[1] He attended Whitgift School in Croydon and read law at Merton College, Oxford.
After abandoning a legal career, he co-founded the magazine Movie (1961–64)[4] which used the French publication Cahiers du Cinéma as its model,.
[6] In 1969 he joined the BBC's drama department, and became one of the corporation's most successful and prolific producers.
[9] Critics disliked Shivas's production of The Borgias (1981) for the BBC; it suffered in comparison with the contemporary Brideshead Revisited on ITV.
Some of his most noted later productions included the second series of Alan Bennett's Talking Heads monologues in 1998 and the 2003 espionage drama Cambridge Spies.