The Banana

Arena

24th December 1997 Season 1 Episode 506

Tonight's programme considers musa sapientum, the fruit of the wise. The Velvet Underground's John Cale tells the story behind Andy Warhol's famous LP cover, Auberon Waugh and John Walters recall their first encounters with the fruit after the war and footballer Brendan Batson considers how they became a symbol of racism hurled from the terraces.

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Season 1 · Episode 507

Cigars - out of the Humidor

In 1962, before John F Kennedy signed the embargo banning the importation of cigars into America from Cuba, the President ordered 1,200 Havana cigars, according to Pierre Salinger, his former press secretary. Tonight's programme follows the story of the cigar - from the tobacco fields west of the Cuban capital of Havana into the factories where poetry and daily newspapers are read aloud to workers; to Hollywood cigar bars and the gentlemen's haunts of St James's, London. With contributions from actors James Belushi, George Wendt and Peter Weller, plus Lord Grade and politician Kenneth Clarke.

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