Arena — Season 1, Episode 405: Staring at the Ceiling
Documentary • 90 min • 3 seasons, 689 episodes • ★ 7.2/10
Episode synopsis
This profile of Keith Waterhouse follows him through his hectic diary. As a columnist for the Daily Mail he reports from the Conservative conference in Bournemouth and the Labour conference in Blackpool, where he slips away to become a tram driver. As the playwright of Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell he tutors the real Jeffrey Bernard in the delicate art of making eggs fly into beer glasses. As a novelist he does research in Haywards Heath. And while one play ends, another one - Bookends - opens in Brighton. He also finds time for his favourite hobby, lunch.
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.