barrie Penrose investigates a multi-national art empire and the artists and methods that created it.

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.

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'.

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.

A look at the opening of the Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester.

Gavin Miller interviews the director Robert Altman on "M*A*S*H", "Nashville", "Buffalo Bill and the Indians" and more.

David Gould, the expert who discovered Tom Keating's Samuel Palmer imitations, shows the process of identifying and analyzing suspected pictures.

Gavin Millar talks with Frank Westmore, whose family has dominated the make-up departments of American cinema for decades.

Peter Shaffer, writer of 'Equus', talks about his plays, his life and the theatre with an excerpt from the 1976 stage production of 'Equus'.

Gavin Millar interviews director Eric Rohmer about 'Die Marquise von O', 'Claire's Knee' and 'Love in the Afternoon'.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Sculpture for the Blind - a special Tate Gallery exhibition; Linda Benedict-Jones, photographer; James Boswell - a revival of his war pictures.

Arena speaks with Spanish directors at the Madrid premiere of 'The Long Vacation of 36'.

20th anniversary tribute to Bertolt Brecht at Newcastle's University Theatre with scenes from 'The Good Woman of Setzuan' and prose, poetry and music.

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.

Gavin Millar talks to Mel Brooks just before the London release of 'Silent Movie'.

An introduction to the magical world of wood-sculptor Sam Smith, plus a look at one of this month's major exhibitions.

Gavin Miller talks to director Martin Ritt, writer Walter Bernstein, and actors Woody Allen and Zero Mostel about 'The Front'

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'.

A fortnightly look at the big screen at home and abroad. News, views and interviews presented by Gavin Millar.

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.

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.

Peter Stein, director of Die Schaubuhne theatre co-operative, comes to London with his Shakespeare Project. Includes extracts from 'Summerfolk' and 'Shakespeare's Memory'.

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.

Arena investigates holograms and their potential in the arts; artist Kit Williams' vivid folklore paintings.

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.

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.

A look at Ealing Studios, including excerpts of many of their popular films.

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.

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'.

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.

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.

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.

Arena looks at erotic films, including 'Je T'Aime Moi Non Plus', 'Hardcore', and 'Come Play With Me'.

An interview with Sophia Loren on the occasion of the opening of 'The Cassandra Crossing'.

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.

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.

Features the 1977 Edinburgh International Festival with a new production of Carmen, the experimental shows, Film Festival, Television Festival, and art galleries.

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.

Diane Keaton and Woody Allen talk about the filming of 'Annie Hall' and their long friendship.

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.

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.

George Melly explores his lifelong relationship with surrealism in all its forms and prominent personalities; Henry Moore discusses Leonardo da Vinci's anatomical drawings.

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.

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.

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.

A tribute to the British filmmaker Alan Clarke (1935-1990).

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.

'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.

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.'

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.

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.

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.

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.'

Gavin Millar presents another edition in his regular series about the cinema today.

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)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Arena presents a film about the strange art of ventriloquism with Tattersall and his amazing life-size doll.

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.'

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.

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.

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 '.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 ".'

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.

"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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

' 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.

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.

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

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 .

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.

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

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.

' 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.

"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.

' 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.

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.

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.

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.

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,

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.'

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

' 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.

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

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.

'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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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'.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

Arena shows three film classics from the early years of British documentary, which began 50 years ago.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

'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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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'.

Hard blues meets film noir as Big Bill Broonzy sings and plays in a Belgian nightclub back in the 1950s.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Out of the archives, a skanking delight from Kingston's Sombrero Club, 1964. Featuring Prince Buster, Toots and the Maytals and Jimmy Cliff.

Darcus Howe interviews leading Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes and Trinidadian historian John La Rose on the exotic and often bloody story of the Caribbean.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

'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.

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.

'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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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'.

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.

'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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

(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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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'.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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'.

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)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

'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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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'.

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.

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.

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'.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Salif Keita - the golden voice of Mali - is one of the first 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Some lessons in manners from the silver screen - Five Easy Pieces, Tampopo, Oliver Twist and more.

This film explores the application of kosher dietary laws which have helped to preserve the separate identity of the Jewish people.

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.

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.

A chance to sample some favourites from the kitchens of such legends as Fanny Cradock, Zena Skinner and Delia Smith. Director Sarah Mortimer

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.

Left to your own devices, what do you eat, when do you eat it and how much of it do you eat?

As Christmas approaches, time to contemplate self-denial.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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'.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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".

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.