Arena — Season 1, Episode 377: The Princess
Documentary • 90 min • 3 seasons, 689 episodes • ★ 7.2/10
Episode synopsis
Niccolo Machiavelli 's infamous The Prince is a short book about power - how to get it and how to hang on to it. But if 'he' were changed to 'she' throughout, would Machiavelli's masterpiece provide an insight into the remarkable success of a considerable number of women today, not least this century's longest surviving Prime Minister? Arena tests this phenomenon against the world's greatest power manual and wonders what has happened to feminism at the end of the 80s.
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.