Howard Jacobson, the eldest son of Max Jacobson, the Manchester conjuror, made a late but successful start in the world of fiction. At the age of 41 he published 'Coming from Behind', a scabrous satire of polytechnic life; and now, with his sexual comedy 'Peeping Tom', he has established himself as an important new voice in English fiction. Tonight, Arena looks at this Leavisite polytechnic lecturer, shopkeeper and original Jewish humorist on the move from Manchester, Wolverhampton, Cornwall and Australia.

The artists Julian Schnabel, Markus Lupertz, Sandro Chia, Francesco Clemente and Georg Baselitz command some of the highest prices on today's booming art market. Their paintings, monumental in scale and mainly figurative in style, have begun to fill the walls of private collections world-wide. They have been hailed as the 'New Expressionists' - though some cynical observers accuse them of turning out their pictures to order. As they establish themselves in spacious New York premises, castles in Germany, and even retreats in India, Arena examines the real driving force behind today's art world successes.

Arena this week presents a profile of the man many would consider the greatest living French film director. It introduces a BBC2 season of five of the masterpieces he made with the poet and scriptwriter Jacques Prevert during a decade of collaboration, running from 1936. They gave us such films as 'Quai des brumes', 'Le jour se lève', and - best loved of all - 'Les enfants du paradis'. Voted the best French film of all time in 1979, this remarkable film still plays to packed houses. In this first interview on British television, Carné gives a vivid account of his memorable career.

Karen Blixen 's voyage to Africa in 1913 was a journey away from the 20th century. Kenya was then a semi-feudal society, a land of Masai and Kikuyu, teeming with game. In 1931 she returned to Denmark having lost her farm, her health, and her closest friends. Within a decade she had produced her three greatest books: 'Seven Gothic Tales', 'Out of Africa', and 'Last Tales'. Karen Blixen had become Isak Dinesen, the writer.

Tonight Arena and Newsnight join forces to mount a major studio debate between the embattled factions of the arts world. 'The Glory of the Garden' was the Arts Council's blueprint for a redistribution of its grants favouring regional centres over London. Now a headlong battle has developed between those administering funds and those who are the beneficiaries... or the losers. The National Theatre has threatened 100 redundancies, and the Cottesloe could go dark in April. The English National Opera sees its programme in jeopardy. The Council's Literature Department narrowly escaped the axe, and half of the drama panel have resigned. In this atmosphere of open warfare, how can the garden grow? Will judicial pruning turn into total devastation? Has the Arts Council, in the words of its critics, "betrayed the arts and lent itself to party politics", or have just and sensible policies become the target for partisan hysteria? Tonight the Council confronts its critics.

From Chaucer's pilgrims to inter-continental juggernauts, generations of travellers have taken this historical route from Dover to the old City of London. It has become part of London's folklore, living up to its reputation as a place for a good night out; there are still 14 pubs along its two-mile stretch. You can also get a quick suntan or wallow in a Jacuzzi at Sundance City, buy the latest casual wear at Le Pel men's boutique, or sip a "slow comfortable screw up against the wall" in the Dun Cow Champagne Bar. These establishments live happily side by side with Bert's Eel and Pie Shop, the Fishing Tackle Specialists, and the world-famous Thomas A Beckett gym. This film looks beyond some of the shopfronts you'd normally pass down the A2 and reveals a host of unexpected personalities - mostly two-legged, but above all Bermondsey born and bred.

"To lig." Verb - to gain something for nothing by wit and ingenuity. Young Gordon Shilling arrives in London in search of fame and fortune, only to find himself alone, penniless, and hungry. Plucked off the streets by the mysterious Eden Rothwell and initiated in the art of ligging, he begins a picaresque journey through the highlife and lowlife of the nation. Along the way such experts as the Lig of Gentlemen - Peter York, April Ashley, John Bull, Samuel Smiles and Machiavelli - show the hero how to help himself in self-help Britain.

Tony Harrison is the son of a baker, and his poetry relishes, and mourns for, the class he comes from. His subjects are sex, love, politics, class warfare, death - all the rituals and performances of our lives. His work is direct, witty, often angry, expressed in the language and idioms of his northern roots. His recent adaptation of the English Mystery plays with the National Theatre Company has been hailed as "the most moving, solemn and joyful theatrical event in London." His latest cycle of poems is on an intensely private theme: meditations on his own family life and relationships. Tonight, Arena investigates a unique voice in contemporary literature.

In 1908, the comic strip artist Winsor McCay brought to life, on film, his celebrated 'little Nemo' characters. The first words that appeared on the screen were "Watch me move!" Tonight Arena salutes the pioneers of animation, in a festival of early cinema cartoons: funny, inventive and often astonishingly beautiful.

Hugh Masekela's career as a musician has been dominated by his determination to take the music of black South Africans to the rest of the world. His music is a fusion of sophisticated jazz and the raw but melodic Mbkanga, which is to the townships of South Africa what reggae is to Jamaica. As he became more successful Masekela left South Africa and spent the next 25 years in self-imposed exile in America, vowing never to return until the apartheid regime had ceased. In fact last year he did return - not to South Africa, but to Gaberone, Botswana, just a few miles from the border. Here he has set up a mobile recording studio which has become a magnet for the explosive music of his homeland.

Robert Wilson is one of the most revered and controversial talents in contemporary theatre. He first came to prominence in the New York avant garde of the 60s and 70s with a series of huge stage works which astonished and often infuriated audiences, but never failed to impress with their invention and sheer visual power. After seeing Wilson's first major work, 'Deafman Glance', the leading New York drama critic Clive Barnes declared that he had created "a new non-verbal, post-Wagnerian epic theatre." Tonight, in the first of two Arena programmes, Wilson talks candidly about his formal upbringing in the American Midwest; his job as a teacher of brain-damaged children in Brooklyn - an experience that changed his life; and about the inspiration behind his extraordinary theatre pieces.

First transmitted in 1985, Blues Night presents rare footage of the harmonica blues player Sonny Boy Williamson, who gave B.B. King his big break in 1948. "He was on the radio doing live performances when I first came to Memphis. He put me on his show to do this one song – a lady saloon-keeper hired me that day and I’ve worked ever since," King explained to the Radio Times.

First transmitted in 1985, John Walters talks to B.B. King - aided by his guitar Lucille - about his extraordinary life, from a childhood picking cotton in Mississippi to worldwide stardom.

First transmitted in 1985, Harley Cokliss’ classic blues documentary includes performances by Muddy Waters, Junior Wells and Buddy Guy, and shows how the tough urban music of Chicago developed out of the original rural blues.

First transmitted in 1985, the great Chicago broadcaster and journalist Studs Terkel and pianist Blind John Davis meet in a downtown bar to discuss and play the blues. This interview was shot for "Omnibus: Studs Terkel's Chicago" but not shown in the final programme.

First transmitted in 1985, this medley of the blues features Fred McDowell, Thomas 'Georgia Tom' Dorsey, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee. Huddie Ledbetter - better known as 'Lead Belly' - performs 'Pick a Bale of Cotton', and Billie Holiday accompanied by Lester Young, Coleman Hawkins, Ben Webster and Roy Eldridge, performs her own composition 'Fine and Mellow'.

First transmitted in 1985, hard blues meets film noir as Big Bill Broonzy sings and plays in a Belgian nightclub back in the 1950s.

Second of two programmes. When director Robert Wilson was asked to devise a stage piece to reflect the spirit of the Olympics, he decided on a truly global concept - an epic spectacle on the theme of civil war that would be created simultaneously in six countries. Each segment of work would be staged in its originating country before going on to form part of a complete 12-hour performance in Los Angeles. The artistic, logistical and financial problems of the undertaking were immense - Wilson was to be found jetting between cities, directing through interpreters, dealing with financial crises and trying to keep his original conception intact. Arena followed Wilson throughout this immense enterprise and presents a rare insight into the mind and working methods of one of the most influential personalities in contemporary theatre.

The definitive story of the "undisputed father of rock music," produced and hosted by former Beatle Paul McCartney.

Tonight Arena presents a unique interview with one of the great figures of 20th-century literature, Jean Genet. His first novel, 'Our Lady of the Flowers', written in prison, moved Jean-Paul Sartre to declare him a saint and martyr. Genet's plays, including 'The Maids' and 'The Balcony', revolutionised post-war theatre, and his novels, explicit and passionate celebrations of homosexual love, were widely banned. Now 75, Genet remains a self-declared outcast, unrepentant about his past as a thief and prostitute, still questioning society's expectations. In an impassioned outburst, he denounces even the interview itself as "a piece of bad theatre" and turns the tables on his interrogators, asking them some uncomfortable Questions of his own.

What do Charles Dickens, Count Leo Tolstoy, Barry Manilow, and James Anderton, Chief Constable of Manchester, have in common? A love of the accordion. Tonight Arena investigates the appeal of a much-maligned instrument from its roots in Imperial China, and appraises its bellowings from Cajun to the classics, from Stockhausen to Jimmy Shand. Other sounds from around the world include the heart-throbs of the Indian cinema, Tex-Mex superstar Flaco Jiminez, Soweto's Mahotella Queens, and the Accordion World Cup in Folkestone.

Francesco Rosi is one of the foremost figures in post-war Italian cinema. His films have an epic sweep covering Mafia crime, political corruption and economic mismanagement in Italy since the liberation of the country from Fascism by the Americans in 1944. Filmed in Naples and his home in Rome, Rosi talks about his development as a film-maker with illustrations from 'Salvatore Giuliano', 'Lucky Luciano', 'Hands Over the City', 'Illustrious Corpses', and 'Three Brothers'.

Yukio Mishima was one of the outstanding writers of his generation. Nominated three times for the Nobel Prize, he was the author of 40 novels and 18 plays. But his legend rests less on his literary output than on his bizarre suicide 15 years ago by ritual hara-kiri. Mishima's life was filled with contradictions. An intellectual, he was also a right-wing militarist who maintained his own private army. A nationalist who wished to restore the Emperor to power, he was obsessed with Western culture and offended his own people by adopting the image of a Western-style celebrity. In Tokyo, Arena reconstructs the story of this complex and contradictory figure against the background of Japan's wartime humiliation and astonishing post-war recovery.

The list of artists who have performed at Harlem's Apollo Theater reads like a Who's Who of black American entertainment. No black performer, from Sammy Davis Jr to Charlie Parker , could be considered a star without conquering the Apollo's tough, sophisticated audience. Tonight and next week Arena celebrates the 50th anniversary of the Apollo. But it is more than the story of a single venue. It is the story of Harlem itself and the struggles and triumphs of black America. Tonight's programme begins with the Apollo's infancy, when Bill (Bojangles) Robinson tapped effortlessly to the music of Fats Waller, and royalty like Count Basie and Duke Ellington held court.

Harlem's Apollo Theater has been the ultimate testing ground for every black American performer from Duke Ellington to Michael Jackson. Tonight Arena continues its celebration of the Apollo's 50th anniversary. With uncharacteristic modesty, Little Richard describes his fear of the notoriously tough Apollo audience, while Mary Wilson of the Supremes and Gladys Knight recall life backstage. Amid the upheavals of Harlem in the 60s, Solomon Burke and 'Mr Apollo' himself, James Brown, explain how they took themselves out of the church and on to the stage and renamed it soul. And finally, Nile Rodgers, producer of David Bowie and Madonna and veteran of the Apollo house band, presents the aspirations of the Apollo today.