L. W. Conolly is the general editor of the Selected Correspondence of Bernard Shaw and one of a the founders of the L. W. Conolly Theatre Archives at the University of Guelph, and his dual love of Shaw and theater comes through in Bernard Shaw and the BBC. While the book considers the full range of Shaw's interactions with the BBC in the period between 1923 and his death in 1950, the principal focus is on the consistently fractious collaboration between Shaw and the BBC in producing broadcast, and later televised, productions of his plays. This is also, easily, the most entertaining part of the book, even for someone with only a casual familiarity with the Shavian oeuvre. For nearly three decades, Shaw haggled with the BBC over license fees to broadcast his plays. He repeatedly pushed the broadcaster to pay him more than the going rate and frequently refused to allow his plays to be performed. He jealously guarded access to even short extracts, simultaneously enforcing the principle of copyright and padding his purse. The BBC became so used to his querulous attitude toward broadcast permissions that they were “usually ultra-cautious in contacting Shaw on all occasions,” including when, in 1937, they desired to use ninety words of John Bull's Other Island as part of a broadcast talk on Ireland. Rather than appreciate the courtesy, Shaw had his secretary write back that while he was “quite willing to accept the fee of half a guinea, [he believed] that if you consulted the Copyright Act you would find that you have a statutory right of reasonable quotation, within the limits of which there is no obligation to consult him” (84). When he did allow his plays to be broadcast, he rarely had a kind word for the results. In October 1929, he wrote to the BBC about its recent broadcast of Brassbound: “Its infamy was such that I hereby solemnly renounce, curse, and excommunicate everybody who had a hand in it” (77). Of a 1949 production of Candida he wrote, “It is a hopeless failure; its broadcasting has probably killed the play for years. … You really are a pack of duffers” (157). Given what a complete pain he was to deal with, it is a real testament to Shaw's talent as a playwright that the BBC continued to entreat him to allow his plays to be broadcast.

Shaw's relationship with the BBC extended beyond the theatrical. He served on the BBC's Pronunciation Committee from 1926 to 1939, playing Henry Higgins to a whole generation of British broadcasters. He also broadcast nineteen times between 1925 and 1946 (a full list of talks and titles appears in one of the book's many appendices). Here his position as a founder member of the Fabian society and a renowned polemicist was as much of an attraction as his theatrical credentials. Two of his early appearances—as the far-from-silent-and-impartial moderator of a debate between Lady Rhondda and G. K. Chesterton on the “leisured woman” in modern society and in a debate with Chesterton on evolution moderated by Hilaire Belloc—brought Shaw together with two of the era's other great polemicists. The debates, however hackneyed (the views of all three men were well known to themselves and their listeners), could not have failed to entertain. Rather than run the risk of offending listeners or the government, the BBC frequently requested that Shaw submit speeches to corporation review before they were broadcast, something he refused to do. These requests for “censored” broadcasts were invariably refused, and the refusals became news items in and of themselves, as Shaw made a point of informing the press whenever the BBC attempted to “muzzle” him. Conolly's discussion of these episodes highlights one of the signal features of the interwar BBC: its extremely cautious attitude to “controversy.” The BBC, under close supervision from the government, fought shy of “controversial” broadcasting, even after the government lifted the official ban on radio controversy in March 1928.

However, Shaw's suspicion of the BBC was not solely libertarian, but party political, an aspect of their relationship that Conolly's narrative obscures. As a committed socialist (even if a singularly unorthodox one), Shaw was not immune from the suspicion and hostility that poisoned Labour's relationship with the BBC in the 1920s and (to a lesser extent) 1930s. His refusal of a request to broadcast in July 1926 was no doubt intimately tied up with left-wing anger over the BBC's treatment of the general strike, just two months earlier. Yet, while Conolly mentions the general strike in passing, the book largely abjures discussion of the domestic political situation, a decision that presumably reflects the author's background as a literary scholar and not a historian.

Finally, the book would have benefited from more thorough editing. Shaw's secretary, Blanche Patch, is mentioned nearly twenty times in the text; however, it is not until her third appearance that she is identified as his secretary. Further, unlike all the other men and women in the book, she is referred to throughout by her full name. Baldwin's 1924–29 government is identified as “Liberal” (25), and George Orwell is identified as Eric Blair on page 113 and as George Orwell on page 127, with no apparent logic behind the distinction. While petty, these and other errors distracted from the content of the book.