Arena BBC4, 9pm

Not by accident, Arena's meticulous and fascinating profile of Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul began with a shot of an aged mongrel dog standing stiff-legged in the middle of a busy roadway in Delhi. The hound barked defiantly at the camera, holding its ground as a car bore down on it, horn honking. In the far background, a woman wearing a sari swept dust from the pavement.

In a seamless audio-visual segue, V S Naipaul - widely acknowledged as Britain's greatest living novelist (particularly by V S Naipaul, it soon transpired) - began to read a passage from one of his works, An Area of Darkness, concerning the inadequate maintenance of a dirty Indian hotel.

"It is enough in India that the sweepers attend," he read, smoothly and carefully. "They are not required to clean. That is a subsidiary part of their function, which is to be sweepers. Degraded beings, to go through the motions of their degradation."

It swiftly became clear that V S Naipaul, at the age of 75, is a curmudgeonly and determined old dog himself. His career-propelling certainty about his own writing ability - and the lack of it among his contemporaries - borders on arrogance.

Perversely, however, Arena chose to take luck as its theme, with Naipaul ascribing his success to good fortune - the good fortune that took him away from his birthplace, Trinidad, on a scholarship in London, then got him a BBC job, and finally allowed him to find his great subject as a writer: the British Empire, as it is seen by its colonial subjects.

It was luck, too, Naipaul reckoned, that had led him to his long-established home in the "Hardy-esque emptiness" of rural Wiltshire, keeping him in England when otherwise he might have left. We saw Naipaul progress through his garden slowly, with proprietorial pride, admiring his trees, leaning on a stick.

Meanwhile, in the kitchen, Naipaul's wife, Nadira, got on with chopping up salad vegetables, confiding easily in film-maker Adam Low about the sadness she'd felt during the very moment of her husband's greatest triumph: his acceptance of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001.

"For me, Vidia became old on the stage," she said. "Before the Nobel, Vidia was never old. He was feisty, angry lean, keen and mean. When he got the Nobel, he had reached the top."

This success might have allowed Naipaul to relax into his advanced years, but it hasn't mellowed him. Low admitted that his long and dogged documentary pursuit of Naipaul had begun with his more approachable younger brother, Shiva, with a film made about the latter in 1983. Because back then, V S Naipaul had a reputation for being remote and impatient - especially with interviewers who hadn't done their homework by reading his books. Plus ca change. Cut to a press conference held last year during Naipaul's visit to Trinidad. A young local reporter asked a question from the floor which prompted dismissive ire. The inquiry had come "from a man who hasn't written a fool, a turd trying to put me in my place," Naipaul raged.

In contrast, both Naipaul's wives - the late Pat as well as the current incumbent - had secured their status by being his devoted principal readers, we learned.

"He needs a rah-rah girl," Nadira explained. Naipaul knows how good his writing is, but he still needs someone else to confirm its brilliance for him.

As brilliant a writer as V S Naipaul is, Arena confirmed that his brilliance is too painfully hard-edged, too cutting to be readily embraced.