Described by Martin Scorsese as “home to some of the greatest non-fiction film making of the last 40 years”, Arena is the world’s longest running arts documentary strand. (Anthony Wall was a director from 1978 and Series Editor since from1985 to 2018. Since then he has looked after the Arena archive. Arena is dedicated to arts and culture high and low, from Visconti to Hip Hop, from Dylan and The Beatles to Nelson Mandela.
In 2000, Arena was given the Special Medallion at the Telluride Film Festival for its contribution to “cutting edge film making”. It was there that Werner Herzog, a fellow medallion recipient, declared Arena to be “the oasis in the sea of insanity that is television.” In 2019, Arena was given the Mel Noivikoff Award at the San Francisco International Film Festival for its “contribution to cinema”. Other awards include nine BAFTAS and twenty five nominations, six Royal Television Society awards, Primetime and International Emmys, the Peabody, the Prix Italia and numerous honours from all over the globe.
