Arena — Season 1, Episode 269: The Journey Man
Documentary • 90 min • 3 seasons, 689 episodes • ★ 7.2/10
Episode synopsis
Behind the quiet, gentlemanly exterior of Norman Lewis lies the acute Perception of one of Britain's foremost travel writers and investigative journalists. His fascinating accounts of the cultures of the world cover the Brazilian jungle, the tribes of Indo-China, the villages of Spain and his own eccentric upbringing in Enfield, where his parents ran a Spiritualist church. One of his finest books is Naples '44, describing his experiences as an intelligence officer with the forces that liberated Southern Italy. In tonight's film Lewis returns to this extraordinary region where the ancient Sibyl foretold the fates of emperors and kings, whose local saint can quell the lavas of Vesuvius and where today 600 Mafiosi are on trial. Through Lewis's own idiosyncratic observations, Arena explores the life and work of a very dead-pan Englishman abroad.
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.