Arena (1975)
Arena is a British television documentary series, made and broadcast by the BBC. Voted by leading TV executives in Broadcast as one of the top 50 most influential programmes of all time, it has run since 1 October 1975 with over five hundred episodes made, directed by the likes of Martin Scorsese, Alan Yentob, Roly Keating, Frederick Baker, Volker Schlondorff and Vikram Jayanti. Arena's subjects are a roll-call of the world's best known cultural figures from the 20th and 21st centuries, from singers Bob Dylan and Amy Winehouse to academics Edward Said and Eric Hobsbawm, from writers Jean Genet and V S Naipaul to artists Francis Bacon and Louise Bourgeois. The current series editor is Anthony Wall.
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Episode 1 - Wisconsin Death Trip
Release Date: 2000-07-02This poetic documentary uses archive newspaper reports, the contemporary photographs of Charles Van Shaick, and reconstructions to portray the mysterious and tragic events that befell the small and unsuspecting American town of Black River Falls in the 1890s. The story was originally told in Michael Lesy's book, which was itself based on newspaper reports and archive photographs from the time. Ian Holm narrates the stories using the words of the local newspaper editor.