Arena — Season 1, Episode 309: How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?
Documentary • 90 min • 3 seasons, 689 episodes • ★ 7.2/10
Episode synopsis
What do the following have in common? Maria von Trapp, whose story became "The Sound of Music"; Bob Guccione, the editor of Penthouse; Martin Scorsese, the director of "The Color of Money" and "Mean Streets"; and the popular singers Mary O'Hara and Tony Monopoly. They all trained to be Catholic priests, nuns or monks. Fr Michael Cleary is a Dublin parish priest and also a comedian and singer; Fr Ernesto Cardenal is Nicaragua's Minister of Culture and one of Latin America's foremost poets. All of them feel that the vocation to the cloth and the vocation to art and entertainment are not dissimilar. Tonight's "Arena" tells their stories and examines the rich artistic traditions of Catholicism.
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.