Arena — Season 1, Episode 108: Who is Poly Styrene?
Documentary • 90 min • 3 seasons, 689 episodes • ★ 7.2/10
Episode synopsis
wo years ago Marion Elliott , a 20-year-old from Brixton, gave up working in Woolworths and became punk singer Poly Styrene. Having created her own plastic image, she formed a band, X-Ray Spex, and set about reflecting life in the synthetic 70s with songs like 1 The Day the World Turned Day-Glo' and ' Germ-Free Adolescents' 'Rock stars are disposable products, and I just wanted to send the whole thing up.' This film observes the differing worlds of MARION ELLIOTT and POLY STYRENE.
About Arena
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.