Arena's 1993 season opens with this three-part exploration of the life and work of the enigmatic writer. Greene's obsessions with the seedy world of love, sex, betrayal, disloyalty and failure influenced millions of readers over 60 years. Tonight's film examines the failures and successes of Greene's early career; investigates his conversion to Catholicism; and explores his intense but unhappy marriage. It includes the first interview with his widow Vivien.

Continuing the exploration of the life and work of the enigmatic writer who influenced millions of readers over 60 years. Disloyalty, secrecy and spying fascinated Greene both in his work and in his private life. Tonight's film charts the hidden years of his life when his marriage broke down and he became involved in a series of intense and turbulent affairs. It begins in 1940 when Kim Philby recruited him as a spy.

Last of the biographical films, with extracts read by Sir Alec Guinness. Passionately promoting the link between Catholicism and communism, defending Kim Philby, supporting guerrillas in central America or fighting the Mafia in Nice - these were some of the more controversial activities Greene was involved in during his last 30 years. With contributions from Jeffrey Bernard, Koo Stark, John le Carré, Anthony Burgess, Vivien Greene, and interviews with his confessor Father Leopoldo Duran and his companion Yvonne Cloetta.

In the 1980s American artist J S G Boggs stunned the art world by holding an exhibition of banknotes, drawn by himself. In one go, he broke moral, artistic and legal taboos - counterfeiting money, poking fun at the art world, and raising the question, "Is this art?" The film follows this controversial artist on a journey funded by his hand-painted banknotes through railway stations, supermarkets, restaurants, wine bars and art galleries, as he attempts to evade arrest and discover the real value of money - and art.

The story of the unlikely and unpublicised relationship between a 60s American rock band and some of Britain's little-known orchestral composers. Once the icons of the San Francisco hippie scene, the Grateful Dead are still a leading touring band. But behind their continuing success, the group hide a secret cause: through their Rex Foundation, they have been anonymously - and usually to the astonishment of the recipients - funding British composers ignored or neglected in their homeland. This film contrasts the Dead's extravagant shows with the private lives and music of the composers who benefit.

Elder statesman of jazz and a co-founder of the style that became bebop in the 40s, John Birks "Dizzy" Gillespie will be remembered by many as the trumpet player with ballooning cheeks and a misshapen horn. His career began in the 30s in Philadelphia, taking him on to New York where he met and jammed with two other young jazz greats, Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk. From these improvisations grew the radical new style that revolutionised jazz. He continued to experiment, and in the latter part of his career he took his music to the developing world, incorporating the sounds he found there into his own work. Arena pays tribute to the trumpeter, composer and bandleader who died earlier this month.

One of the world's leading figures in the battle against Aids is not a doctor, scientist or politician, but a writer - Larry Kramer - who says: "Aids has given me my life's work." A novelist, playwright and screenwriter, Kramer first came to prominence in the 1960s with his screenplay of the film 'Women in Love'. His 1970s novel 'Faggots' caused widespread controversy as he attacked his contemporaries in the gay community for their regime of casual sex and easy promiscuity, earning him the title "the angriest gay man in the world". In the 1980s, when the Aids epidemic began to decimate the community, he was one of the first people to take a political, active stance in bringing it to the attention of the world. In recent years - and with the discovery of his own HIV-positive status - Kramer has withdrawn from activism to concentrate on writing, and his new play, the autobiographical 'The Destiny of Me', has opened off-Broadway to rave reviews.

Palestinian writer, academic and exile Edward W Said takes a journey into the worlds of history, literature, ideas and imagination to explain how he wrote his most recent book, 'Culture and Imperialism'. Opening in New York, "the city of exiles", Said's passionate and challenging TV essay ranges from Joseph Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness' to the Gulf War. In it, he shows how attitudes forged over the last 200 years continue to enforce the relationship between the west and the developing world. Challenging the barriers imposed by race, religion and nationalism, he argues that the experience of empire connects us all - whoever we are, wherever we are from - that our histories overlap, that all our cultures are hybrid and impure.

For three decades the Soviet Union's obsession with space stirred the soul of the nation like a secular religion - from the first space star Yuri Gagarin to the sad saga of cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev who circled the planet for almost a year, a helpless spectator of the momentous events back home on earth. Exploring the spiritual force of this grand obsession, Arena talks to Krikalev and the first cosmonauts, and ventures into the world of relics, icons and the memorabilia of the Soviet space venture.

An interview with the poet who last December won the Nobel Prize for Literature, and whose current novel-length poem has caused him to be dubbed the "Homer of the Caribbean". He talks to Stuart Hall on the Caribbean island of St Lucia where he was born about how his family, the people of St Lucia. and the physical beauty of the island have inspired a brilliant career as poet and playwright spanning more than 40 years.

One of China's most successful film directors, Zhang Yimou, talks about his life, his work, and his views on China. The stunning photography and quintessential "Chineseness" of his films - from 'Red Sorghum', 'Judou', and 'Raise the Red Lantern' to the forthcoming 'The Story of Qiu Ju' - have won him enormous acclaim in the west, and yet have been met with harsh censorship in China.

To mark his 60th birthday - and the publication of his new book 'Operation Shylock' - Philip Roth breaks his long silence and talks to Arena about his life, books, and some of the links between the two. Since his outrageous comic novel 'Portnoy's Complaint' appeared in the late 1960s, Roth's chronicles and comedies of Jewish America have established him as one of the most important writers of his generation. But success has brought hostile criticism and, until now, he has refused every request for a television interview, preferring to present himself in his books in the guise of fictional alter egos.

To the innocent reader, the characters in a work of fiction are the author's inventions. To those in the know, it is often more complicated. Arena investigates the effect novels can have on those people who do see a resemblance between themselves and a fictional character and asks whether or not it is "entirely coincidental".

Chronicling New York low and high life, Weegee's photographs have often shocked the world. His wife, Wilma Wilcox, talks about the man behind the myth.

In 1917, Marcel Duchamp entered a white porcelain object in a New York exhibition. it was a urinal. Arena unearths the origins of this extraordinary story with an account from Duchamp's lover of the time, ceramicist Beatrice Wood.

When Jewish writer Carole Angier watched the original 'Heimat', she was so moved she wrote to its creator; Reitz responded that she had understood his work better than anyone. She later saw the making of his next epic, the 26-hour 'The Second Heimat'. Tonight's programme is a record of Angier's extraordinary experiences witnessing two years of writing and four years of filming.

Gerron Rackham tells how Buddy Holly's songs 'Peggy Sue' and 'Peggy Sue Got Married' came to be written. She went to the same high school as Holly and married drummer Jerry Allison. Other people recall the era, including Donna Fox who inspired Ritchie Valens' song, Donna.

Brenda Fassie is South Africa's answer to Madonna. A black singer for black people, she is streetwise, outrageous and aiming to be an international star. With her new album 'I'm Not a Bad Girl', this Arena special shows Brenda Fassie in performance and meets the musicians and media-manipulators working with her in an ever-changing South Africa.

The second documentary in this Arena series telling the true stories behind classic rock songs is devoted to Elvis Presley's first million-selling release, 'Heartbreak Hotel'. This film tracks down the song's writers, schoolteacher Mae Axton and Country musician Tommy Durden, and discovers that 'Heartbreak Hotel' was inspired by a real-life suicide in Miami in 1955. The lyrics of the song actually incorporate the suicide note found by police at the scene. 'Heartbreak Hotel' launched Elvis into international stardom but the song came back to haunt him at the end of his life, which - alleges controversial biographer Albert Goldman - also ended in suicide. This documentary looks at both his meteoric success and his later decline, through the words and music of the song that made it all happen.

Continuing the Arena series with the true story behind Lou Reed's classic rock song that celebrated transvestism. All the characters named in the song were real people who frequented Andy Warhol's studio in the late 60s. 'Walk on the Wild Side' is a description of the bizarre and sometimes sordid world inhabited by Warhol's "superstars". Of those named in the song, only "Holly" Woodlawn and "Little Joe" Dallesandro have survived to tell the tale, and both are interviewed in the film. An examination of a significant chapter in New York's underground culture, it also includes unseen archive footage of Max's Kansas City, the notorious club made popular by Warhol in the late 60s.

Last programme in the Arena series tracing the origins of classic rock songs. This musical journey travels the famous highway that has inspired successive generations of musicians, including Bob Dylan and his 1965 song. One of the longest roads in the USA, Highway 61 runs from the Canadian border, passing by Dylan's home town of Hibbing, Minnesota, en route to New Orleans in the south. The film takes a guided tour of Hibbing in the company of John Bucklen, Dylan's high school friend, who provides some new insights into Dylan's earliest musical experiments. As well as recordings of conversation and music that the two teenagers made in 1958, there are clips of the musicians who have been associated with Highway 61, from Bessie Smith to Elvis Presley and Little Richard.