Arena — Season 1, Episode 200: Kurt Vonnegut
Documentary • 90 min • 3 seasons, 689 episodes • ★ 7.2/10
Episode synopsis
Writing about his experiences as a war prisoner in Dresden in the novel Slaughterhouse-5, Kurt Vonnegut achieved a unique blend of dead-pan humour and shrewd observation of human folly. For Vonnegut, disaster is an everyday experience. Today the world freezes over, tomorrow a visitor from outer space is brained to death with a golf club... Tonight Arena looks at Vonnegut's career with the help of his most famous creation, his alter ego - the SF writer Kilgore Trout.
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.