His father left the family when his son was four and died not long afterwards, and Shaw was brought up for a time by his grandparents[1] (his grandfather was a miner in Shirebrook, Derbyshire), which he revisited in the Central Television programme on his life (1983).
Shaw gained a place at the Quaker college at Woodbrooke, Birmingham, for a pre-university course in 1941[2] and later read German and Philosophy at Manchester University, from which he graduated in 1946.
[2] WhIle at Keele he became a member of the Boards of Governors of the BBC and of the British Film Institute,[3] and was involved in the foundation of the Open University.
After the election of the Margaret Thatcher's Conservative government in 1979, the council was forced to make major cuts to the budgets of the arts organisations it financially supported.
He remained concerned with political issues, for example visiting Israel in 1994 to press for the release of the nuclear whistle-blower Mordechai Vanunu.