Arena — Season 1, Episode 311: Talk is Cheap
Documentary • 90 min • 3 seasons, 689 episodes • ★ 7.2/10
Episode synopsis
What is a chat show - a forum for stimulating conversation and the exchange of ideas or just an economical way of filling the airwaves? Gus Macdonald becomes host for an evening and invites his guests Russell Harty , David Frost and Kenneth Williams to discourse on the art of the chat show. Simon Dee talks about the legendary moment when he was given his own chat show and Jackie Collins sets off on the long promotional haul, knocking off one chat show after another. And Quentin Crisp and Malcolm Muggeridge consider why we should want to watch strangers talking on television.
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.