Arena — Season 1, Episode 313: The Waugh Trilogy: Mayfair and the Jungle
Documentary • 90 min • 3 seasons, 689 episodes • ★ 7.2/10
Episode synopsis
The second of three programmes looks at Evelyn Waugh 's most productive period as a novelist, journalist, travel-writer and man of action. His exotic journeys from the coronation of Haile Selassie in Addis Ababa to the deepest jungles of Brazil are recalled by fellow correspondent, William Deedes. His commanding officers in the war, Lord Lovat and Sir Fitzroy Maclean assess the disastrous military career which ironically produced his romantic masterpiece, Brideshead Revisited. This is the period in which Waugh's finest work was published. John Mortimer , Kingsley Amis and Graham Greene consider his literary achievement.
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.