Arena — Season 1, Episode 209: The GPO Story
Documentary • 90 min • 3 seasons, 689 episodes • ★ 7.2/10
Episode synopsis
The GPO Film Unit-50 years old this year-went where no Hollywood film studio would dare to go in 1933. Down the mines, across the Alps, through the storms of the North Sea ... they really were a dedicated and intrepid group ot film makers. Held together by a dour and dynamic Scot, John Gnerson— the man who first coined the word documentary-they made some of the greatest factual films of the 1930s which still provide a fascinating insight into the everyday life of the time. Tonight Arena tells the story of this remarkable period of British cinema.
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.