Arena — Season 1, Episode 372: Peggy and Her Playwrights
Documentary • 90 min • 3 seasons, 689 episodes • ★ 7.2/10
Episode synopsis
Now in her 80s, Peggy Ramsay is the most powerful and unconventional play agent in Britain. She started her agency in the mid-50s in a converted brothel in the West End and has been responsible for the careers of over 70 writers including David Mercer, Robert Bolt, John Arden, David Rudkin, Edward Bond, Willy Russell and Joe Orton. Ramsay was played by Vanessa Redgrave in the Orton biopic Prick Up Your Ears. This film shows her working with playwrights David Hare, Caryl Churchill, Stephen Poliakoff and Christopher Hampton, follows her on an outing to the Barbican and taking a trip to Scarborough to visit Alan Ayckbourn.
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.