Arena: The Peter Sellers Story (BBC, 1995)

The telly equivalent of a bumper Beano summer special, the 1995 BBC Arena documentary about Peter Sellers was stretched over three episodes and clocked in at nearly three and a half hours. Made up of extensive home movie footage and interviews with most of the key players in Sellers’ life, as well as clips from his career and some wonderfully atmospheric music, it was arguably the second-most important multi-episode popular culture TV retrospective of 1995, behind The Beatles Anthology series. Obvs. And *speaking* of The Fab Four, this week’s guest is Joe Wisbey, a man who spends an awful lot of time chatting to authors of Beatles books (paperback writers, if you will) for his marvellous Beatles Books podcast – available here: https://beatlesbooks.podbean.com/ Joe has probably watched the Sellers documentary more times than is strictly seemly but it holds an enduring fascination for him and he spoke eloquently about how he came to discover it and what it means to him.