Arena

This week, the director Ronald Eyre looks selectively and critically at what's coming on, or doing well, and recommends his own personal ' best buy.'

Kenneth Tynan talks to Laurence Olivier about Lilian Baylis, the eccentric founder of The Old Vic. Kenneth Tynan says: "The theatre is the cockpit of society: it is here that ideas are argued out, laughed at and worked over. It is our job in Arena: Theatre to make the theatre accessible and comprehensible to the largest possible audience. We hope to celebrate plays, players and playwrights as they are working now and we shall also pass judgement of our own. When a dictatorship takes over, the first cultural institution to be suppressed is the theatre."

This week Arena features a unique event in the arts calendar: the opening of the Space Studios with 150 one-man shows in 20 days.

Including an extract from a new play, Stripwell, which opened at the Royal Court Theatre, London, last night, and an interview with the author, Howard Barker.
Kenneth Tynan tackles a topical issue, and we investigate why Birds of Paradise has been packing them in on Bournemouth Pier.

This week's guest columnist is cartoonist Mel Calman on the New Yorker magazine and its artists.
Arena reports on new exhibitions and activities around the country and brings work by artists and designers into the Arena studio. This week's programme features Richard Hamilton at the Serpentine Gallery and a new documentary exhibition from Jarrow

On the first night of The Playboy of the Western World, a National Theatre production at the Old Vic, Arena reviews the National Theatre's past and present. Its magnificent new home on the South Bank is due to open in March. There Peter Hall , the present artistic director, talks to Kenneth Tynan , who worked as the theatre's literary adviser for 11 crucial years.
Presented by Michael White

This week's guest columnist is Observer critic William Feaver on Painting the End of the World.
Arena reports on new exhibitions and activities around the country and brings work by artists and designers into the Arena studio. This week's programme features Bill Brandt's selection of landscape photography at the Victoria and Albert Museum and the best of science fiction illustration.

A look at what is topical, urgent and most interesting in the British theatre.
There will be an extract from a current play and Kenneth Tynan will have some strong words to say about the theatrical events of the fortnight.

This week's guest columnist is Shirley Conran.
Arena reports on new exhibitions and activities around the country and brings work by artists and designers into the Arena studio.
This week's programme features the work of Barry Lategan , top fashion photographer and creator of the 60s image of female beauty, filmed at work with models including his most famous photographic subject, Twiggy

Introduced this week by Deborah Norton who makes her own selection of the most lively events on the British stage during this fortnight.
There will be an extract from a current play and Kenneth Tynan gives his own personal views on the theatre.

This week's guest columnist is Terry Measham of the Tate Gallery on Landscape into Art.

Arena reports on new exhibitions and activities around the country and brings work by artists and designers into the Arena studio. This week's programme concentrates on the work of contemporary British artists and features the work of painter and poet Charles Tomlinson.

The most famous male dancer since Nureyev, Mikhail Baryshnikov, will appear in the New Year in a BBC Television Gala Performance. We filmed him rehearsing for this with Natalia Makarova. This is the first time he has ever been seen on television.
Kenneth Tynan draws a portrait of the actor Albert Finney, who opens as Hamlet at the National Theatre tonight.

This week, Forgotten Heritage
This month sees the end of European Architectural Heritage Year. A report by the SAVE Campaign comes out this week, which contains the alarming news that, in the first six months of this of all years, 182 buildings listed for their historical or aesthetic value were destroyed.
Why does the ' spirit of our age' seem to be demolition?
Film-maker Roger Graef and journalist Simon Jenkins explore our ' forgotten heritage,' and some of the ways in which it might be conserved and put to new use.