Arena — Season 1, Episode 506: The Banana
Documentary • 90 min • 3 seasons, 689 episodes • ★ 7.2/10
Episode synopsis
Tonight's programme considers musa sapientum, the fruit of the wise. The Velvet Underground's John Cale tells the story behind Andy Warhol's famous LP cover, Auberon Waugh and John Walters recall their first encounters with the fruit after the war and footballer Brendan Batson considers how they became a symbol of racism hurled from the terraces.
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.