Arena presents Bob Dylan, concentrating on his classic songs and backed by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers in his first concert on British television in over a decade.

Tonight Arena presents the moving story of the first lady of country music. At the age of 44 she's had 35 number one records, three Grammy awards, 50 albums, five husbands, four children, two grandchildren, continuing health problems, and 15 operations. Yet she continues her punishing schedule driven by the dream that took her from the Alabama cotton fields to Nashville and now to Hollywood. Filmed in Los Angeles, Nashville, and her childhood home in the deep South, she talks with openness about her career and her marriages, especially to country superstar George Jones.

Night and Day is a 24-hour journey through the streets of London spent in the company of two different and unusual writers. The day is introduced by 'Spectator' columnist Jeffrey Bernard, who has turned the humdrum routine of daylight hours into a time of escapade, adventure and other lowlife pursuits in the face of every obstacle, including his own collapse at eight each evening. As his day ends, Celia Fremlin's night begins. Fremlin, a 71-year-old thriller writer, stalks London's streets from 11pm to 5am in pursuit of what she perceives as a kingdom magically transformed by darkness. Together Bernard and Fremlin present a London that is delightfully personal, mysteriously romantic and usually unexpected.

Alan Yentob interviews TV dramatist Dennis Potter about his work through the years, touching on subjects such as why and how he started writing, his sense of being different as a child, the insularity of his past in Forest of Dean, starting at the BBC in 1959, and a failed attempt at going into politics.

Martin Chambi, an Indian born into a peasant family in the remote Peruvian countryside, became a leading figure in the revolutionary artistic and social movements that swept South America in the 1930s. His magnificent photographs of the great Inca ruins were the visual epitome of the quest to rediscover the native culture of the Andes. At the same time his portraits recorded the whole of Peruvian society, the heirs of the conquerors as well as the heirs of the Incas. Shot on location deep in the Andes by Jorge Vignati, cameraman on Herzog's 'Fitzcarraldo', the film explores Andean life through Chambi's majestic photographs and looks at the relevance of his work 50 years on.

After Robert Crumb, comics could never be the same again. He came to fame in the mid 60s with characters such as Fritz the Cat and the archetypal guru Mr Natural - wicked satires on the excesses of the Love Generation. In a medium associated with superheroes, Crumb deals only with anti-heroes, and most entertainingly his own self-portrait: a confused, paranoid weakling with an unfortunate taste for big, powerful women. Lost in the modern world, Crumb has found refuge in rural California with his wife and fellow comic artist, Aline Kominsky. Tonight, in a rare appearance before the camera, he talks about his work and his troubles with women, life and himself.

David Lynch, director of some of the strangest films in today's cinema, including 'Eraserhead' and 'Elephant Man', guides us through the film works of a peerless group of artists - the Surrealists. Working in Paris from the mid-1920s, such legendary figures as Jean Cocteau, Man Ray, and Luis Buñuel were the first to explore techniques so startling that they have passed into the common language of mainstream cinema, video and advertising. Extracts from their classics combine with the lesser-known films by Rene Clair, Fernand Leger, Marcel Duchamp, Hans Richter and Max Ernst to produce a box of unearthly delights. And, to bring us up to date, Arena includes a sneak preview of David Lynch's 'Blue Velvet', the most talked-about film of recent years.

Abdullah Ibrahim (formerly Dollar Brand) - pianist, composer, arranger - was born in Cape Town, South Africa in 1934. When Duke Ellington heard him in 1965 he was so impressed that he arranged for Ibrahim to move to America, where he quickly became a leading figure in the jazz avant-garde. He has since lived and worked in exile in New York, developing a blend of jazz and the traditional styles of South Africa that have recently become fashionable in the West. Tonight's Arena moves between New York and the relics of the Cape Town he grew up in, explaining his beautiful, evocative music and the stories and feelings that inspired it.

In 1986 Andrei Tarkovsky's remarkable career in the cinema received the accolade of the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival. It sealed his reputation in the west as Russia's greatest living artist. In Moscow, however, his work has been at best ignored, at worst vilified as elitist and wilfully obscure. Official disfavour finally forced Tarkovsky to leave Russia to seek financing. It was only a few months before his recent death that his poetic and haunting films were given official recognition in Moscow. Tonight's Arena reviews Tarkovsky's life and work.

Jo Spence's photography defies definition - her work appears in community spaces as well as grand galleries. It deals with social problems, sexuality, myth, and power. Tonight's Arena looks at her life and work since 1982, when she was diagnosed as having breast cancer. She rejected the treatment offered by the NHS and began a search for alternative cancer treatment. She began to photograph her own body and, as an extension to co-counselling, began to use the camera to explore the memories of her parents - her mother died of cancer. The work culminated in an extraordinary series of dramatic re-creations of her mother. Jo's camera has become an integral part of her healing process. She calls this practice "phototherapy".

What do the following have in common? Maria von Trapp, whose story became 'The Sound of Music'; Bob Guccione, the editor of 'Penthouse'; Martin Scorsese, the director of 'The Color of Money' and 'Mean Streets'; and the popular singers Mary O'Hara and Tony Monopoly? They all trained to be Catholic priests, nuns or monks. All of them feel that the vocation to the cloth and the vocation to art and entertainment are not dissimilar. Tonight's Arena tells their stories, and examines the rich artistic traditions of Catholicism.

Lino Brocka is the most influential film director in the Philippines, and a leading figure in the civil rights movement. Throughout the period of martial law, he opposed the Marcos regime. In 1985 he was jailed on a trumped-up charge of sedition. Now Cory Aquino is president, but poverty and intimidation are firmly entrenched, and the communist guerrillas, the New People's Army, continue to gain in number. Brocka led a clandestine expedition into the mountains to film interviews with the NPA, and Arena went with him, at a time when real-life events were becoming as dramatic as a Brocka film.

What is a chat show - a forum for stimulating conversation and the exchange of ideas, or just an economical way of filling the airwaves? Gus Macdonald becomes host for an evening and invites his guests Russell Harty, David Frost and Kenneth Williams to discourse on the art of the chat show. Simon Dee talks about the legendary moment when he was given his own chat show and Jackie Collins sets off on the long promotional haul, knocking off one chat show after another. And Quentin Crisp and Malcolm Muggeridge consider why we should want to watch strangers talking on television.

Twenty-one years after his death, Evelyn Waugh looms larger than ever over the English literary scene. In the course of three programmes, Arena uses the testimony of his friends and foes to explore the man and his work. The first programme covers the period of his early life, and his arrival in his 20s on the literary horizon with the publication of 'Decline and Fall' and 'Vile Bodies'.

The second of three programmes looks at Evelyn Waugh's most productive period as a novelist, journalist, travel writer and man of action. His exotic journeys from the coronation of Haile Selassie in Addis Ababa to the deepest jungles of Brazil are recalled by fellow correspondent William Deedes. His commanding officers in the war, Lord Lovat and Sir Fitzroy Maclean, assess the disastrous military career which ironically produced his romantic masterpiece, 'Brideshead Revisited'. This is the period in which Waugh's finest work was published. John Mortimer, Kingsley Amis, and Graham Greene consider his literary achievement.

Last of three programmes. When Waugh died on Easter Sunday 21 years ago, his friend Graham Greene felt "as if one's commanding officer were dead." During his last 20 years he retreated from the outside world, increasingly obsessed with mortality - at the same time cultivating the cantankerous personality that became his abiding image. With contributions from his priest, neighbours and family, Arena looks behind the public mask of Evelyn Waugh.

Joseph Beuys was one of the most prominent and controversial German artists of the past 30 years. Sculptor, performance artist, teacher and maverick politician - when he died last year, Beuys left behind him a unique and provocative inheritance. Paradoxically, his irreverent art now fills the museums of the world and is bought and sold for fortunes. Tonight's programme follows Beuys's remarkable career from World War II, when, as a Stuka pilot he crashed in the Crimea, to his increasingly political role in post-war Germany as co-founder of the Green Party. Did he achieve his goal and help to heal the wounds of German history through art, or was he finally a charlatan?

A profile of Diego Rivera, considered to be the most famous painter in the history of Latin America - and also the most notorious. He was a Rabelaisian figure of far-flung proportions who claimed to have been a confidant of Lenin, the true father of Rommel, and to have tasted human flesh on a number of occasions. He was a maverick, a compendium of contradictions and irrationalities. A self-proclaimed revolutionary who sought in mural paintings a new public art form to broadcast social change to the people of Mexico, he was also the man who accepted commissions from the yankee-dollar capitalists, Rockefeller and Ford.

Arena presents its first authentic courtroom drama, featuring, in the prosecution corner, Bob 'Penthouse' Guccione versus Britain's Ken Russell - a case in which justice must not only be done, but must be seen to be believed. Guccione hired Russell to direct a film version of Daniel Defoe's picaresque classic 'Moll Flanders' in the same vein as his infamous 'Caligula'. Before too long ego clashed with ego over the contents of the script - and Guccione sued Russell for breach of contract. Arena brings you all the tension and cross-court fire of one of the most outrageous trials of the century.

'Jewel in the Crown', 'The Far Pavilions', 'A Passage to India' - for 200 years British writers have achieved great success with their accounts of life on the Indian subcontinent. Less well-known are the writings of those Indians who travelled to Britain and recorded their observations throughout the same period. Hardly any of this work has ever been translated, yet it represents a fascinating perspective on how the Indians have seen us. With specially commissioned translations Arena presents this extraordinary testament for the first time.

Arena presents the first television showing for Jonathan 'Something Wild' Demme's superlative concert-movie featuring Talking Heads. David Byrne's innovatory visual flair and virtuosity as a performer surmount the cliches of both the tinsel vacuity of pop videos and the tired posturing of rock shows. Demme does away with the visual jargon of the rocumentary - no shots to adoring fans - and by dispensing with shaggy perms, straining leather trousers and squealing red guitars, 'Stop Making Sense' drags the pop concert into the 80s.

Art Spiegelman is one of America's leading comic-strip artists. Earlier this year he created a stir with 'Maus', a novel in strip form. 'Maus' tells of a young Jewish couple who are arrested and transported to Auschwitz - where Spiegelman's parents endured and survived the war. The Jews are depicted as mice, and the SS guards as cats. The story is told by an elderly mouse to his young son who asks him about his life. The unlikely, perhaps provocative, form of the comic-strip has produced an extremely moving book which has had huge success on both sides of the Atlantic. Tonight's film follows Spiegelman's journey with his wife and child to Auschwitz for the first time.