About

Welcome back to Your Local Arena, a unique project featuring iconic films from the archives of BBC TV’s Arena, the pioneering cultural documentary series. It includes new poems inspired by the Arena films and panel talks to explore the continuing relevance of the Arena archives today. The Your Local Arena concept was developed by Lucy Hannah and Speaking Volumes, with Arena’s award-winning director/editor Anthony Wall as creative consultant, and funded by Arts Council England.

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

In 2020-21, Your Local Arena materialised as a year-long series of online presentations, necessitated by the Covid-19 pandemic (the archive of which you can explore here). Over the next year, we are excited to be producing a new live series of YLA events which you can discover more about on our partner, Lucy Hannah's, website. Find a Your Local Arena event taking place near you below.

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.