About

Welcome to Your Local Arena, an Arts Council England-funded project (2020-21), produced by Lucy Hannah and Speaking Volumes, which featured the BBC's Arena film archive, with award-winning Arena producer/director Anthony Wall as creative consultant.

Your Local Arena is an original 'film meets literature' concept that matched UK venues or literary festivals to Arena films relating in some way to their local area, and invited speakers to explore their themes: from working-class Britain to Caribbean writers, football to nineties’ music.

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the films were screened online, in partnership with literary festivals and cultural venues across the UK. As part of each event, we commissioned brand-new poems inspired by a film from the BBC’s Arena archive. You can read all 30 of these poems here, and listen to the poets reading their work.

Although each classic film was screened only for a limited period, you can revisit each Your Local Arena event below, and watch a specially produced short film in which local writers and cultural experts respond to the Arena film, and highlight how our cultural past gives us inspiration for the future.

You can also read Anthony Wall’s written introductions to each film, participate in thought-provoking writing workshops linked to them, and listen to audio interviews with Anthony Wall and cultural experts – from carnival specialists to curators. Your Local Arena builds a mosaic of modern Britain and reminds us of the contemporary relevance of this iconic BBC archive.

About Arena

Martin Scorsese has described Arena as ‘home to some of the greatest non fiction film making of the past 40 years’. From 1979, under the editorship of Alan Yentob, Anthony Wall and Nigel Finch developed a new documentary form, a kind of free form examination of subjects that hadn’t previously been thought appropriate to an artistic treatment – a song, ('My Way'); a car, (The Private Life of the Ford Cortina); a radio classic, (Desert Island Discs). The success of these films laid the foundation for Arena’s reputation for wit, style and surprise.

Finch and Wall were core to a group of directors who pioneered Arena, applying the highest filmic values to art and culture both low and high, from Visconti to Superman, Louise Bourgeois to Amy Winehouse, Bob Dylan to flamenco.

Wall and Finch became editors in 1985 and continued to direct; Wall carried on as editor after Finch’s death in 1985. During his forty-year tenure, Arena won over a hundred domestic and international awards including nine BAFTAs with twenty-five nominations; six Royal Television awards; the Prix Italia; Primetime and International Emmys and, most prestigious of all, the Special Medallion at the Telluride Film Festival for a ‘commitment to cutting edge film making’. It was there that Werner Herzog declared Arena to be ‘the oasis in the sea of insanity that is television.’

Anthony Wall

Anthony Wall initially grew up near Victoria Park in the east end of London. Moving to south London, he attended St Joseph’s College, a Catholic grammar school run by the De La Salle Brothers. In 1969, he joined the National Youth Theatre and performed in its most celebrated original production, Zigger Zagger, both in London and on tour in Europe. He went on to study English at King’s College Cambridge, where he won the James Prize for poetry.

In 1974 he joined BBC radio as a studio manager. The same year he became the rock critic of the Morning Star, reviewing and interviewing leading musicians, notably Bob Marley, who gave his first interview to a national newspaper to Wall and the Star.

In 1980, Wall wrote and presented a six-part series for Radio 3, All Across The USA, using field recordings he’d made on the roots music of the American South. Wall has maintained a love of radio and he recently presented a feature documentary for 6 Music about Chuck Berry, based on his own interviews.

Wall moved into television in 1978 and soon joined Arena, briefly as a researcher, then as one of the core directors/producers (1978-85) and then Series Editor from 1985 to 2018. Since then, he has been committed to curating the 700 Arena films at festivals and events all over the world, notably as creative consultant for the Arts Council England funded Your Local Arena project with Lucy Hannah and Speaking Volumes.

He is also committed to creatively recomposing the films into new forms. His main project is Night and Day – The Arena Time Machine, a 24-hour evocation of a single day in the life of the planet, made entirely from the Arena archive. It screened at the San Francisco Film Festival in 2019 and Wall and Arena received the Mel Novikoff Award, one of the festival’s highest honours for their ‘contribution to cinema’. Wall has personally won three BAFTAs, with numerous nominations and other awards from all over the world.