Arena — Season 1, Episode 297: Scarfe on Scarfe
Documentary • 90 min • 3 seasons, 689 episodes • ★ 7.2/10
Episode synopsis
In this week's Arena Gerald Scarfe takes a long, hard look at himself. In his paintings and drawings he mercilessly pillories the powerful and the famous and yet in public he presents an image of docile sociability. In this irreverent investigation of his own personality Scarfe attempts to reconcile his two sides. He traces his progress from an asthmatic childhood through his early days in Punch and Private Eye to the Sunday Times - his days of reportage in Vietnam, electioneering travels with American presidents; he talks to Richard Ingrams Peter Cook , Harold Evans and Roger Waters and explores how his work has developed through sculpture, animation, films such as The Wall, rock and roll with PINK FLOYD to theatre and opera work.
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.