Arena — Season 1, Episode 333: Byrne About Byrne
Documentary • 90 min • 3 seasons, 689 episodes • ★ 7.2/10
Episode synopsis
Each season Arena invites a distinguished figure in the arts to direct a film. This year's guest director is John Byrne, painter and author of Tutti Frutti. In this diverse and inventive autobiography, Byrne travels from his youth, through his art school years to the period of his stage and TV plays, and on to his death sometime in the future. With him is Robbie Coltrane as himself and as a shamus invented by Byrne, who discovers there are as many aspects to the author as there are actors playing him.
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.