On Saturday 26 February 1938, 17-year-old Georg Klaar went to his first ball in Vienna. It was also his last. Two weeks later Hitler annexed Austria. The comfortable world of Georg and his family was utterly destroyed. Tonight Georg Klaar, now George Clare, tells his story. Based on his widely acclaimed autobiography, the film traces the fortunes of three generations of Viennese Jews through a troubled period of Austrian history. It begins in Vienna in the 1860s and ends in September 1942 in a tiny village in France from which his parents were to make their last journey. It is this small village which is at the heart of George Clare's search for his family past - a personal attempt to record the rich cultural heritage which he absorbed and to lay the ghost of a recurring nightmare.

Today, in post-revolutionary Cuba, under the benign patronage of Fidel Castro, classical ballet thrives. This unlikely success story is mainly due to the legendary figure of Alicia Alonso. After almost 20 years as an internationally acclaimed star of the American ballet, she returned to support the Revolution in 1959, determined to create from scratch a national ballet company. Now aged over 60, her long career frequently threatened by failing eyesight, Alicia Alonso is still Cuba's prima ballerina, still performing 'Giselle' and still the formidable leader of a huge company of dancers, all of them now trained and recruited within Cuba.

Tonight Arena takes you on a tour of contemporary British heads, from the exotic to the mundane, from hot wax to Brylcreem. Blue rinse, quiff, mohican, short back and sides, dreadlocks or just shaved off altogether. By your choice of hairstyle you tell the world about yourself. You can blend in with the crowd or stand out from it. For some it is a fundamental part of their religious beliefs, for others pure indulgence. What are the prospects for a bank clerk with a hennaed 'trojan'? How does a white man become a Rasta? Does the back of your neck still prickle at the thought of the barber's clippers? This Arena investigation will make your hair stand on end.

Pierre Boulez, leading composer of the post-war generation and later a powerful and innovative conductor, is now the head of an extraordinary experimental studio in Paris. This huge underground music laboratory was built especially for Boulez beneath the Pompidou Centre. Here, for the past-seven years, accompanied by computers and music assistants, he has been developing his most ambitious work to date - 'Répons'. It had a huge success at last year's Proms. In tonight's film he shares his ideas and methods of working, introduces extracts from 'Répons', and describes his enthusiasm for opening a window on a new world of sound.

George Melly presents films of the greatest names of swing jazz - but with a difference. Some were made for visual juke boxes which flourished in the early 40s, others are promotional shorts from the major Hollywood companies. The forerunners of today's rock promos, these gems are by turns witty, moving, surreal and always irresistibly entertaining. The line-up includes Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Billy Holliday, Fats Waller, Bessie Smith, and the three kings of boogie-woogie: Meade Lux Lewis, Albert Ammons, and Pete Johnson.

Widely regarded as one of the greatest literary figures of the century, William Burroughs has perfected a unique and terrifying vision of the world. He is, most notably, a savage satirist and a revolutionary stylist and his ideas and experiments with language have had effects far beyond the world of literature. Born into a wealthy family in St Louis, Missouri, he abandoned his background for another kind of life - the central theme of his work comes from his experiences as a heroin addict and a homosexual outlaw. Filmed over five years, tonight's programme is an intimate portrait of this elegant, witty and often shocking man.

Tonight Arena presents one of the most ambitious dance projects ever seen on television. The Catherine Wheel combines the talents of Twyla Tharp, one of America's most imaginative choreographers, and David Byrne, leader of the rock band Talking Heads, who composed and performed this original music score. The starting point of the dance is the image of a Catherine wheel and the unattainable ideal of physical and moral perfection which St Catherine herself aspired to. Energy, benign and malevolent, it is the central theme of the work, which builds to a spectacular climax of virtuoso dancing in the final Golden Section. When premiered on Broadway the 'New Yorker' referred to The Catherine Wheel as a "major event in our theatre" with dancing of "astonishing beauty and power".

In this timeless interview, Kurt Vonnegut - iconoclastic writer of science fiction and satire - discusses his family history, how he got his start as an author, his experiences in World War II, his obsession with the betrayal of humankind by science, and his vision of technology gone mad. Delving into the psyches of his characters, he even enters into a dialogue with his fictional alter ego, Kilgore Trout. Dramatizations and excerpts from 'Slaughterhouse Five', 'Breakfast of Champions', 'Cat's Cradle' and 'Deadeye' Dick bring the offbeat yet vivid world of Vonnegut's stories to life.

Tonight Arena takes an extraordinary journey through the video age. Video pirates, video trials, video weddings, video graves... Fifty years ago it was just the dream of a science fiction future - now It's All True.

Now 84, Jorge Luis Borges is the acknowledged master of the rich new literature of South America. Above all, Borges's stories are a dazzling exploration of his own mind and his own limitless curiosity. His magical tales are often rooted in puzzles and paradoxes. Imagine a man who can forget absolutely nothing, a knife that mysteriously controls the destinies of those who handle it, a point in space that contains everything that exists. Bringing together an exotic miscellany of incident and reference, Borges's work draws on the extraordinary landscape of Argentina and Uruguay - with their traditions of gauchos, horses, and old-time knife fighters - and on his profound and vivid love of books, especially those of other times and other places. Filmed in Uruguay, Buenos Aires and Paris, tonight's programme re-creates some of Borges's most memorable stories, among them 'Death and the Compass', 'The Meeting' and 'Funes the Memorious'.

Bette Davis is undoubtedly one of the most original stars Hollywood has ever produced, and in this exclusive interview, filmed on her 70th birthday, she is as formidable as ever. With great candour, she takes us through a career that spans a turbulent half-century. She has seen both sides of the precarious world of the movies-she tells of her triumphs, including two Oscars and ten nominations - but she also recalls vividly her years in the wilderness.

Anthony Powell's 12-volume epic, 'A Dance to the Music of Time', is widely regarded as the most formidable single work of British fiction since the war. It is also largely entertaining: its cast of 400 characters ranges from upper-class drawing-rooms to Bohemian London, and a violent death in a hippie commune. They have, in their turn, gathered a devoted set of fans among English-speaking readers. Tonight's portrait of Powell includes tributes from such admirers as Clive James, Kingsley Amis, Alison Lurie, Robert Conquest, and Hilary Spurling.

Philip Roth's masterly novel about writers and writing, conflicts of family, race and art, has been specially dramatised for Arena. Nathan Zuckerman learns some unexpected lessons about himself, and his aspirations to become a great writer, when he spends a night in the troubled household of his hero, the distinguished E. I. Lonoff. And who is the young woman with the shadowed eyes - and the mysterious past?

Following the success of Jazz Juke Box I, George Melly presents another selection of jazz shorts and 'soundies' - the delightful films made for visual juke boxes in the early 40s. He is joined by great jazzman Slim Gaillard, famous for such hits as 'Flat Foot Floogie' and 'Dunkin' Bagel'. Gaillard recalls swing's heyday and its legends - Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Fats Waller, Louis Armstrong and Nat King Cole.

The GPO Film Unit - 50 years old this year - went where no Hollywood film studio would dare to go in 1933. Down the mines, across the Alps, through the storms of the North Sea... they really were a dedicated and intrepid group of filmmakers. Held together by a dour and dynamic Scot, John Gnerson - the man who first coined the word "documentary" - they made some of the greatest factual films of the 1930s, which still provide a fascinating insight into the everyday life of the time. Tonight, Arena tells the story of this remarkable period of British cinema.

Last September, at the Royal Albert Hall, Don and Phil Everly performed together for the first time in ten years. The concert was the popular music event of the year. With a fine band, including lead guitarist Albert Lee and Pete Wingfield on keyboards, the Everlys faithfully re-created the sound of their huge repertoire of hits. 'Cathy's Clown', All I Have To Do is Dream', 'When Will I Be Loved', 'Wake Up, Little Susie' and the rest stirred the memories and emotions of a rapturous audience. The Everlys' harmonies are among the most special sounds in rock 'n' roll - and they sound as good as ever.

George Orwell is one of the greatest writers England has produced. Tonight, and for the next four nights, Arena presents a unique full-scale portrait of this remarkable man, filmed in the places where he lived and worked and told in his own words and the words of those who knew him. The first programme traces Orwell's upbringing in a sedate middle-class home near Henley, his horrific experiences at preparatory school, his years at Eton and as a military policeman in Burma - and closes with his sudden and dramatic emergence as a writer with 'Down and Out in London and Paris', a book drawn from his experiences among vagrants, tramps and outcasts.

Tonight's episode of the five-part Arena biography tells the story of Orwell's marriage to Eileen O'Shaughnessy, his growing political awareness, and retraces what was to be the most important journey of his life - the trip he made to Wigan and the industrial north in 1936, in an attempt to understand the embittered and divided working class of the 30s.