Bernard Shaw and the BBC (review)

George Bernard Shaw was always an early adopter of ideas, and the dilemmas of social justice, morality, gender equity, spirituality, and economics that his characters grapple with still resonate with an uncanny contemporary relevance. However, what is less well known is that Shaw was also an early adopter of technologies, and here, too, his ideas and experiences demonstrate a prescience that has significant contemporary parallels. In Bernard Shaw and the BBC, L.W. Conolly documents the evolution of the relationship between ‘two of the twentieth century’s cultural giants,’ a contentious courtship that was fraught with issues around artistic integrity, state censorship, copyright, and compensation for broadcast in the burgeoning new media of radio and television.

Arranging his material roughly chronologically, Conolly begins with the story of Shaw’s first major encounter with the BBC (in 1923): a compensation claim that threatened to turn litigious for an unauthorized BBC radio broadcast of an excerpt from a Shaw play. Conolly points out that Shaw was highly cognizant of the benefits he could derive from the new media’s unprecedented audience reach, but he also recognized his responsibility as a pioneering radio and television artist to set the proper precedent for financial compensation in these fledgling and uncertain new media. Nor were copyright and compensation the only issues on which Shaw and the BBC ‘butted heads’ repeatedly. There were Shaw’s astute concerns over translation across media, for both plays and actors developed primarily for live theatrical performance. Shaw realized early on that actors who were brilliant on stage did not necessarily have the voice quality crucial to be effective over the radio or the camera presence for television (interestingly, Shaw himself apparently had both), and he refused to compromise his plays with substandard production values or to comply with the institutional constraints of broadcasting time slots. Even more contentious were negotiations around broadcasts of addresses by Shaw. As one of the foremost dramatists and commentators of the age, Shaw was always in high demand with the BBC’s audiences, but the broadcaster’s eagerness to take advantage of Shaw’s celebrity was necessarily tempered by Shaw’s unwillingness to refrain from making controversial statements or criticizing government policies on live radio. Already a seasoned campaigner against state control of theatres, Shaw immediately recognized the de facto censoring power that the BBC wielded through its monopoly on broadcasting licences and access to the airwaves. Shaw insisted on being allowed to voice his criticisms freely, a stand that sometimes resulted in his complete ban from public broadcast, particularly during the war years (although an intriguing appendix lists several instances where German radio quoted Shaw in its own wartime propaganda).

L.W. Conolly has published widely on Shaw, including as general editor of UTP’s ‘Selected Correspondence of George Bernard Shaw’ series, and has an expert’s knowledge of Shaw’s creeds and crusades. What particularly distinguishes this book, however, is the scope of its focus and the rich sense of perspective it offers. Because Shaw wrote so much himself, his own voice usually emerges most prominently in historical research. This is not just a book chronicling what Shaw said on or about the BBC, although that information is presented throughout and in several appendices (with a link to further online UTP resources). In meticulously researching this topic, Conolly has focused equally on both parties: we see beyond Shaw’s pronouncements and opinions to get a rare and fascinating glimpse at the reactions they engendered from individuals similarly engaged in trying to understand the appropriate institutional structure for new media. Copious excerpts from internal memos and correspondence give a sense of how incredibly much energy the BBC invested in courting Shaw for the public airwaves and the extent to which the broadcaster came to understand its own mandate and methods as a result of these often fraught negotiations with Shaw, who could clearly be as cantankerous as he was meticulous. Letters from listeners and viewers give an equally rare glimpse into what Shaw...