1 00:00:05,260 --> 00:00:08,180 REPORTER: The Hertfordshire village of Ayot St Lawrence 2 00:00:08,180 --> 00:00:09,940 mourns its friend. 3 00:00:09,940 --> 00:00:12,980 The world mourns one of the dominating figures of our time. 4 00:00:12,980 --> 00:00:16,300 Gone from its presence but not from its mind 5 00:00:16,300 --> 00:00:19,060 is the man of whom the Prime Minister has written, 6 00:00:19,060 --> 00:00:22,300 "As critic, dramatist, man of letters, 7 00:00:22,300 --> 00:00:25,740 "humourist, social revolutionary and prophet, 8 00:00:25,740 --> 00:00:28,340 "he was our greatest entertainer and teacher." 9 00:00:35,620 --> 00:00:38,660 So, in the box here is that wonderful puppet... 10 00:00:39,620 --> 00:00:41,180 ..of Shaw. 11 00:00:49,220 --> 00:00:50,940 And there he is. 12 00:00:51,940 --> 00:00:55,380 In his famous knickerbockers. Oh, my God, that's brilliant. 13 00:00:55,380 --> 00:00:56,700 Wow! 14 00:00:56,700 --> 00:01:00,180 If you have a little look at the head a bit, straight on, 15 00:01:00,180 --> 00:01:02,140 that's a bit better. Oh, yeah. 16 00:01:02,140 --> 00:01:03,460 There. 17 00:01:04,540 --> 00:01:08,220 This probably puts how he thought about himself in some context. 18 00:01:08,220 --> 00:01:10,940 He said, "The Greeks have Aristotle... 19 00:01:11,980 --> 00:01:14,660 "..the Italians had Leonardo da Vinci, 20 00:01:14,660 --> 00:01:16,980 "the English had Shakespeare 21 00:01:16,980 --> 00:01:21,580 "and Ireland has my astonishing self." 22 00:01:21,580 --> 00:01:23,860 THEY GIGGLE 23 00:01:43,180 --> 00:01:44,940 Oh, ladies. 24 00:01:44,940 --> 00:01:46,900 Well, this is a surprise. 25 00:01:48,460 --> 00:01:52,380 Have you all come to see me, ladies and gentlemen? 26 00:01:52,380 --> 00:01:53,900 Well... 27 00:01:53,900 --> 00:01:57,140 I should never have expected this. 28 00:02:01,620 --> 00:02:03,860 A few words from Mr Bernard Shaw. 29 00:02:04,900 --> 00:02:08,420 I have always been intrigued by the work of George Bernard Shaw 30 00:02:08,420 --> 00:02:09,940 but who was he, 31 00:02:09,940 --> 00:02:12,380 this shy Irish playwright who conquered Britain 32 00:02:12,380 --> 00:02:14,060 and the English-speaking world? 33 00:02:14,060 --> 00:02:15,380 Oh, you're real good. 34 00:02:15,380 --> 00:02:16,700 Thank you, captain. 35 00:02:16,700 --> 00:02:21,740 A celebrity and a serious thinker who insisted we question everything. 36 00:02:22,140 --> 00:02:26,260 I shall make a duchess of this draggletailed guttersnipe. Oh! 37 00:02:26,260 --> 00:02:29,900 The winner of an Oscar and a Nobel Prize for Literature. 38 00:02:29,900 --> 00:02:32,700 I suppose that I am here 39 00:02:32,700 --> 00:02:35,940 as the next best thing to Shakespeare. 40 00:02:35,940 --> 00:02:37,740 LAUGHTER 41 00:02:38,780 --> 00:02:42,980 Shaw wrote about the big issues of his time and of our time - 42 00:02:42,980 --> 00:02:46,700 poverty, war, feminism, race, fanaticism - 43 00:02:46,700 --> 00:02:50,980 but always using charm and humour to get people's attention. 44 00:02:50,980 --> 00:02:53,460 When I talk, at least I talk politics. 45 00:02:53,460 --> 00:02:58,500 And he sold these big ideas by being larger than life. 46 00:02:58,500 --> 00:03:03,380 This, ladies and gentlemen, is an exhibition of my profile. 47 00:03:04,780 --> 00:03:06,460 How was that? 48 00:03:06,460 --> 00:03:09,580 Shaw invented the idea of the artist as a brand. 49 00:03:09,580 --> 00:03:11,500 This shy boy from Dublin 50 00:03:11,500 --> 00:03:15,260 became one of the world's most famous and recognisable men. 51 00:03:15,260 --> 00:03:18,660 Shall I now become the partly visible man? 52 00:03:18,660 --> 00:03:21,220 Do you recognise the beard... 53 00:03:22,460 --> 00:03:25,820 ..or must I become a little more visible? 54 00:03:25,820 --> 00:03:29,460 Even this exaggerated depiction here, 55 00:03:29,460 --> 00:03:32,940 it's slightly abstract but you can see from it... 56 00:03:33,940 --> 00:03:36,580 ..that it's George Bernard Shaw. 57 00:03:38,060 --> 00:03:40,380 But I think he would have been very happy to know 58 00:03:40,380 --> 00:03:42,460 that at the end of the road there was, 59 00:03:42,460 --> 00:03:46,900 as some people in Dublin call it, a Muriel, in honour of his... 60 00:03:46,900 --> 00:03:48,900 in honour of his life. 61 00:03:50,460 --> 00:03:53,460 Sadly, I think Shaw is underappreciated. 62 00:03:53,460 --> 00:03:56,460 He's the forgotten man of Irish literature. 63 00:03:56,460 --> 00:03:59,220 His birthplace in Dublin is closed to the public, 64 00:03:59,220 --> 00:04:03,700 yet people around the city know his name but perhaps not much else. 65 00:04:03,700 --> 00:04:07,180 So if you want to learn more about him or his big ideas, 66 00:04:07,180 --> 00:04:09,460 you actually have to start in England. 67 00:04:09,460 --> 00:04:13,460 He arrived aged 20 and spent three-quarters of his life there, 68 00:04:13,460 --> 00:04:15,660 yet always felt like a foreigner. 69 00:04:15,660 --> 00:04:17,940 When I came to London in the 1980s, 70 00:04:17,940 --> 00:04:20,700 I understood that sense of exile myself. 71 00:04:20,700 --> 00:04:23,580 Shaw had the outsider's ability to observe, 72 00:04:23,580 --> 00:04:25,660 to question the way things are. 73 00:04:26,660 --> 00:04:28,980 And long before he became famous, 74 00:04:28,980 --> 00:04:32,700 he used to keep warm in the British Library, reading Karl Marx. 75 00:04:32,700 --> 00:04:35,900 I think it was that time that inspired the great beliefs 76 00:04:35,900 --> 00:04:38,220 and themes of his life and work. 77 00:04:39,180 --> 00:04:41,420 "How shall we house our poor?" 78 00:04:42,940 --> 00:04:47,380 The Practical Politics of Socialism by George Bernard Shaw. 79 00:04:49,460 --> 00:04:53,180 This is a record of Shaw's speaking engagements. 80 00:04:54,980 --> 00:04:57,900 "Labour is the source of all wealth... 81 00:04:58,980 --> 00:05:02,180 "..therefore to the labourers all wealth is due." 82 00:05:03,580 --> 00:05:05,980 "October the 11th, 1891, 83 00:05:05,980 --> 00:05:10,660 "Mr G. Bernard Shaw, Fabian, lecture followed by discussion." 84 00:05:11,940 --> 00:05:13,940 "Practical communism." 85 00:05:13,940 --> 00:05:15,220 Wow. 86 00:05:16,300 --> 00:05:21,220 It's interesting that he, kind of, taught himself to become an orator 87 00:05:21,220 --> 00:05:23,740 because in the early part of his lifetime 88 00:05:23,740 --> 00:05:27,220 he was a very shy and insecure, young man 89 00:05:27,220 --> 00:05:31,180 and he became this, kind of, spellbinding orator. 90 00:05:32,260 --> 00:05:34,900 What a great thing it would have been to go along 91 00:05:34,900 --> 00:05:38,980 to one of these things and to hear him...to hear him speak. 92 00:05:40,060 --> 00:05:44,380 Foolish people in easy circumstances flatter themselves 93 00:05:44,380 --> 00:05:49,420 that there is no such thing as the class war in the British Empire, 94 00:05:49,740 --> 00:05:53,460 where we are all far too respectable 95 00:05:53,460 --> 00:05:56,940 to have any vulgar unpleasantness of that sort. 96 00:05:56,940 --> 00:05:59,540 They deceive themselves. 97 00:05:59,540 --> 00:06:02,740 We are up to the neck in the class war. 98 00:06:03,740 --> 00:06:06,180 "The Women's Progressive Society." 99 00:06:08,420 --> 00:06:11,380 "The London Vegetarian Society." 100 00:06:11,380 --> 00:06:15,460 He was a vegetarian from the age of 24 and he said that at his funeral 101 00:06:15,460 --> 00:06:19,460 instead of people coming behind his coffin, there'd be all the animals 102 00:06:19,460 --> 00:06:22,220 that he hadn't eaten to pay tribute to him. 103 00:06:23,260 --> 00:06:26,900 He must have been out every single night. 104 00:06:28,500 --> 00:06:31,260 You get the idea that he never went to sleep. 105 00:06:34,100 --> 00:06:38,180 To begin with, he was very anxious about could he stand up, 106 00:06:38,180 --> 00:06:40,900 could he speak, 107 00:06:40,900 --> 00:06:45,900 but very quickly he found that he was, well, like a good actor. 108 00:06:48,300 --> 00:06:50,460 It's interesting you should say that 109 00:06:50,460 --> 00:06:54,340 because some people have defined acting as the shy man's revenge. 110 00:06:56,940 --> 00:07:01,460 Shaw's real need to spread new ideas overcame his natural shyness. 111 00:07:01,460 --> 00:07:04,700 He understood the power of the spoken word, 112 00:07:04,700 --> 00:07:07,940 first on a soap box, later on a stage. 113 00:07:08,940 --> 00:07:11,980 No more so than in Man And Superman, 114 00:07:11,980 --> 00:07:16,460 a razor-sharp exploration of nature, sex and evolution 115 00:07:16,460 --> 00:07:19,940 dressed up as a verbose comedy of manners. 116 00:07:19,940 --> 00:07:22,980 When I read Michael Holroyd's biography, 117 00:07:22,980 --> 00:07:26,220 he talked about how Shaw himself honed his own speaking 118 00:07:26,220 --> 00:07:28,620 on street corners, pamphleteering. Yes. 119 00:07:28,620 --> 00:07:32,140 There's something Michael Holroyd writes about Shaw's consonants 120 00:07:32,140 --> 00:07:34,940 could cut so strongly in a space 121 00:07:34,940 --> 00:07:37,220 because he knew he had to communicate. 122 00:07:37,220 --> 00:07:41,460 So I always thought, he's writing for people who really can speak 123 00:07:41,460 --> 00:07:45,220 and really know how to phrase and lead an idea and land it. 124 00:07:45,220 --> 00:07:48,940 We don't have that sort of writing. Ba-ba-ba-ba ba-bam-ba-bam. 125 00:07:49,940 --> 00:07:51,260 It's exciting. 126 00:07:52,340 --> 00:07:54,460 With a wonderful, instinctive cunning, 127 00:07:54,460 --> 00:07:57,180 she kept silent and allowed me to glorify her. 128 00:07:57,180 --> 00:08:01,180 To mistake my own visions, thoughts and feelings for hers. 129 00:08:01,180 --> 00:08:05,620 I found that when I had touched a woman's imagination... 130 00:08:05,620 --> 00:08:07,460 LAUGHTER 131 00:08:07,460 --> 00:08:10,900 ..she would allow me to persuade myself that she loved me 132 00:08:10,900 --> 00:08:14,700 but when my suit was granted, 133 00:08:14,700 --> 00:08:17,980 she never said, "I'm happy, my love is satisfied", 134 00:08:17,980 --> 00:08:20,980 she always said first, "At last the barriers are down", 135 00:08:20,980 --> 00:08:23,340 and second, "When will you come again?" 136 00:08:23,340 --> 00:08:28,380 As Jack, you get to say mischievous, provocative things as a man. Yeah. 137 00:08:28,460 --> 00:08:32,140 Which is great to say in front of an audience. 138 00:08:32,140 --> 00:08:35,460 You get to tease and provoke with wit. 139 00:08:35,460 --> 00:08:37,700 You don't have to insult the audience 140 00:08:37,700 --> 00:08:41,460 but it's so witty but the ideas are still provocative. 141 00:08:41,460 --> 00:08:43,100 It's wonderfully human. 142 00:08:43,100 --> 00:08:45,460 We live in an atmosphere of shame. 143 00:08:45,460 --> 00:08:48,460 We're ashamed of everything that's real about us. 144 00:08:48,460 --> 00:08:50,940 Ashamed of ourselves, of our relatives, 145 00:08:50,940 --> 00:08:53,980 of our incomes, of our accents, of our opinions, 146 00:08:53,980 --> 00:08:57,460 of our experience, just as we're ashamed of our naked skins. 147 00:08:57,460 --> 00:09:00,660 The more things a man is ashamed of, the more respectable he is. 148 00:09:00,660 --> 00:09:04,220 Jack Tanner is a sort of self portrait of Shaw, 149 00:09:04,220 --> 00:09:06,700 so he's possibly one of the most verbose... 150 00:09:06,700 --> 00:09:09,700 In fact, that's one of the jokes of the play, that he does... 151 00:09:09,700 --> 00:09:12,260 He comments on his own verbosity, doesn't he? 152 00:09:12,260 --> 00:09:14,420 The last word of the play is "talking". 153 00:09:15,700 --> 00:09:18,300 And it's about talking but it's about ideas. 154 00:09:21,180 --> 00:09:25,660 Shaw's lifelong big idea was that inequality of any kind - 155 00:09:25,660 --> 00:09:30,380 economic, gender or race - was neither inevitable nor acceptable. 156 00:09:33,220 --> 00:09:36,420 He wrote that poverty was the greatest of our evils 157 00:09:36,420 --> 00:09:38,420 and the worst of our crimes. 158 00:09:39,700 --> 00:09:43,140 And he hated poverty because, like a lot of Dubliners, 159 00:09:43,140 --> 00:09:45,140 he was born into it. 160 00:09:52,900 --> 00:09:55,380 So, this was his bedroom. 161 00:09:56,940 --> 00:09:58,860 Tiny little room. 162 00:09:58,860 --> 00:10:02,100 It's not hard to imagine him sitting here as a little boy. 163 00:10:02,100 --> 00:10:06,940 Born into what he called "shabby, genteel poverty." 164 00:10:12,620 --> 00:10:15,220 His mother was a singer 165 00:10:15,220 --> 00:10:20,260 and so he would have heard operas and all kinds of musicians play. 166 00:10:20,940 --> 00:10:24,340 MUSIC: Home Sweet Home by Nellie Melba 167 00:10:36,780 --> 00:10:39,340 So, this was his parents' room. 168 00:10:40,340 --> 00:10:43,180 Shaw realised at the age of three 169 00:10:43,180 --> 00:10:47,100 that his father was an alcoholic 170 00:10:47,100 --> 00:10:50,980 and his mother, who was a woman who didn't bestow 171 00:10:50,980 --> 00:10:54,220 any great deal of affection or love on him, 172 00:10:54,220 --> 00:10:58,500 was involved with a music teacher called George Lee. 173 00:10:58,500 --> 00:11:02,940 It wasn't just that the mother had supposedly taken this lover 174 00:11:02,940 --> 00:11:07,460 but she lived with the lover and the husband in this house 175 00:11:07,460 --> 00:11:12,020 and what a strange thing that must have been for the young boy, 176 00:11:12,020 --> 00:11:16,980 to watch his father be isolated and diminished in that way. 177 00:11:17,980 --> 00:11:21,980 Certainly an unorthodox household arrangement. 178 00:11:27,260 --> 00:11:31,980 You think about the early life of Shaw in Synge Street. 179 00:11:31,980 --> 00:11:36,700 What must that have been like for him to grow up in a place like this? 180 00:11:36,700 --> 00:11:40,460 Shaw invented the word "downstart" and I think that's one of the things 181 00:11:40,460 --> 00:11:42,740 that gave him his human sympathy, you know. 182 00:11:42,740 --> 00:11:45,980 He was trying to shake people to say, "Look, it is not inevitable 183 00:11:45,980 --> 00:11:48,660 "that vast numbers of people have to lead lives 184 00:11:48,660 --> 00:11:51,460 "that are constrained by poverty, 185 00:11:51,460 --> 00:11:54,820 "by ignorance, by filth, by inequality. 186 00:11:54,820 --> 00:11:56,420 "We can change it." 187 00:11:56,420 --> 00:11:59,140 When he was a kid, his nanny would take him out walking 188 00:11:59,140 --> 00:12:01,020 and they would walk 189 00:12:01,020 --> 00:12:04,980 and she was probably paid buttons by his mother and father, you know, 190 00:12:04,980 --> 00:12:08,700 and it seems clear that she used to do some prostitution on the side, 191 00:12:08,700 --> 00:12:11,220 so he'd be taken into the horror of the Dublin slums. 192 00:12:11,220 --> 00:12:13,900 He saw this kind of poverty and he was horrified by it. 193 00:12:13,900 --> 00:12:15,660 That's what haunted him. 194 00:12:15,660 --> 00:12:18,620 There's a kind of smell of the slums in his nostrils 195 00:12:18,620 --> 00:12:21,220 and it's what drives him. 196 00:12:21,220 --> 00:12:25,180 He wants the world to get away from that kind of indignity. 197 00:12:26,980 --> 00:12:29,660 "I now confess to an episode in my boyhood 198 00:12:29,660 --> 00:12:32,980 "formerly so repugnant to me that for 80 years 199 00:12:32,980 --> 00:12:37,180 "I never mentioned it to any mortal creature - not even my wife." 200 00:12:39,980 --> 00:12:42,980 We're in the centre of Model School in Dublin. 201 00:12:42,980 --> 00:12:47,140 This is the second school that Shaw attended. 202 00:12:49,140 --> 00:12:51,220 "I was sent to Marlborough Street 203 00:12:51,220 --> 00:12:55,180 "and at once became a boy with whom no Protestant young gentleman 204 00:12:55,180 --> 00:12:57,140 "would speak or play." 205 00:12:59,980 --> 00:13:04,940 A sole Protestant child in a school of poor Catholic pupils. 206 00:13:04,940 --> 00:13:06,940 He was unhappy here. 207 00:13:06,940 --> 00:13:08,460 Very unhappy 208 00:13:08,460 --> 00:13:10,980 I suppose he felt the shame of being an outsider 209 00:13:10,980 --> 00:13:14,980 but he also I'm sure felt the shame of being poor. 210 00:13:15,980 --> 00:13:19,180 And he was ashamed that he was ashamed. 211 00:13:19,180 --> 00:13:22,500 It further reinforced in him, I think, 212 00:13:22,500 --> 00:13:24,940 the notion that poverty was a horrible thing 213 00:13:24,940 --> 00:13:27,980 and later on he came to question, of course, 214 00:13:27,980 --> 00:13:31,220 why some people were poor and other people were rich, 215 00:13:31,220 --> 00:13:35,900 which was what led him to his philosophical examination 216 00:13:35,900 --> 00:13:39,140 of how society is put together. 217 00:13:40,980 --> 00:13:44,180 His whole idea about education was that it's not the teacher 218 00:13:44,180 --> 00:13:46,220 who should be doing the questioning, 219 00:13:46,220 --> 00:13:49,980 it's the child who should be questioning the teacher. 220 00:13:49,980 --> 00:13:54,980 It should implant in the child a love of learning, 221 00:13:55,460 --> 00:13:59,980 to develop the ability to think for one's self, 222 00:13:59,980 --> 00:14:03,220 to think critically, to question everything. 223 00:14:03,220 --> 00:14:08,220 Authority, religion, precepts, tenets, propaganda. 224 00:14:15,700 --> 00:14:20,180 Even 100 years ago, Shaw understood that you had to look for the truth, 225 00:14:20,180 --> 00:14:22,340 not simply accept it. 226 00:14:22,340 --> 00:14:26,900 Many people today still don't trust the so-called voices of authority 227 00:14:26,900 --> 00:14:28,700 or the media. 228 00:14:28,700 --> 00:14:31,140 Shaw was adamant that we had to wake up. 229 00:14:32,140 --> 00:14:33,700 To be active. 230 00:14:33,700 --> 00:14:37,460 To question, to be aware of the world around us. 231 00:14:39,180 --> 00:14:43,500 And awareness is the beginning of action. 232 00:14:43,500 --> 00:14:46,220 He wasn't just telling you, this is what you must think, 233 00:14:46,220 --> 00:14:48,660 he was telling you, this is how you must think. 234 00:14:48,660 --> 00:14:51,460 You have a right but also a duty to think for yourself 235 00:14:51,460 --> 00:14:53,700 and not to take the orthodoxies, you know, 236 00:14:53,700 --> 00:14:56,620 but to actually feel that you are free as a human being 237 00:14:56,620 --> 00:14:58,460 to engage with ideas 238 00:14:58,460 --> 00:15:01,620 and to be sceptical about things that people are telling you. 239 00:15:03,460 --> 00:15:07,420 By the age of 20, the one truth Bernard Shaw couldn't escape 240 00:15:07,420 --> 00:15:10,660 was that Dublin was becoming too small for him. 241 00:15:13,380 --> 00:15:15,460 Ireland is an island. 242 00:15:15,460 --> 00:15:18,060 It's an island off the coast of an island. 243 00:15:18,060 --> 00:15:21,940 There's something about living on an island that gives you a particular 244 00:15:21,940 --> 00:15:26,900 desire to leave it, to get away from it, because it can be suffocating. 245 00:15:27,940 --> 00:15:32,460 When I grew up in Ireland in the '50s and early '60s, 246 00:15:32,460 --> 00:15:36,700 deep inside me there were some instinct try to prove myself 247 00:15:36,700 --> 00:15:41,740 against something else rather than that staid, predictable, familiar, 248 00:15:41,980 --> 00:15:44,940 grey society that I felt I was trapped in. 249 00:15:46,460 --> 00:15:49,420 When Shaw left, he didn't come back 29 years. 250 00:15:49,420 --> 00:15:53,980 His true ambition was to become a universal artist. 251 00:15:53,980 --> 00:15:58,260 If your spirit is adventurous, you need something more than that. 252 00:15:58,260 --> 00:16:01,940 You need to move beyond the comforts of a small town. 253 00:16:06,780 --> 00:16:08,660 London wasn't much better. 254 00:16:08,660 --> 00:16:11,500 He left his feckless father behind in Dublin 255 00:16:11,500 --> 00:16:13,940 and lived with his mother in rented rooms, 256 00:16:13,940 --> 00:16:16,980 earning a few shillings ghost-writing music reviews 257 00:16:16,980 --> 00:16:19,620 and failing spectacularly as a novelist. 258 00:16:20,620 --> 00:16:22,700 In his first decade in London, 259 00:16:22,700 --> 00:16:26,380 he reckoned he'd earned the sum total of £6. 260 00:16:26,380 --> 00:16:28,460 But on his 29th birthday, 261 00:16:28,460 --> 00:16:31,700 wearing a brand-new suit paid for with the insurance money 262 00:16:31,700 --> 00:16:35,420 from his father's death, George Bernard Shaw lost his virginity 263 00:16:35,420 --> 00:16:37,460 to his mother's best friend. 264 00:16:37,460 --> 00:16:39,940 It might sound like a Freudian nightmare 265 00:16:39,940 --> 00:16:41,860 but it was the making of him. 266 00:16:41,860 --> 00:16:45,420 The shy boy was replaced by a new, confident persona. 267 00:16:45,420 --> 00:16:47,460 G.B.S. 268 00:16:47,460 --> 00:16:51,620 He called it "the most fictitious character I have ever created". 269 00:16:52,700 --> 00:16:55,180 Don't be deceived, ladies and gentlemen. 270 00:16:56,180 --> 00:17:00,420 When a man is playing the simple, unaffected human being... 271 00:17:01,460 --> 00:17:06,220 ..in public he's always acting as hard as he possibly can. 272 00:17:06,220 --> 00:17:11,260 And small blame to him, I do that sort of thing myself. 273 00:17:14,700 --> 00:17:16,900 he had to create a persona, didn't he? 274 00:17:16,900 --> 00:17:19,460 He had to invent G.B.S, 275 00:17:19,460 --> 00:17:21,980 so he became this sort of conscious entertainer 276 00:17:21,980 --> 00:17:24,220 always with an opinion on every subject 277 00:17:24,220 --> 00:17:27,140 and I think that was a conscious effort on Shaw's part 278 00:17:27,140 --> 00:17:28,900 to market his plays. 279 00:17:30,260 --> 00:17:35,220 By the 1890s, this new, confident G.B.S stopped writing bad novels 280 00:17:35,420 --> 00:17:38,460 and started to write what he called sermons - 281 00:17:38,460 --> 00:17:41,980 plays about real social issues learned from his years 282 00:17:41,980 --> 00:17:45,700 speaking, protesting and pamphleteering on the streets. 283 00:17:45,700 --> 00:17:49,140 It was radical, but he really believed that serious business 284 00:17:49,140 --> 00:17:51,380 could be conducted from the stage. 285 00:17:51,380 --> 00:17:54,940 His first unpleasant plays dealt with the horrors 286 00:17:54,940 --> 00:17:58,220 of slum landlordism, the social shame of divorce 287 00:17:58,220 --> 00:18:02,140 and the grim economic realities of prostitution. 288 00:18:02,140 --> 00:18:06,660 Victorian London was scandalised but he had their attention. 289 00:18:07,940 --> 00:18:10,260 He was an overtly political writer. 290 00:18:10,260 --> 00:18:12,300 He knew enough about the London audience 291 00:18:12,300 --> 00:18:15,220 to know you always had to sugar the pill with jokes 292 00:18:15,220 --> 00:18:18,900 but it is always an appeal to our intelligence 293 00:18:18,900 --> 00:18:21,460 and to our emotional maturity 294 00:18:21,460 --> 00:18:25,380 to see that the world is worth arguing over. 295 00:18:25,380 --> 00:18:28,220 He is absolutely insistent 296 00:18:28,220 --> 00:18:33,260 that his audiences share the lives of others and ideas of others. 297 00:18:33,740 --> 00:18:36,380 What do you want to take down what I said for? 298 00:18:36,380 --> 00:18:38,660 You'll just show me what you wrote. 299 00:18:39,700 --> 00:18:42,100 How do I know if you took me down right? 300 00:18:43,060 --> 00:18:45,180 That ain't proper writing. 301 00:18:45,180 --> 00:18:47,300 I can't read that. 302 00:18:47,300 --> 00:18:52,340 He's reacting against a form of theatre which he despised. 303 00:18:52,500 --> 00:18:56,220 He despised those kind of heart on sleeve Victorian melodramas 304 00:18:56,220 --> 00:19:00,500 that were the West End staple that he was trying to sweep away. 305 00:19:00,500 --> 00:19:04,180 He was restoring seriousness to the London theatre. 306 00:19:04,180 --> 00:19:07,980 But that's the key thing. I think Shaw was a great demolition expert. 307 00:19:07,980 --> 00:19:11,500 He inherits a medium that when he comes into it into the 1890s 308 00:19:11,500 --> 00:19:15,740 is ossified, really, and is dealing in certain stock forms. 309 00:19:15,740 --> 00:19:19,020 Stock melodramas, stock romance, stock love stories, 310 00:19:19,020 --> 00:19:21,420 bad Shakespeare productions, obviously, 311 00:19:21,420 --> 00:19:23,980 actor managers dominating the whole theatre. 312 00:19:23,980 --> 00:19:26,740 Shaw comes along and puts a bomb under it all, really, 313 00:19:26,740 --> 00:19:30,500 and explodes it and says, no, theatre can actually be serious, 314 00:19:30,500 --> 00:19:33,420 it can address big issues, it can be topical 315 00:19:33,420 --> 00:19:35,420 and it can make you think. 316 00:19:36,660 --> 00:19:40,380 Shaw is always challenging you 317 00:19:40,380 --> 00:19:43,500 and people don't always like that. 318 00:19:43,500 --> 00:19:46,620 I think it is good to challenge people. 319 00:19:47,660 --> 00:19:50,980 Like a Trojan horse, Shaw was prepared not just to challenge 320 00:19:50,980 --> 00:19:53,700 but to undermine the society he lived in. 321 00:19:53,700 --> 00:19:57,260 To show his contempt for the British class system. 322 00:19:57,260 --> 00:19:59,980 Pygmalion, I suppose, is the perfect example, 323 00:19:59,980 --> 00:20:02,660 where he turns a flower girl into a lady 324 00:20:02,660 --> 00:20:05,620 just by changing the way she speaks. 325 00:20:05,620 --> 00:20:07,940 You see this creature with her kerbstone English? 326 00:20:07,940 --> 00:20:10,980 The English that will keep her in the gutter for the rest her days. 327 00:20:10,980 --> 00:20:13,700 Well, sir, in three months I could pass her off as a duchess 328 00:20:13,700 --> 00:20:15,700 at an ambassador's reception. No, no, no. 329 00:20:15,700 --> 00:20:18,660 Yes. I could even get her a job as a lady's maid or a shop assistant, 330 00:20:18,660 --> 00:20:21,420 which requires better English. You mean you could make me... 331 00:20:21,420 --> 00:20:23,420 Yes, you squashed cabbage leaf, 332 00:20:23,420 --> 00:20:26,420 you disgrace to the noble architecture of these columns, 333 00:20:26,420 --> 00:20:29,100 you incarnate insult to the English language... 334 00:20:30,980 --> 00:20:34,060 I could pass you off as the Queen of Sheba. 335 00:20:35,100 --> 00:20:38,380 Here's simultaneously entertaining, 336 00:20:38,380 --> 00:20:41,260 theatrically appealing and... 337 00:20:41,260 --> 00:20:44,420 complex, unresolvable, unpindownable. 338 00:20:44,420 --> 00:20:47,980 I mean, obviously Shaw relishes ideas and a lot of his plays are 339 00:20:47,980 --> 00:20:51,220 discussion plays, but at the same time, if you look at the plays, 340 00:20:51,220 --> 00:20:54,300 there's an extraordinary, sort of, emotional undertone 341 00:20:54,300 --> 00:20:57,940 and the very end of Pygmalion, what happens, Professor Higgins, 342 00:20:57,940 --> 00:21:01,180 having sort of modelled and created this woman Eliza, 343 00:21:01,180 --> 00:21:03,460 sees her become independent 344 00:21:03,460 --> 00:21:06,260 and there's a wonderful, sort of, heartbreak at the end 345 00:21:06,260 --> 00:21:08,980 when he's both rejoicing in Eliza's independence 346 00:21:08,980 --> 00:21:12,940 and at the same time realising he's now left alone. 347 00:21:12,940 --> 00:21:17,660 You know, he's the master who's been overtaken by his pupil. 348 00:21:17,660 --> 00:21:20,940 You can't take away the knowledge you gave me. 349 00:21:21,860 --> 00:21:23,940 You said I had a finer ear than you 350 00:21:23,940 --> 00:21:26,940 and I can be civil and kind to people, which is more than you can. 351 00:21:26,940 --> 00:21:30,020 Ah-ha, that's done you, Henry Higgins, that 'as. 352 00:21:30,020 --> 00:21:33,700 Now, I don't give that for your bullying and your big talk. 353 00:21:33,700 --> 00:21:37,220 I shall advertise in the papers that your duchess is a flower girl 354 00:21:37,220 --> 00:21:40,460 that you taught, and that she'll teach anyone to be a duchess 355 00:21:40,460 --> 00:21:43,580 just the same in six months for a thousand guineas. 356 00:21:45,460 --> 00:21:48,500 Victorian London took to Shaw in a big way. 357 00:21:48,500 --> 00:21:51,940 Like Oscar Wilde, they enjoyed this Irishman's charming way 358 00:21:51,940 --> 00:21:53,980 of tearing their world apart. 359 00:21:53,980 --> 00:21:59,020 So after 40 years, the shy boy from Dublin found notoriety and success. 360 00:21:59,940 --> 00:22:01,980 And with success came money 361 00:22:01,980 --> 00:22:04,700 and with money came the financial independence to leave 362 00:22:04,700 --> 00:22:07,180 his mother's home and to find a wife. 363 00:22:07,180 --> 00:22:11,180 At the tender age of 42, Shaw married an Irish woman, 364 00:22:11,180 --> 00:22:13,460 Charlotte Payne-Townshend. 365 00:22:13,460 --> 00:22:15,940 He once wrote that marriage is popular 366 00:22:15,940 --> 00:22:18,940 because it combines the maximum of temptation 367 00:22:18,940 --> 00:22:21,700 with the maximum of opportunity. 368 00:22:21,700 --> 00:22:25,660 But Charlotte could never tolerate the matter of fact side of marriage 369 00:22:25,660 --> 00:22:28,460 and it was probably never consummated. 370 00:22:29,980 --> 00:22:33,620 But they lived contentedly for half a century in Ayot St Lawrence, 371 00:22:33,620 --> 00:22:35,420 an hour north of London, 372 00:22:35,420 --> 00:22:39,300 and of course it became known as Shaw's Corner. 373 00:22:39,300 --> 00:22:43,860 And of course it was Shaw himself who left it to the National Trust. 374 00:22:44,780 --> 00:22:48,420 This is exactly as Shaw left it. 375 00:22:50,220 --> 00:22:53,180 It feels like he's just... 376 00:22:53,180 --> 00:22:55,820 that he's just stepped out. 377 00:23:06,420 --> 00:23:07,900 Ah! 378 00:23:10,140 --> 00:23:12,180 The Oscar is a doorstop. 379 00:23:13,220 --> 00:23:18,260 Academy Award for writing the screenplay of Pygmalion. 380 00:23:19,540 --> 00:23:23,940 He was asked how he felt about winning the Oscar and he said... 381 00:23:24,980 --> 00:23:28,620 "Considering the source, it's an insult." 382 00:23:30,860 --> 00:23:33,620 Of course, he also won the Nobel Prize. 383 00:23:33,620 --> 00:23:37,500 One of only two people to do that, the other one being Bob Dylan. 384 00:23:41,980 --> 00:23:45,900 I had always read about Shaw's Corner and I had imagined it... 385 00:23:46,980 --> 00:23:51,940 ..but when you're here, you realise there's a stillness about this place 386 00:23:51,940 --> 00:23:55,660 that is, erm... really powerful. 387 00:23:56,660 --> 00:23:58,900 It feels like it's a cocoon... 388 00:23:59,980 --> 00:24:03,660 ..away from the world, though of course the world came to him here. 389 00:24:12,500 --> 00:24:15,180 I've always found it kind of interesting 390 00:24:15,180 --> 00:24:19,420 to know where writers write, the rooms that they write it - 391 00:24:20,900 --> 00:24:22,660 It's, erm... 392 00:24:24,260 --> 00:24:28,980 It's a wonderful feeling to be in the same... 393 00:24:28,980 --> 00:24:34,020 in the space as where he wrote some of his greatest work. 394 00:24:36,180 --> 00:24:39,940 It's not too difficult to imagine him sitting here typing away. 395 00:24:39,940 --> 00:24:42,220 He didn't like to be disturbed. 396 00:24:42,220 --> 00:24:45,140 People were always calling to the house to meet him, 397 00:24:45,140 --> 00:24:48,460 to ask his opinion about everything 398 00:24:48,460 --> 00:24:53,460 and sometimes they'd ask for money, sometimes he actually had stalkers. 399 00:24:55,420 --> 00:24:58,540 And this was a place where he couldn't be found 400 00:24:58,540 --> 00:25:00,540 and he could be distracted. 401 00:25:01,580 --> 00:25:05,820 There's a unique feature about this little... little hut. 402 00:25:13,380 --> 00:25:15,700 So it revolved with the sun. 403 00:25:16,740 --> 00:25:21,780 He moved with the times and moved always towards the light, I think, 404 00:25:21,980 --> 00:25:24,420 not to make too heavy a metaphor of it. 405 00:25:27,540 --> 00:25:29,980 Shaw was always a forward-thinking man. 406 00:25:29,980 --> 00:25:33,740 He said himself that he'd been born 50 years too early, 407 00:25:33,740 --> 00:25:36,940 as if he were waiting for the 20th century to arrive. 408 00:25:37,980 --> 00:25:41,620 He called himself the messenger boy for the new age. 409 00:25:42,900 --> 00:25:46,420 I stand for the future and past, 410 00:25:46,420 --> 00:25:48,700 for the posterity that has no vote 411 00:25:48,700 --> 00:25:51,180 and for the tradition that never had any. 412 00:25:51,180 --> 00:25:53,380 For intellectual integrity, 413 00:25:53,380 --> 00:25:55,460 for humanity, 414 00:25:55,460 --> 00:25:58,940 for the rescue of industry from commercialism 415 00:25:58,940 --> 00:26:01,460 and of science from professionalism, 416 00:26:01,460 --> 00:26:06,460 for all the things that you desire as sincerely as I... 417 00:26:07,700 --> 00:26:12,740 ..but which in you is held in leash by the power of the press. 418 00:26:14,980 --> 00:26:18,980 By 1904, Shaw's plays and ideas were making an impact 419 00:26:18,980 --> 00:26:21,900 on British social and political life. 420 00:26:21,900 --> 00:26:23,940 He helped found the Labour Party, 421 00:26:23,940 --> 00:26:27,980 the London School of Economics and the New Statesman magazine. 422 00:26:27,980 --> 00:26:32,020 He was a socialist and a social media sensation. 423 00:26:32,020 --> 00:26:35,700 He began a successful residency at the Royal Court Theatre 424 00:26:35,700 --> 00:26:39,980 on Sloane Square, where he was called the Chelsea Shakespeare. 425 00:26:39,980 --> 00:26:44,420 Coincidentally, it's where I made my own London acting debut. 426 00:26:46,700 --> 00:26:50,940 He began his run here by taking the piss out of the English and Irish. 427 00:26:50,940 --> 00:26:56,020 John Bull's Other Island made Edward VII break his chair with laughter. 428 00:26:58,940 --> 00:27:01,940 "the cleverest man in England is an Irish man". 429 00:27:02,980 --> 00:27:05,980 "Man alive, don't you know that all this 'top of the morning' 430 00:27:05,980 --> 00:27:09,180 "and 'broth of a boy' and 'more power to your elbow' business 431 00:27:09,180 --> 00:27:11,660 "is got up in England to fool you? 432 00:27:11,660 --> 00:27:14,500 "Like the Albert Hall concerts of Irish music, 433 00:27:14,500 --> 00:27:18,980 "no Irishman ever talks like that in Ireland or ever will." 434 00:27:18,980 --> 00:27:21,220 Shaw was an interesting case, wasn't he, 435 00:27:21,220 --> 00:27:24,460 because he lived in England much longer than he lived in Ireland 436 00:27:24,460 --> 00:27:27,220 without ever relinquishing his sense of Irishness. 437 00:27:27,220 --> 00:27:29,940 The thing about Shaw, wherever he was, he was an outsider. 438 00:27:29,940 --> 00:27:32,460 Someone said he had the homelessness of genius 439 00:27:32,460 --> 00:27:35,220 and I think there's some truth in that, actually. 440 00:27:37,660 --> 00:27:40,700 The English enjoy an outsider commenting on them. 441 00:27:40,700 --> 00:27:44,740 The English are more receptive to that, I think, than the Irish are. 442 00:27:44,740 --> 00:27:48,100 The Irish don't like outsiders commenting on them. 443 00:27:48,100 --> 00:27:50,100 No, I don't, and certainly we get very... 444 00:27:50,100 --> 00:27:52,300 We're a little raw in that department. Yes. 445 00:27:52,300 --> 00:27:54,940 Whereas the English have a greater tradition of it. 446 00:27:54,940 --> 00:27:58,020 Shaw made people laugh and Wilde made people laugh, 447 00:27:58,020 --> 00:28:00,620 Wogan made people laugh, Dave Allen made people... 448 00:28:00,620 --> 00:28:02,500 and you make people laugh. 449 00:28:02,500 --> 00:28:05,900 Is it a thing that you can make a more powerful inroad 450 00:28:05,900 --> 00:28:07,980 if you do it through humour, or...? 451 00:28:07,980 --> 00:28:10,220 Well, that was Shaw's take on it always. 452 00:28:10,220 --> 00:28:12,940 If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, 453 00:28:12,940 --> 00:28:14,700 otherwise they'll kill you. 454 00:28:14,700 --> 00:28:17,260 They want us to take a wry look and look askance 455 00:28:17,260 --> 00:28:20,460 because it is a comedy stance to be the intelligent alien, 456 00:28:20,460 --> 00:28:24,980 to be slightly outside of somewhere and holding it up for examination 457 00:28:24,980 --> 00:28:27,980 but with one eyebrow raised in a, "What I'm saying here 458 00:28:27,980 --> 00:28:31,180 "isn't too damning, I'm just saying this is unusual." 459 00:28:32,180 --> 00:28:34,420 Shakespeare had a mulberry tree 460 00:28:34,420 --> 00:28:37,380 and I'm not going to be outdone by Shakespeare. 461 00:28:37,380 --> 00:28:39,220 LAUGHTER 462 00:28:39,220 --> 00:28:41,020 He was, as you can see there, 463 00:28:41,020 --> 00:28:46,140 he was bearded and suited but in the machinery of the modern world, 464 00:28:46,220 --> 00:28:48,980 I mean, that is somebody being a celebrity. 465 00:28:48,980 --> 00:28:52,700 I am in a certain difficulty about it because it's perfectly obvious 466 00:28:52,700 --> 00:28:55,420 to all of you that it's already planted. 467 00:28:55,420 --> 00:28:56,700 LAUGHTER 468 00:28:58,620 --> 00:29:01,180 He's a complete ham, isn't he? 469 00:29:01,180 --> 00:29:03,660 I mean, he's acting up for the crowd and the cameras 470 00:29:03,660 --> 00:29:06,140 and he has them in the palm of his hand. 471 00:29:06,140 --> 00:29:08,660 The comparison I draw there is to Einstein, 472 00:29:08,660 --> 00:29:11,140 as somebody who became iconic in their field. 473 00:29:11,140 --> 00:29:15,220 You paid for the Shakespearean forehead, so here it is again. 474 00:29:15,220 --> 00:29:19,460 You'll notice the arrangement of my hair, 475 00:29:19,460 --> 00:29:23,220 it takes me 20 minutes every morning to get that up, you know, 476 00:29:23,220 --> 00:29:26,740 to get it properly arranged for you to admire. 477 00:29:26,740 --> 00:29:29,220 Another thing that strikes me, his accent. 478 00:29:29,220 --> 00:29:32,420 Yes, he's still got an Irish accent even though he left the country 479 00:29:32,420 --> 00:29:34,900 presumably 40, 50 years before then. 480 00:29:34,900 --> 00:29:38,220 It's Irish but there's an inflection, a slight inflection. 481 00:29:38,220 --> 00:29:42,220 Now, are we saying that he may have cultivated that accent slightly 482 00:29:42,220 --> 00:29:47,260 to distinguish himself in the world he was working in? I don't know. 483 00:29:49,940 --> 00:29:52,980 Now, whether you are a foreigner or a native, 484 00:29:52,980 --> 00:29:55,980 the first thing I must impress on you 485 00:29:55,980 --> 00:30:01,020 is that there is no such thing as ideally correct English. 486 00:30:02,300 --> 00:30:06,660 I wish I could offer you your choice among them all as a model 487 00:30:06,660 --> 00:30:11,660 but for the moment, I am afraid you must put up with me, an Irish man. 488 00:30:12,980 --> 00:30:17,980 Shaw said, "In Britain, I am still a foreigner and I shall die one." 489 00:30:17,980 --> 00:30:21,180 But his wife Charlotte had family in Cork and Kerry 490 00:30:21,180 --> 00:30:24,460 and so, as a 50-year-old man, he was going to have to face 491 00:30:24,460 --> 00:30:28,220 the inevitable at some point and go home. 492 00:30:28,220 --> 00:30:31,660 The dilemma that every exile faces is that... 493 00:30:31,660 --> 00:30:35,220 once you leave the place that you're from, 494 00:30:35,220 --> 00:30:38,660 you never belong there in quite the same way again 495 00:30:38,660 --> 00:30:43,740 and the place that you go to, you never truly belong either. 496 00:30:43,940 --> 00:30:46,740 And that can produce a restlessness. 497 00:30:46,740 --> 00:30:50,900 Sometimes, what we're imagining is something that's no longer... 498 00:30:50,900 --> 00:30:53,020 it's no longer the same. 499 00:30:54,100 --> 00:30:57,740 I think Shaw understood that and it was 30 years before he came back. 500 00:30:57,740 --> 00:31:00,340 When he did come back, he didn't come back to Dublin 501 00:31:00,340 --> 00:31:03,980 where he'd been born and brought up, he came back to a place like this, 502 00:31:03,980 --> 00:31:07,900 which has a kind of a timelessness about it. 503 00:31:12,980 --> 00:31:16,380 He was a notoriously bad driver... 504 00:31:17,460 --> 00:31:20,420 ..and Mrs Shaw insisted that when they came to Ireland 505 00:31:20,420 --> 00:31:22,180 they would be driven. 506 00:31:23,940 --> 00:31:28,900 What a figure he must have presented sitting in the back of... 507 00:31:28,900 --> 00:31:33,980 this beautiful, modern machine 508 00:31:34,420 --> 00:31:38,220 coming through the countryside at a time when there were 509 00:31:38,220 --> 00:31:42,420 almost no cars on the road, with his white beard and his camera. 510 00:31:42,420 --> 00:31:46,460 It must have been an amazing, amazing sight as it passed, 511 00:31:46,460 --> 00:31:50,460 and the drama of it coming from a distance 512 00:31:50,460 --> 00:31:53,620 and then materialising and then disappearing. 513 00:31:58,820 --> 00:32:02,180 The idea that he was driving around in Ireland in a Rolls-Royce... 514 00:32:02,180 --> 00:32:05,940 I heard somebody say once that it shows you what a hypocrite he was. 515 00:32:05,940 --> 00:32:08,940 There he was, spouting about how everybody was equal. 516 00:32:08,940 --> 00:32:12,220 But it reminds me of a story, apocryphal or not, 517 00:32:12,220 --> 00:32:16,220 of Lenin coming back from Finland to lead the Russian Revolution 518 00:32:16,220 --> 00:32:18,980 where somebody says, you're in a first-class carriage 519 00:32:18,980 --> 00:32:21,860 and you're coming back to lead the Revolution, 520 00:32:21,860 --> 00:32:23,660 what's up with that? 521 00:32:23,660 --> 00:32:26,940 And he said, there should only be first-class carriages, 522 00:32:26,940 --> 00:32:29,980 and I think Shaw would have agreed with him. 523 00:32:29,980 --> 00:32:33,420 Probably that everybody should have their own Rolls-Royce. 524 00:32:35,460 --> 00:32:39,980 Like his writing shed, Shaw loved the isolation of County Kerry. 525 00:32:39,980 --> 00:32:42,940 He finished his plays Major Barbara and Saint Joan 526 00:32:42,940 --> 00:32:44,980 on various visits here. 527 00:32:44,980 --> 00:32:48,700 I think he found energy and inspiration from the landscape. 528 00:32:48,700 --> 00:32:50,500 It stimulated him. 529 00:32:50,500 --> 00:32:53,220 And when you look at his letters and photos from here, 530 00:32:53,220 --> 00:32:56,380 you get the feeling that even though this was his native land, 531 00:32:56,380 --> 00:32:58,980 he was still eager to explore. 532 00:32:58,980 --> 00:33:01,660 He spent two hours rowing out to the Skellig Islands 533 00:33:01,660 --> 00:33:03,260 off the Kerry coasts. 534 00:33:03,260 --> 00:33:06,140 He called it "the most impossible rock in the world". 535 00:33:06,140 --> 00:33:08,140 "Part of our dream world". 536 00:33:08,140 --> 00:33:11,620 He had a childlike sense of curiosity and adventure. 537 00:33:11,620 --> 00:33:13,660 He went up in hot air balloons, 538 00:33:13,660 --> 00:33:16,940 he flew over the Cape and the Great Wall of China. 539 00:33:16,940 --> 00:33:20,460 He experimented with cameras, mechanics and naturism. 540 00:33:20,460 --> 00:33:23,180 He didn't navel gaze, he looked outwards, 541 00:33:23,180 --> 00:33:25,460 fascinated by everything he saw 542 00:33:25,460 --> 00:33:28,700 and questioning everything he saw as wrong. 543 00:33:28,700 --> 00:33:32,940 Shaw wasn't afraid to bring his lifelong crusade against inequality 544 00:33:32,940 --> 00:33:34,980 back to the city of his birth. 545 00:33:39,940 --> 00:33:41,940 "Poverty is a crime. 546 00:33:41,940 --> 00:33:46,620 "A crime not of the poor but of the people who allowed them to be poor. 547 00:33:46,620 --> 00:33:49,140 "Poverty is a crime of society. 548 00:33:49,140 --> 00:33:51,180 "A preventable crime." 549 00:33:53,980 --> 00:33:59,020 There is an extraordinary meeting when he gives a lecture in 1910 550 00:33:59,180 --> 00:34:04,220 in Dublin on The Poor Law and Destitution in Ireland. 551 00:34:05,700 --> 00:34:09,420 They give him a round of applause when he arrives 552 00:34:09,420 --> 00:34:12,740 and he said to them straightaway, 553 00:34:12,740 --> 00:34:17,700 "I might not be able to reciprocate with some applause for yourselves", 554 00:34:18,980 --> 00:34:23,020 as he's telling them what they might not want to hear. 555 00:34:23,020 --> 00:34:24,580 And what's he saying, 556 00:34:24,580 --> 00:34:29,420 "I went to the workhouse today and I saw how you're treating children 557 00:34:29,420 --> 00:34:32,580 "in the workhouses and I'm telling you now, 558 00:34:32,580 --> 00:34:33,860 "you're going to burn in hell 559 00:34:33,860 --> 00:34:35,700 "for the way you're treating these children. 560 00:34:35,700 --> 00:34:37,580 "And this is not about the Brits. 561 00:34:37,580 --> 00:34:40,580 "This is in your control. This is your local government. 562 00:34:40,580 --> 00:34:43,780 "This is what you're doing to Irish children right now." 563 00:34:43,780 --> 00:34:46,180 When he was a very famous man and everybody wanted to have 564 00:34:46,180 --> 00:34:48,500 a look at him and claim him a little bit as a Dubliner 565 00:34:48,500 --> 00:34:51,340 and all the great and the good of Dublin society come to hear him. 566 00:34:51,340 --> 00:34:54,220 I mean, to stand up in front of an audience 567 00:34:54,220 --> 00:34:57,020 and to make them afraid of their souls... 568 00:34:57,020 --> 00:35:00,340 And of course so prescient, it was so prescient. 569 00:35:00,340 --> 00:35:04,540 He was the person who identified, before we set up the state, 570 00:35:04,540 --> 00:35:06,780 the way we were treating children 571 00:35:06,780 --> 00:35:10,260 was going to be the dark undercurrent of our society. 572 00:35:10,260 --> 00:35:15,260 You know in Pygmalion where he gives Eliza, who's this kind of poor, 573 00:35:15,700 --> 00:35:19,740 illiterate young woman off the streets, literally, 574 00:35:19,740 --> 00:35:22,420 and he gives her that great line at end, 575 00:35:22,420 --> 00:35:24,460 when she's become the sort of mock duchess 576 00:35:24,460 --> 00:35:27,180 and she says, you know, "We become of the way we're treated." 577 00:35:28,660 --> 00:35:32,900 The difference between a lady and a flower girl is not how she behaves, 578 00:35:32,900 --> 00:35:34,060 but how she's treated. 579 00:35:35,220 --> 00:35:38,020 I shall always be a flower girl to Professor Higgins 580 00:35:38,020 --> 00:35:41,020 because he always treats me as a flower girl and always will. 581 00:35:41,020 --> 00:35:42,860 But I know I can be a lady to you 582 00:35:42,860 --> 00:35:46,140 because you always treat me as a lady and always will. 583 00:35:46,140 --> 00:35:49,820 If you treat somebody like dirt, they'll become dirt. 584 00:35:49,820 --> 00:35:52,020 If you treat them with decency and dignity, 585 00:35:52,020 --> 00:35:54,060 they will be decent and dignified. 586 00:35:54,060 --> 00:35:57,260 And I think that's the belief that runs through his politics, you know? 587 00:35:57,260 --> 00:35:59,300 His politics, in a way, are very, very simple, 588 00:35:59,300 --> 00:36:01,740 which is just that nobody should be treated like dirt. 589 00:36:01,740 --> 00:36:05,100 I dare say my mother could find some chap or other who'd do very well. 590 00:36:06,100 --> 00:36:08,140 We were above that in Covent Garden. 591 00:36:08,140 --> 00:36:11,500 What do you mean? I sold flowers. 592 00:36:11,500 --> 00:36:12,580 I didn't sell myself. 593 00:36:13,780 --> 00:36:16,780 Now you've made a lady of me I'm not fit to sell anything else. 594 00:36:18,300 --> 00:36:20,060 Mrs Warren's Profession. 595 00:36:21,340 --> 00:36:25,780 This amazing play, which was revolutionary for its time, 596 00:36:25,780 --> 00:36:29,780 which is about the notion of prostitution. 597 00:36:29,780 --> 00:36:33,460 More importantly about the economic demands that make a woman 598 00:36:33,460 --> 00:36:36,540 turn to prostitution just to educate her daughter. 599 00:36:36,540 --> 00:36:38,420 Shaw made no moral judgments 600 00:36:38,420 --> 00:36:41,300 but he was scathing about the harsh realities 601 00:36:41,300 --> 00:36:44,660 of life for women in Victorian England. 602 00:36:44,660 --> 00:36:46,460 The play was banned in London 603 00:36:46,460 --> 00:36:50,220 and in New York the cast were arrested on stage, mid-performance. 604 00:36:54,260 --> 00:36:56,900 He was a true champion of women 605 00:36:56,900 --> 00:37:00,380 and believed that women were in every way 606 00:37:00,380 --> 00:37:03,180 the equal of men and that's something that we may say, 607 00:37:03,180 --> 00:37:06,580 "Oh, yes, well, that's obvious," but at that time when he was writing, 608 00:37:06,580 --> 00:37:08,060 it wasn't obvious. 609 00:37:08,060 --> 00:37:11,060 His play Saint Joan, for example, 610 00:37:11,060 --> 00:37:14,780 is about a woman who takes on the male establishment, 611 00:37:14,780 --> 00:37:18,140 questions it and is willing to sacrifice her life 612 00:37:18,140 --> 00:37:20,700 for her principles and for the truth. 613 00:37:20,700 --> 00:37:24,340 I think I'm very drawn to Shaw because I think I am, as a director, 614 00:37:24,340 --> 00:37:29,180 drawn to plays that are full of debate and full of ideas. 615 00:37:29,180 --> 00:37:32,660 It feels at the moment like we are so polarised in politics 616 00:37:32,660 --> 00:37:35,380 that we can't understand the other's view. 617 00:37:35,380 --> 00:37:37,940 Now, that's incredibly painful at a point where you've got Trump 618 00:37:37,940 --> 00:37:39,940 in America and you've got Brexit here, you know, 619 00:37:39,940 --> 00:37:42,580 one's natural instinct is not to look at the other perspective. 620 00:37:42,580 --> 00:37:45,060 You've not many friends at court. 621 00:37:45,060 --> 00:37:48,380 Why do all these nights and courtiers and churchmen hate me? 622 00:37:49,580 --> 00:37:51,340 Simpleton. 623 00:37:51,340 --> 00:37:54,580 Do you expect stupid people to love you for showing them up? 624 00:37:56,860 --> 00:38:01,020 In terms of the depictions of women in theatre, 625 00:38:01,020 --> 00:38:04,380 she's a very strong and powerful character. Yes. 626 00:38:04,380 --> 00:38:07,140 It's one of the great roles for women 627 00:38:07,140 --> 00:38:11,580 because it's so difficult to play and epic and complex. 628 00:38:11,580 --> 00:38:14,580 What I love about Joan is that she sees herself 629 00:38:14,580 --> 00:38:18,420 as a soldier and so she's not a woman or a man. 630 00:38:18,420 --> 00:38:21,620 I really believe that she sees herself in that way 631 00:38:21,620 --> 00:38:25,220 and that's sort of a post-feminist thing, 632 00:38:25,220 --> 00:38:28,100 that I hope one day we manage to achieve, where it doesn't 633 00:38:28,100 --> 00:38:31,100 really matter what sex you are, you can just do something. 634 00:38:31,100 --> 00:38:36,180 I think he is fascinated by women as the outrageous voice 635 00:38:36,540 --> 00:38:39,260 and the challenging voice. 636 00:38:39,260 --> 00:38:42,900 It feels like it's written by a woman for a woman as opposed to 637 00:38:42,900 --> 00:38:46,380 a man for a woman. Yeah, and even I feel it from the audience, 638 00:38:46,380 --> 00:38:51,420 sometimes they don't like Joan because she's so full of pride 639 00:38:51,660 --> 00:38:54,700 and conviction and that's not very feminine, is it? 640 00:38:55,900 --> 00:38:57,260 Light your fires! 641 00:38:58,820 --> 00:39:02,660 Do you think I dread it as much as the life of a rat in a hole? 642 00:39:03,860 --> 00:39:05,940 My voices were right. 643 00:39:05,940 --> 00:39:08,140 Joan, Joan! Yes! 644 00:39:08,140 --> 00:39:10,340 He didn't just put women on the stage in great roles. 645 00:39:10,340 --> 00:39:12,340 Many of those great roles were supported 646 00:39:12,340 --> 00:39:14,620 and inspired by women that he knew. 647 00:39:14,620 --> 00:39:18,580 He was really supportive of women and he supported women 648 00:39:18,580 --> 00:39:21,900 who otherwise people would see as troublemakers. 649 00:39:21,900 --> 00:39:24,340 That was what really impressed him about the suffragettes. 650 00:39:24,340 --> 00:39:26,980 You know, people saying you're completely crazy and he's like, 651 00:39:26,980 --> 00:39:30,020 "Well, no, they're not crazy. They are actually going to do this 652 00:39:30,020 --> 00:39:32,140 "and they sound like hooligans." 653 00:39:32,140 --> 00:39:34,780 What was it Emmeline Pankhurst said? 654 00:39:34,780 --> 00:39:36,780 "I am what you would call a hooligan." 655 00:39:36,780 --> 00:39:40,300 But hey, you know, I sit here talking to you 656 00:39:40,300 --> 00:39:43,700 and I do have the vote and the right to education 657 00:39:43,700 --> 00:39:48,100 and many of the things that were imagined to the impossible. 658 00:39:48,100 --> 00:39:50,940 How about you listed Shaw 659 00:39:50,940 --> 00:39:55,540 as one of the "top ten" feminists of the century? 660 00:39:55,540 --> 00:39:57,100 Why do you say that? 661 00:39:57,100 --> 00:39:58,540 Because... 662 00:39:58,540 --> 00:40:03,580 Because he had enormous influence and he didn't just write journalism, 663 00:40:03,740 --> 00:40:06,220 he turned up at meetings, he promoted people, 664 00:40:06,220 --> 00:40:08,740 he went to rallies, he shouted. 665 00:40:08,740 --> 00:40:12,700 But not only that, but he actually was doing that decades before 666 00:40:12,700 --> 00:40:16,700 with his friends in the socialist movement, like Eleanor Marx. 667 00:40:16,700 --> 00:40:18,980 Saying, "If we have socialism on the agenda, 668 00:40:18,980 --> 00:40:22,580 "if we're looking at equality, then this journey, part of this journey, 669 00:40:22,580 --> 00:40:24,660 "is also the inequality between people, 670 00:40:24,660 --> 00:40:29,780 "between humans and between men and women as well." 671 00:40:29,780 --> 00:40:32,820 He would have said that women's rights were human rights. Yeah. 672 00:40:34,300 --> 00:40:36,660 I think Shaw was a truly brave man, 673 00:40:36,660 --> 00:40:40,460 always prepared to risk unpopularity or outrage. 674 00:40:40,460 --> 00:40:44,780 At the beginning of World War I, his closest friends ostracised him. 675 00:40:44,780 --> 00:40:47,020 One called him "a complete bastard" 676 00:40:47,020 --> 00:40:49,900 and there were calls for him to be shot as a traitor. 677 00:40:49,900 --> 00:40:54,060 But Shaw couldn't stay quiet about the propaganda, 678 00:40:54,060 --> 00:40:58,980 the jingoism, about the greed of the arms trade or the sheer futility of 679 00:40:58,980 --> 00:41:01,900 war, where the only winner was war itself. 680 00:41:03,100 --> 00:41:06,220 In 1914, 681 00:41:06,220 --> 00:41:11,100 I was as sorry for the young Germans who lay slain or mutilated 682 00:41:11,100 --> 00:41:16,100 in no man's land as for the British lads who lay beside them. 683 00:41:16,780 --> 00:41:20,900 War is to me a sheer waste of life. 684 00:41:22,740 --> 00:41:26,020 Sadly, I think Shaw could have written these words yesterday. 685 00:41:28,220 --> 00:41:32,740 I have visions of streets heaped with mangled corpses 686 00:41:32,740 --> 00:41:37,460 in which children wander, crying for their parents, 687 00:41:37,460 --> 00:41:42,460 and babies grasp and strangle in the clutches of dead mothers. 688 00:41:44,300 --> 00:41:46,540 I dislike war, 689 00:41:46,540 --> 00:41:50,220 not only for its dangers and inconveniences, 690 00:41:50,220 --> 00:41:54,060 but because of the loss of so many young men, 691 00:41:54,060 --> 00:41:59,100 any of whom may be a Newton or an Einstein, a Beethoven, 692 00:41:59,100 --> 00:42:03,540 a Michelangelo, a Shakespeare or even a Shaw. 693 00:42:07,380 --> 00:42:10,700 It wasn't easy to be that kind of commentator. 694 00:42:10,700 --> 00:42:15,580 It required real bravery and courage, don't you think? 695 00:42:15,580 --> 00:42:16,820 I've no doubt that Shaw 696 00:42:16,820 --> 00:42:21,180 was exceptionally brave and courageous. 697 00:42:21,180 --> 00:42:24,100 It would have been easier for him to stay silent 698 00:42:24,100 --> 00:42:26,140 about a lot of burning issues 699 00:42:26,140 --> 00:42:28,860 in domestic and international politics 700 00:42:28,860 --> 00:42:31,220 and controversies at that time. 701 00:42:31,220 --> 00:42:36,260 Take the First World War - he could have decided that he was going 702 00:42:36,260 --> 00:42:40,940 to be relatively quiet about that but he explodes about it. 703 00:42:40,940 --> 00:42:44,260 There are various issues in relation to what's going on in Ireland 704 00:42:44,260 --> 00:42:46,860 that he could have been relatively quiet about 705 00:42:46,860 --> 00:42:51,340 but he's not going to stay silent about what he sees as the excesses, 706 00:42:51,340 --> 00:42:53,420 the mistakes of British rule in Ireland. 707 00:42:55,540 --> 00:42:59,060 You've got to remember that in the middle of Ireland's struggle 708 00:42:59,060 --> 00:43:02,340 for independence, which came to a head in the 1916 rising, 709 00:43:02,340 --> 00:43:07,380 Shaw was one of the few Irish voices that Britain might listen to. 710 00:43:07,700 --> 00:43:12,340 And so he offered his support to a man on trial in London for his life. 711 00:43:12,340 --> 00:43:15,380 Sir Roger Casement was a highly respected diplomat 712 00:43:15,380 --> 00:43:16,860 and knight of the realm 713 00:43:16,860 --> 00:43:20,900 but also an Irish Republican and a gun-runner. 714 00:43:20,900 --> 00:43:23,220 Roger Casement was a really interesting character. 715 00:43:23,220 --> 00:43:25,540 Protestant from the North of Ireland 716 00:43:25,540 --> 00:43:28,380 who was knighted by the British establishment 717 00:43:28,380 --> 00:43:31,180 for his work in the Congo. 718 00:43:31,180 --> 00:43:33,420 Somewhat later, then, 719 00:43:33,420 --> 00:43:36,580 he was caught importing arms into Ireland 720 00:43:36,580 --> 00:43:41,580 for the Irish revolution and he went from being an establishment hero 721 00:43:41,900 --> 00:43:43,540 to being a villain. 722 00:43:43,540 --> 00:43:47,020 And Shaw came to his defence and for Shaw 723 00:43:47,020 --> 00:43:51,460 the courtroom was a theatre 724 00:43:51,460 --> 00:43:56,140 and he wanted Casement to defend himself 725 00:43:56,140 --> 00:43:59,700 by reciting a defence that 726 00:43:59,700 --> 00:44:04,740 would be written specifically by Shaw 727 00:44:07,180 --> 00:44:12,180 in which he would get the jury to think about why they were trying him 728 00:44:13,660 --> 00:44:15,660 and to appeal to their sense - 729 00:44:15,660 --> 00:44:18,460 in a weird way it's a Shavian kind of paradox - 730 00:44:18,460 --> 00:44:21,940 to appeal to their sense of what was right. 731 00:44:23,700 --> 00:44:27,140 "If you persist in treating me as an Englishman, 732 00:44:27,140 --> 00:44:28,860 "you bind yourself thereby 733 00:44:28,860 --> 00:44:31,940 "to hang me as a traitor before the eyes of the world. 734 00:44:31,940 --> 00:44:34,300 "Now, as a simple matter of fact 735 00:44:34,300 --> 00:44:37,460 "I am neither an English man nor a traitor. 736 00:44:37,460 --> 00:44:41,420 "I am an Irish man captured in a fair attempt to achieve 737 00:44:41,420 --> 00:44:44,460 "the independence of my country." 738 00:44:50,940 --> 00:44:55,900 Unfortunately, Casement was talked out of that defence by his counsel 739 00:44:56,460 --> 00:45:01,300 and as a matter of fact he was found guilty and he was hanged. 740 00:45:04,100 --> 00:45:05,660 It wasn't just Casement. 741 00:45:05,660 --> 00:45:10,660 I mean, Shaw, in relation to the Irish revolution in 1916, 742 00:45:11,460 --> 00:45:16,180 he tried to prevail upon the British government from executing those men 743 00:45:16,180 --> 00:45:17,980 by saying that if you execute them, 744 00:45:17,980 --> 00:45:20,140 you'll turn them into martyrs 745 00:45:20,140 --> 00:45:25,100 and he was also aware of this with Roger Casement because 746 00:45:25,100 --> 00:45:30,100 Casement did become a martyr and those men of 1916 who were executed 747 00:45:30,260 --> 00:45:34,140 summarily by the British government also became martyrs 748 00:45:34,140 --> 00:45:37,100 and he thought that that was a huge mistake. 749 00:45:37,100 --> 00:45:40,260 But he had a tremendous capacity to see the bigger picture. 750 00:45:46,700 --> 00:45:51,700 He has developed this way of engaging with the world 751 00:45:52,260 --> 00:45:55,780 that involves him speaking out, writing. 752 00:45:55,780 --> 00:45:57,820 It's also feeding his ego. 753 00:45:57,820 --> 00:46:02,860 There's a reason why Shaw becomes so iconic and part of it is ego. 754 00:46:03,060 --> 00:46:05,140 I don't think he could help himself. 755 00:46:05,140 --> 00:46:08,620 There has been one very important omission 756 00:46:08,620 --> 00:46:10,140 in the proceedings today. 757 00:46:11,340 --> 00:46:13,620 I simply ask you 758 00:46:13,620 --> 00:46:16,100 to drink the health 759 00:46:16,100 --> 00:46:17,420 of Mr Bernard Shaw. 760 00:46:17,420 --> 00:46:19,700 LAUGHTER 761 00:46:19,700 --> 00:46:21,580 He is Doctor Frankenstein, you know, 762 00:46:21,580 --> 00:46:25,020 he creates GBS and it's a very self-conscious, 763 00:46:25,020 --> 00:46:28,180 thought-through way of projecting himself. 764 00:46:28,180 --> 00:46:30,060 So now take a good look at me 765 00:46:30,060 --> 00:46:33,980 because I am the actual, real and original Bernard Shaw. 766 00:46:33,980 --> 00:46:37,700 NEWSREEL: When the Irish dramatist came back to Southampton on the Arandora Star, 767 00:46:37,700 --> 00:46:40,580 he favoured British news with one of his most meaty interviews. 768 00:46:40,580 --> 00:46:42,300 Perhaps the vanity of Shaw 769 00:46:42,300 --> 00:46:45,300 allowed him to square a lot of his own circles. 770 00:46:46,700 --> 00:46:48,180 As a young campaigner, 771 00:46:48,180 --> 00:46:51,460 Shaw had been committed to gradual social change. 772 00:46:51,460 --> 00:46:54,460 But as an old man in his 70s and running out of years, 773 00:46:54,460 --> 00:46:56,260 he was getting frustrated. 774 00:46:56,260 --> 00:46:59,780 He felt democratic change was just too slow. 775 00:46:59,780 --> 00:47:03,660 In the 1930s, he certainly wasn't alone in thinking that a short, 776 00:47:03,660 --> 00:47:06,700 sharp shock in the form of a Stalin, 777 00:47:06,700 --> 00:47:10,300 Mussolini or Hitler might save socialism 778 00:47:10,300 --> 00:47:14,780 and save the world. And when Shaw spoke, the world listened. 779 00:47:16,340 --> 00:47:19,740 The great majority of the human race are easy-going, 780 00:47:19,740 --> 00:47:22,780 sensible people and left to themselves, 781 00:47:22,780 --> 00:47:25,540 they look round for somebody who looks intelligent 782 00:47:25,540 --> 00:47:27,260 and they say, "Tell us what to do." 783 00:47:27,260 --> 00:47:30,260 You can't get anything done without a dictatorship. 784 00:47:30,260 --> 00:47:33,900 I think in justice to Signor Mussolini, 785 00:47:33,900 --> 00:47:38,940 I ought to tell you that he has a very wonderful head. 786 00:47:39,100 --> 00:47:42,500 He has a wonderful brow, which comes down to here. 787 00:47:47,100 --> 00:47:52,140 Then there came a very intelligent gentleman named Adolf Hitler and he, 788 00:47:52,780 --> 00:47:57,700 knowing perfectly well that the powers would not fight, 789 00:47:57,700 --> 00:48:00,540 he snapped his fingers at the Treaty of Versailles. 790 00:48:01,900 --> 00:48:06,940 So far as Hitler and Second World War is concerned, 791 00:48:07,180 --> 00:48:09,460 he said at the end of the first war, 792 00:48:09,460 --> 00:48:12,420 "What you are doing is going to create 793 00:48:12,420 --> 00:48:15,740 "another world war while I'm still alive. 794 00:48:15,740 --> 00:48:19,700 "To say that they are the enemy of people, of human beings, 795 00:48:19,700 --> 00:48:23,900 "they will look in and make somebody else the enemy, 796 00:48:23,900 --> 00:48:26,220 "rather than themselves." 797 00:48:26,220 --> 00:48:29,140 This is the interesting thing about Shaw's longevity. 798 00:48:29,140 --> 00:48:34,140 He was there during this period in the 19th century of a nationalism 799 00:48:37,620 --> 00:48:40,220 He has an awful lot to say about international conflict, 800 00:48:40,220 --> 00:48:45,260 about the dangers of nationalism and patriotism and xenophobia and there, 801 00:48:46,020 --> 00:48:51,060 in the 1920s and 1930s, he's still there observing the new regimes, 802 00:48:51,180 --> 00:48:54,700 the new orders, the questioning of democracy. 803 00:48:54,700 --> 00:48:58,900 The real thing, you cannot get responsibility without dictatorship. 804 00:48:58,900 --> 00:48:59,980 What you've got to do 805 00:48:59,980 --> 00:49:02,620 is to make your dictator really responsible so that 806 00:49:02,620 --> 00:49:07,180 when he abuses his powers or doesn't do the job, you can get rid of him. 807 00:49:07,180 --> 00:49:09,740 That's... Everything that is done, has to be done, 808 00:49:09,740 --> 00:49:11,580 somebody's got to dictate it. 809 00:49:14,260 --> 00:49:16,580 His thinking starts to change 810 00:49:16,580 --> 00:49:21,340 but that takes him into some kind of dark areas through his support 811 00:49:21,340 --> 00:49:24,140 of Mussolini and Hitler and Stalin. 812 00:49:24,140 --> 00:49:28,380 What do you make of that swerve into territory that a lot of people 813 00:49:28,380 --> 00:49:31,660 found very hard to reconcile with the earlier Shaw? 814 00:49:31,660 --> 00:49:34,540 He was deeply wrong about Hitler, he was deeply wrong about Mussolini. 815 00:49:34,540 --> 00:49:36,940 He doesn't have the humility to turn around and say, 816 00:49:36,940 --> 00:49:38,860 "You know what? I was wrong about that." 817 00:49:38,860 --> 00:49:41,500 Actually, he shouldn't be spared the opprobrium of it. 818 00:49:41,500 --> 00:49:44,860 But I think it shouldn't be used to sort of take away everything 819 00:49:44,860 --> 00:49:46,740 that goes before that, you know? 820 00:49:46,740 --> 00:49:49,980 In the end, for all the dark parts of him, 821 00:49:49,980 --> 00:49:54,260 he did more than almost any modern individual 822 00:49:54,260 --> 00:49:58,700 to try to uphold the ideas that everybody could be dignified 823 00:49:58,700 --> 00:50:02,100 and that they could be dignified by their mind, 824 00:50:02,100 --> 00:50:06,220 by having the power to think as independent individuals. 825 00:50:09,340 --> 00:50:10,780 And what did you come to see? 826 00:50:13,140 --> 00:50:15,500 An old man... 827 00:50:15,500 --> 00:50:17,980 who was once a famous playwright. 828 00:50:21,940 --> 00:50:25,100 Who talked about everything on Earth 829 00:50:25,100 --> 00:50:26,140 and wrote about it. 830 00:50:27,140 --> 00:50:31,060 Well, here's what is left of him. 831 00:50:32,380 --> 00:50:36,780 Not much to look at, is it? 832 00:50:36,780 --> 00:50:41,780 What drove him to have this need to communicate constantly, 833 00:50:41,780 --> 00:50:44,700 to be speaking, to be writing, to be commentating? 834 00:50:50,260 --> 00:50:53,700 When you're around these pages that he touched, 835 00:50:53,700 --> 00:50:58,340 there's a sense of him being present and at the same time unreachable. 836 00:51:00,940 --> 00:51:02,580 It kind of leaves you with a sense 837 00:51:02,580 --> 00:51:04,380 of really wishing you could meet him. 838 00:51:07,100 --> 00:51:12,140 Now, I wish that the Movietone could bring you 839 00:51:12,380 --> 00:51:16,340 not only this picture of me 840 00:51:16,340 --> 00:51:18,380 but I wish it could bring you the fresh air 841 00:51:18,380 --> 00:51:19,980 that I'm breathing at present. 842 00:51:25,820 --> 00:51:30,340 I think that all that I can do is to end as I have begun, 843 00:51:30,340 --> 00:51:33,580 to beat the drum in front of my own booth, 844 00:51:33,580 --> 00:51:37,220 to ask you to walk up and to see all those old, old, 845 00:51:37,220 --> 00:51:41,700 old plays of mine that now appear to be so new, new, new. 846 00:51:48,420 --> 00:51:52,260 His plays and the musical version of Pygmalion, My Fair Lady, 847 00:51:52,260 --> 00:51:55,220 have been a source of great bounty since his death. 848 00:51:55,220 --> 00:51:58,820 Three institutions, the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, 849 00:51:58,820 --> 00:52:02,220 the British Museum and the National Gallery of Ireland, 850 00:52:02,220 --> 00:52:06,420 all get about £200,000 a year from the royalties he left them. 851 00:52:07,980 --> 00:52:11,220 It's a wonderful gift to the people of Dublin 852 00:52:11,220 --> 00:52:14,780 that this bequest continues year after year 853 00:52:14,780 --> 00:52:17,700 to buy and curate paintings. 854 00:52:17,700 --> 00:52:22,220 It's a mark of the man. He really believed in accessibility, 855 00:52:22,220 --> 00:52:26,420 that people should have free access to art because he believed 856 00:52:26,420 --> 00:52:29,740 in the power of art to change the way people think. 857 00:52:31,460 --> 00:52:36,500 He also understood that art for many people was an elitist preoccupation, 858 00:52:37,300 --> 00:52:39,700 that it was only people who were wealthy, 859 00:52:39,700 --> 00:52:43,940 who had access to this kind of work and he was extremely aware 860 00:52:43,940 --> 00:52:46,260 that art belonged to everybody. 861 00:52:50,900 --> 00:52:53,780 How do you think he might have developed had he not left Ireland? 862 00:52:53,780 --> 00:52:56,060 Do you think it would have hampered him 863 00:52:56,060 --> 00:52:58,300 or would he have become Shaw anyway? 864 00:52:58,300 --> 00:53:02,420 Oh, he would have become Shaw anyway because, in a way, 865 00:53:02,420 --> 00:53:05,820 he needs a nest 866 00:53:05,820 --> 00:53:08,980 in which to become the cuckoo, you know? 867 00:53:08,980 --> 00:53:11,860 And he does that with British society. 868 00:53:11,860 --> 00:53:15,740 I think we probably should have given him greater recognition. 869 00:53:15,740 --> 00:53:18,380 We here in Ireland owe him a great deal. 870 00:53:18,380 --> 00:53:21,300 What's he saying to us? 871 00:53:21,300 --> 00:53:26,340 Well, I think what he would say here is the importance of education. 872 00:53:28,220 --> 00:53:32,140 The importance of rejecting powerfully the suggestion 873 00:53:32,140 --> 00:53:35,260 that there are matters over which 874 00:53:35,260 --> 00:53:39,500 ordinary citizens cannot exercise control. 875 00:53:39,500 --> 00:53:43,820 Everything in Shaw very much is about the endless capacities 876 00:53:43,820 --> 00:53:46,500 of people who actually put the work in 877 00:53:46,500 --> 00:53:49,860 in relation to thinking and sharing and taking 878 00:53:49,860 --> 00:53:52,540 the vulnerability of the other into account. 879 00:53:52,540 --> 00:53:55,940 What I would call the necessary grace of discourse. 880 00:54:01,220 --> 00:54:04,900 When he died, each of the places to which he left his royalties 881 00:54:04,900 --> 00:54:07,140 were given one additional memento. 882 00:54:41,460 --> 00:54:44,260 When you think of 883 00:54:44,260 --> 00:54:48,460 the mind of this man and the influence that he had, 884 00:54:48,460 --> 00:54:51,540 there's something very touching about it being... 885 00:54:53,620 --> 00:54:54,820 About being stilled. 886 00:55:01,620 --> 00:55:02,660 Small ears. 887 00:55:05,260 --> 00:55:07,060 He wrote about his ears and said, you know, 888 00:55:07,060 --> 00:55:09,100 that he didn't like his ears so much 889 00:55:09,100 --> 00:55:11,820 but they're actually quite neat little ears. 890 00:55:38,900 --> 00:55:40,540 And the way to have a happy life 891 00:55:40,540 --> 00:55:42,460 is to be too busy doing what you like... 892 00:55:46,580 --> 00:55:48,420 ..all the time. 893 00:55:48,420 --> 00:55:50,380 Having no time left to you 894 00:55:50,380 --> 00:55:53,860 to consider whether you're happy or not and... 895 00:55:55,700 --> 00:55:59,620 Oh, look here, I'm getting talking. 896 00:55:59,620 --> 00:56:00,780 I must stop. 897 00:56:12,380 --> 00:56:15,540 Shaw, he wasn't Irish, he wasn't English. 898 00:56:15,540 --> 00:56:20,580 He was always an outsider to the end of his life and, in the end, 899 00:56:22,300 --> 00:56:25,900 as a husband, he chose to be buried with his wife. 900 00:56:25,900 --> 00:56:28,500 Charlotte died five years before he did, 901 00:56:28,500 --> 00:56:30,780 five or six years before he did, 902 00:56:30,780 --> 00:56:35,820 and although he had expressed the desire at one stage to be buried 903 00:56:36,220 --> 00:56:38,860 in St Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin, 904 00:56:38,860 --> 00:56:41,780 he changed his mind and he... 905 00:56:44,220 --> 00:56:49,220 He was cremated at Golders Green crematorium, like Charlotte was, 906 00:56:49,620 --> 00:56:52,460 and their ashes were mixed around this hut. 907 00:56:53,740 --> 00:56:58,740 It's a beautiful... It's a beautiful thing to do at the end of a life. 908 00:57:01,620 --> 00:57:06,700 My abiding sense of the man is of compassion, humanity and courage. 909 00:57:08,540 --> 00:57:13,580 A life spent seeking and speaking the truth and damn the consequences. 910 00:57:15,660 --> 00:57:19,260 As he said, "My life belongs to the community 911 00:57:19,260 --> 00:57:20,740 "and, as long as I live, 912 00:57:20,740 --> 00:57:23,660 "it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can. 913 00:57:24,860 --> 00:57:27,100 "I want to be thoroughly used up when I die. 914 00:57:28,100 --> 00:57:30,700 "Life is no brief candle to me. 915 00:57:30,700 --> 00:57:32,820 "It is a sort of splendid torch 916 00:57:32,820 --> 00:57:36,140 "and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible 917 00:57:36,140 --> 00:57:39,540 "before handing it on to the future generations." 918 00:57:41,660 --> 00:57:44,540 They are making me a signal by which I understand 919 00:57:44,540 --> 00:57:46,780 that they have had about enough of me. 920 00:57:46,780 --> 00:57:50,140 I am very reluctant to leave you, ladies and gentlemen, but, 921 00:57:50,140 --> 00:57:53,020 you see, they can cut me off at any moment. 922 00:57:53,020 --> 00:57:56,540 To save myself from that humiliation, || Downloadha.com || 923 00:57:56,540 --> 00:57:58,940 I must bid you good morning.