Arena — Season 1, Episode 321: The Dandy-Beano Story
Documentary • 90 min • 3 seasons, 689 episodes • ★ 7.2/10
Episode synopsis
Tonight Arena presents, on the occasion of their 50th anniversaries, a tribute to those great British institutions, the Beano and the Dandy. In their pages, the Softie has fought an unending losing battle against the likes of and the cow pie and the slap-up feed remain the just rewards for good behaviour. Arena visits Dundee in Scotland, where the current editors give their rendition of 'The Lost Highway' to the strumming of the Beano guitar. The film also includes such stalwart fans as the acerbic Steve Bell on the sources of his inspiration, Joan Armatrading , who not only wrote a song about the Beano but actually guest-starred in a strip, and leading young fogey A. N. Wilson on his admiration for Desperate Dan.
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.