Audio
Listen to interviews from the Your Local Arena events, exploring the archive of Arena films and discussing their relevance to contemporary Britain.
In these interviews, Lucy Hannah speaks to Anthony Wall about the making of the Arena films that inspired each Your Local Arena event, as well as cultural experts from the towns and cities that Your Local Arena visited. You can also read Anthony Wall's introductions to the Arena films that screened as part of the events.
Busby, Stein and Shankly - The Football Men
Screened online 20 - 25 May 2020 in collaboration with Writing on the Wall, Liverpool. Read more.
We’d just transmitted Sports Writer, an Arena on the art of sports writing, directed by Frank Hanly and presented by Hugh. Typical of Hugh’s style was an observation on Brazil’s greatest footballer: “With Pele, even his opponents felt enriched by what he did to them”. His prose fused elegance with the wit and edge of his native Glasgow. Football had been one of the main themes of that film, Hugh knew the game inside out but he also had a profound understanding of how it played in the working-class culture that supported it.
Around about the fourth bottle, Hugh declared that Bill Shankly, Matt Busby and Jock Stein, the three most celebrated managers of their era, had all been born within fifteen miles of each other in the west of Scotland coalfields and that all three had been miners. He felt this was the key to their methods and their success. Here was a film.
These men shepherded British football into the modern era from the near feudal circumstances in which it had been played before. In 1967, Stein’s Celtic were the first British team to win the European Cup. The following year Busby took the same trophy with Manchester United, a decade after the Munich air disaster that had destroyed virtually his entire team. Shankly transformed Liverpool from a side in the Second Division to the dominant club of the post-war era.
Each had an unforgettable character and, more than that, each became the emblem of the cities their clubs represented — Stein: Celtic and Glasgow; Busby: United and Manchester; and Shankly, Liverpool.
We could have given each one an episode of his own, but felt that the films would be so much richer if their stories were intertwined — a taller order but I knew that Frank’s cool authoritative direction and Hugh’s mercurial talent would pull it off. Episodes 1 and 2 covered their early life and careers as players, this final episode sees them in their full glory.
Directed by Frank Hanly, Arena: The Football Men was nominated for a Royal Television Society award
Anthony Wall
14 April 2020
Listen to Arena Editor Anthony Wall in conversation with Lucy Hannah, about the making of The Football Men
Listen to WoW Co-Director Mike Morris in conversation with Lucy Hannah.
Writing on the Wall (WoW) Co-Director Mike Morris is a founder member of WoW and has a background in community activity, in education and film-making. He was a writer on Dockers (Channel 4, 2000) and a co-director and producer of a ground-breaking documentary, Liverpool's Cunard Yanks (Granada, 2008). He is a playwright; his first play Waiting for Brando, which he wrote and produced, was put on at Liverpool's Unity Theatre in 2012 and 2013, followed by a short tour of UK theatres. His second play, Subterranean Theatre: The Maurie, based on a short story by George Garrett, was produced as a site-specific piece in Liverpool's Cunard Building in 2015. Mike created and directed the George Garrett Archive Project. Alongside Co-Director Madeline Heneghan, he is responsible for WoW's long-term strategic aims and development.
Caribbean Nights: Poetry
Screened online 11 - 15 June 2020 in collaboration with the George Padmore Institute. Read more.
We had developed a relationship with Linton Kwesi Johnson and Darcus Howe through two films we’d made together a few years previously. Arena: Brixton to Barbados was a documentary about Carifesta in Barbados in 1981, Linton wrote and presented it and I directed it.
The festival was an eye opener for me, its richness and variety were dazzling: Irakere from Cuba; The Renegades Steel Orchestra from Trinidad; Arrow from Montserrat; Rebirth, a stunning multicultural theatre company from Surinam; and, of course, the writers. Linton introduced me to many of them, including Mervyn Morris, Shake Keane and a young poet from Jamaica, Michael Smith.
Michael Smith was part of the new movement of dub poetry, as it became known, or reggae poetry, as Linton preferred to call it. Linton had pioneered the form in Britain, with Mutabaruka and Oku Onuora doing something similar in Jamaica. Michael was clearly an exceptional talent, his poetry was startlingly original, assured and performed with mesmerising power. For Brixton to Barbados he declaimed his already classic ‘Me Cyaan Believe It’.
The following year, he came to Britain and we made a film here. Arena: Upon Westminster Bridge provided the thematic basis for the poetry section of Caribbean Nights. C. L. R. James was living in Brixton at the top of the house of the Race Today Collective on the corner of Railton and, fortuitously, Shakespeare Roads. There C. L. R .would hold court and offer his inimitable knowledge and wisdom. He greatly admired Linton’s poetry and political stand but he was also renowned for his love of the classic works of English Literature. Michael made it clear those works said nothing positive to him. C. L. R. singled out Shelley and Keats and proposed that, while their literary language could not have been more different to that of the reggae poets, their revolutionary sentiments were identical. Michael was persuaded.
Upon Westminster Bridge, through Michael, C. L. R. and Linton, explores the correspondences and differences between historic English literature and this new poetry expressed in the language of reggae DJs and everyday Jamaican speech. That dialectic became the basis of the studio discussion, with Derek Walcott, who wholeheartedly embraced the grand literary tradition, Linton and the young Fred D’Aguiar. The result, judiciously supervised by Darcus, is a vibrant, passionate exchange of fiercely held convictions and beliefs and a demonstration of the unique, extraordinary breadth of Caribbean poetry.
Anthony Wall 6 May 2020
Listen to Arena Editor Anthony Wall in conversation with Lucy Hannah, about the making of Caribbean Nights
Listen to George Padmore Institute Trustee Roxy Harris in conversation with Lucy Hannah.
Roxy Harris is a founder Trustee (1991) of the George Padmore Institute and is its current Chair. He was a member of The Black Parents' Movement, played a major part in the International Bookfair of Radical Black & Third World Books (1982-95), was a member of the New Cross Massacre Action Committee and for many years was a coordinator and teacher at the George Padmore Supplementary School. He has taught in secondary schools, further education colleges, adult education institutes and in universities. He has authored and edited numerous books and other publications.
Three Faces of Bradford: David Oxtoby, Andrea Dunbar and David Hockney
Screened online 26 - 30 June 2020 in collaboration with Bradford Literary Festival. Read more.
The three films tell very different stories, yet combining them reveals common ground. The three protagonists certainly all confirm Yorkshire’s famous reputation for straight talking but, most of all, they share an uncompromising commitment to their own particular vision.
For Dunbar, her writing is an affirmation of herself, it confronts deprived and straitened circumstances in her own life. Oxtoby has adopted another world, the one he entered in his teens; he’s an adept in the wild and unruly church of true rock ‘n’ roll. Hockney has enjoyed incomparable success. He quickly became the darling of the art world and the transatlantic media, as well as being that rare phenomenon, an artist as popular as he is feted by the critics. He approaches the uncharted territory of high opera with characteristic assurance and charm.
Hockney has always said exactly what he thinks – about smoking, whether the great classic painters of old could draw as well as we thought, his sexuality – but central to it all is his own artistic vision. He seems ever intrigued by the possibilities art holds for him. That’s exactly how he approaches the new challenge of designing sets for the opera.
The Rake’s Progress – music by Stravinsky, libretto co-written by WH Auden, based on Hogarth, staged at Glyndebourne – this is high art and high life. In every respect it’s at the other end of the spectrum from Arbor, Andrea Dunbar’s play. At Arena we never privileged one over the other. Incorporating both the high and the popular has been, perhaps, Arena’s most defining characteristic.
With little to go on but her own young life, Dunbar tells the story of a teenage girl who becomes pregnant and how she deals with it. The script, unforgiving and unsentimental, is worthy of Ken Loach. The film was directed by my colleague, the dramatist and author Nigel Williams. “The honesty and directness of her writing was irresistible,” he told me, “She was an amazing natural writer. She’d had one advantage — encouragement from her drama teacher at her comprehensive who told her she could write. He recognised her talent as I hope did I.”
Dunbar’s art is rooted in life, Oxtoby’s is rooted in thrills and glory. The effect of American rock ‘n’ roll on the youth of the depressed post-war Britain of the 1950s cannot be overestimated. The late John Peel, a man of Oxtoby’s age, observed that the first time he heard Little Richard, he realised “a quantum leap had taken place in the history of mankind.”
Like Peter Blake, his contemporary at the Royal College of Art, Oxtoby is an unabashed fan (Hockney was at the RCA at the same time). That devotion spawned British Pop Art. While the Beatles, the Stones and others tried to emulate Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis and Chuck Berry in music, Oxtoby did it in paint. His skill is as easy as his manner — confident, humorous and dedicated.
Three faces, three different voices — one Bradford.
Anthony Wall
26 May 2020
Listen to Arena Editor Anthony Wall in conversation with Lucy Hannah, about the making of Décor by David Hockney, The King and I – David Oxtoby and Andrea Dunbar.
Listen to Bradford Literature Festical Director Syima Aslam in conversation with Lucy Hannah.
Syima Aslam is the founder and Director of the Bradford Literature Festival (BLF). Since being established in 2014, the festival has grown to a ten-day literary and cultural celebration, welcoming 70,000 visitors to Bradford annually. Under Syima’s directorship, BLF has made a significant impact on the country’s literary landscape, hailed as ‘one of the most innovative and inspirational festivals in the UK’.
The Banana
Screened online 15-20 September 2020. Read more.
All the nations like banana, all the nations like banana –
Cubans like it, Banana!
Africans like it, Banana!
Americans like it, Banana!
English like it, Banana!
When we made The Banana in 1997, we included that sequence.
In the hands of Contra terrorists, rehabilitated in detention by the Sandinista government, the humble banana carries a message of global empathy and commonality. So, if the banana can have a song, why not a film too? A film that would celebrate the banana, but might also explore its darker side.
Arena: The Banana is in a tradition that Arena pretty much originated, taking a subject that might not be thought obvious or appropriate for an arts documentary. An everyday item that could have the potential to tell us something about ourselves and our world, which we might not have considered or anticipated: a soupy song (My Way); an ordinary car (The Private Life of the Ford Cortina); a radio programme (Desert Island Discs); a hotel (The Chelsea Hotel in New York).
They’re subjects that reveal an unlikely coincidence of interests among an ostensibly disparate collection of characters. The classic Radio Times billing for an Arena film of this kind would begin with the words ‘What do the following have in common?’ In the case of The Banana, the film features Spike Milligan, the Duchess of Devonshire, Darcus Howe, Nicaraguan Contras, Harry Hill, Evelyn Waugh and Carmen Miranda.
These subjects seemed to us to have just as much value as the studies we might make of artists acknowledged to be great – Derek Walcott, Louise Bourgeois, T S Eliot – or great institutions and movements such as surrealism or The National Theatre. The likes of the humble banana might reveal less expected, more surprising insights.
It could be fun, frivolous or satirical, Spike Milligan states that ‘Somewhere way back in time, someone said, “Of all the fruits, the banana is the comedian”.’ Yet the centrality of the banana in the comedy of Harry Hill is in stark contrast to its centrality in European colonial adventure and, subsequently, the economic imperialism of the United Sates in Central America. Such a dialectic is a basis for the film.
The banana found a role in the fall of the Berlin Wall. Unavailable in the Eastern bloc, it became a symbol of the imagined prosperity and freedom of the West. Meanwhile, yes, we have no bananas, Charlie Chaplin slips on a banana skin, we laugh, we might even go bananas.
The challenge in making such a film is to find a way of properly realising all of its different aspects within a framework that melds them together while highlighting their particularities. That would be down to the flair and imagination of the director. Kate Meynell filmed far and wide, from Chatsworth to Honduras, searching for the stories that would build up a multi-faceted portrait of the mighty banana.
Then there is the banana itself, innocent of all this attention. Its abundance in markets, supermarkets, shops, restaurants, cafés all over the world offers no clue to its own very special organic characteristics. It’s a true botanical original and it enchants us all. As the song says, all the nations like the banana.
As Benjamin Disraeli observed in 1831, ‘Of all the fruits in the world there is none so delicious as the banana.’
Anthony Wall
16 August 2020
Listen to Arena Editor Anthony Wall in conversation with Lucy Hannah, about the making of The Banana.
Listen to Reader Development Librarian for Bristol Libraries, Katharine Seymour, in conversation with Lucy Hannah
Katharine Seymour is the Reader Development Librarian for Bristol Libraries and works across Bristol's 27 libraries, organising events, developing partnerships and promoting the library service. After graduating, she took on placements at publishers Hachette and with the books unit at BBC Broadcasting House. She worked for several years as a bookshop manager at Waterstones and has worked at literature festivals around the UK. She now lives in Bristol.
T S Eliot
Screened online 25 - 27 September 2020 in collaboration with Small Wonder Short Story Festival. Read more.
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table…
The opening lines of The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T. S. Eliot; this was my introduction, along with many others, to modern poetry, at school at the age of fifteen or sixteen. In 1915, when it was published, it was the world’s introduction to modern poetry. Once read, these lines can surely never be forgotten.
Eliot broke the mould and has been a determining influence ever since, not least on Arena itself. Eliot pioneered the juxtaposition of the aesthetic and the intellectual with the commonplace and the ordinary. He took poetry somewhere that had never been imagined.
Eliot’s work has been fiercely protected by his estate. The simplest request to quote a few lines would be met with the sternest scrutiny. So when they approached us, we were taken aback, to say the least, and of course thrilled and glad that they thought we would be the right people to make a film about him and his work.
The solid centre of any arts series is the portrait of the artist. The artists portrayed on Arena are nearly all from the era of film. Prufrock was published at the same time that film ceased to be a fairground attraction and became a new kind of art — and the world’s dominant entertainment. When it comes to making an art documentary, the profile is often the most conventional and predictable form — a good story of the life and work of a fascinating and significant person. Eliot offered more. His ambivalence, contrasts and contradictions enabled director Adam Low and film editor Joanna Crickmay to flash back and forwards to deepen the film and reveal the underlying shape of Eliot’s life.
He was from the American frontier – St Louis Missouri – yet affected the manners and reserve of an English gentleman. Among the most famous figures of his day, for years he didn’t even own his own home. The most intellectually achieved of writers, his greatest public success has been a stage musical based on his humorous verse about cats. Cats ran for twenty years in the West End and eighteen on Broadway. The ultimate poetry revolutionary, he was happy to be first a successful banker and then a senior editor at Faber & Faber publishers, occupying the same tiny office for decades.
In a vintage piece of archive, W. H. Auden observes that young poets want to emulate their heroes; he says his generation were spared that emotion, having no aspiration to Eliot’s rolled umbrella and bowler. Realising the pressure in such opposing forces can generate more tension in a film than straight narrative alone might.
Arena has never had a manifesto or a set agenda. I remember when Alan Yentob was the Series Editor in the early 1980s, a director asked him for advice on how to approach the film he was making. Alan said, ‘Just make it really interesting.’
Aiming at neat and tidy conclusions that purport to be definitive is not going to explain a life and work as complex as Eliot’s, analysis that in truth is speculation in disguise. This film aimed to be an evocation of the artist’s world and an invitation to the viewer to enter into it.
Perhaps the biggest irony of all is that T. S. Eliot, one of the greatest essayists and critics of all time, a fearless commentator on the work of others, was signally disinclined to explain his own poetry. A hundred years after his work was published, I hope the film shows that his writing continues to enchant, fascinate and disturb and, above all, to maintain its unique mystery.
Anthony Wall
24 August 2020
Listen to Arena Editor Anthony Wall in conversation with Lucy Hannah, about the making of T S Eliot.
Listen to Small Wonder Festival Artistic Director Susannah Stevenson in conversation with Lucy Hannah.
Susannah Stevenson is Artistic Director: Charleston Festival, Small Wonder Festival and Literary Programmes at the Charleston Trust. As a literary programmer and arts producer, Susannah has worked at some of the UK’s most prestigious arts venues, including the British Library and the Southbank Centre, home of the London Literature Festival. As Cultural Events Producer for the British Library 2016 - 2020, she curated the literature programme and seasons such as the European Literature Focus, Food Season and Harry Potter: A History of Magic. Susannah sat on the selection panel for the European Writers’ Tour 2016 - 2020 and was the Founding Chair of the Gender Equality Network at the British Library. She is also a reviewer, editor and researcher, and a Clore Emerging Leader 2015.
Caribbean Nights: Calypso, Carnival and Steel Pan, and Three Kings of Calypso
Screened online 6 - 10 October 2020 in collaboration with Ilkley Literature Fest. Read more.
Carnival is a Catholic tradition. The word ‘carnival’ is derived from the Latin Carne Vale, literally farewell to flesh, a last grand party the day before Ash Wednesday, which heralds Lent and the abstinence ordained for forty days up to Easter. Pre-Lenten revelry in Britain is confined to the tossing and consuming of pancakes. This celebration deficit is an unfortunate penalty of the success of the Reformation. For several decades now, of course, the Notting Hill Carnival has made up for things here and has brought the Caribbean Carnival spirit to London in the height of summer. However, in nations with a Catholic heritage, Carnival is the star on Shrove Tuesday (as it’s known in the UK) in the spring, from Venice in Italy to the snows of Bavaria in Germany — but the biggest by far are the big three in the so-called New World. Their origin is shared, but each has its own unique character, traditions and music.
Trinidad and calypso are synonymous. Lion, Kitchener and Sparrow were invited to take part, representing succeeding eras of calypso and, by definition, succeeding eras of Carnival. Their meeting was one of the highlights of the programme, shot with elegant simplicity by director Julian Henriques. These three calypso kings are effortlessly cool; they could be candidates on a list of the world’s best dressed men. They swap memories and verses and ruminate on the role of the calypso singer in society. This is a gathering of equals who have nothing to prove. There’s no interviewer, no one is selling anything to anyone.
The newsreel of Kitchener singing ‘London is the place for me’ as he came off the SS Windrush in 1948 has become iconic following the Windrush scandal. Kitch had never seen it; we were able to show it to him for the first time. Along with surprise and nostalgia, more painful memories returned — of the gulf between the optimism of the song and the grim reception those first Caribbean arrivals received here in the UK. As the fame of the newsreel continues to spread, the song becomes an even more telling calypso, incorporating that irony to become increasingly poignant.
In 1986, two years before our celebration of Carnival, Arena presented Caribbean Nights – a Saturday evening, again on BBC Two, devoted to Caribbean art and history, with further films and programmes over the following week. The evening was anchored by the late activist Darcus Howe. One of its main items was a panel discussion devoted to calypso with David Rudder, the then current Calypso King; John La Rose, the London-based Caribbean historian, and Carlos Fuentes, the great Mexican writer. Fuentes represented the Latin Caribbean, with its own islands and a 2,000-mile coastline alongside the English-speaking islands and territories.
The question was: What is Calypso? It began in the days before Trinidad had its own government, radio and newspapers. In their songs, the calypsonians carried the news and their own take on it. They were the media. The year we made the programme, Rudder won the Calypso King title with a smooth, modern presentation supported by promo videos but, however much the style might change to suit the times, calypso remains a commentary on current events.
Calypso is the literary aspect of Carnival, by turns, satirical, sombre, comic and tragic, but always witty and sharp. Rudder’s two successful songs were ‘Bahia Girl’ in which he identifies the two traditions of Brazil and Trinidad as one, and ‘The Hammer’, which marked the passing of the great steel pan maker, Rudolph Charles.
As Howe says, the steel pan is the third element of the trinity: Calypso, Carnival and Steel Pan. There’s nothing quite like the power of a steel pan orchestra in full flight. The Renegades were on hand to prove the point.
The calypsonians practice a kind of verbal alchemy, turning events, emotions and ideas into sung poetry. The steel pan maker practices literal alchemy, transforming the base metal of a disused oil drum into an exquisite musical instrument. The great traditions of the trinity remain testimony to Trinidad’s ingenuity, imagination and artistry.
Anthony Wall
6 September 2020
Listen to Arena Editor Anthony Wall in conversation with Lucy Hannah, about the making of Calypso and The Three Kings of Calypso.
Listen to Michael La Rose in conversation with Lucy Hannah.
Michael La Rose is author and researcher, and Director of Savannah View. He was band leader of the Peoples War Carnival Band (1982-1998), Vice Chair of CDC (1978-1980), founder of APC (1989), and Chair of the George Padmore Institute educational archive (2006-2016).
