Arena — Season 1, Episode 413: Texas Saturday Night
Documentary • 90 min • 3 seasons, 689 episodes • ★ 7.2/10
Episode synopsis
A show as big as the Lone Star State this is an epic voyage through the wildest state in the union - from the honkytonks and dancehalls to the hill country and burning deserts; from big cities to towns so tiny they're not even on the map. A departure from the style of Arena's previous TV nights, this programme takes the form of one continuous film with three intermissions. The guide for the evening is Texas's only Jewish retired country singer turned detective - Kinky Friedman. In the spirit of his mystery novels, he goes on a quest deep into the heart of Texas to find out what makes it so darn different from everywhere else.
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.