Arena — Season 1, Episode 381: The Daily Worker Story
Documentary • 90 min • 3 seasons, 689 episodes • ★ 7.2/10
Episode synopsis
When Lenin told the newly formed Communist Party of Great Britain that its survival depended on having a daily paper, he could not have forseen that after 60 years of heroic struggle the Daily Worker, renamed in 1966 the Morning Star, would come perilously close to extinction because today's leader of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, had cancelled half its subscription. Beatrix Campbell, who worked on the paper for ten years during the turbulent 60s and 70s, talks to the people who sustained it during its glorious triumphs and constant crises, and in its pages finds a unique reflection of the history and culture of Britain.
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.