When Channel 4 began 40 years ago with a remit to radicalise British TV, there was some surprise that its early dramas included a Sunday peak-time broadcast of a West End production of George Bernard Shaw’s Arms and the Man, an 1894 farce set during the Serbo-Bulgarian war.
The disruptive network, though, had made a learned choice: Shaw was proto-feminist and pacifist, his ridicule of nationalist militarism feeling, just after the Falklands conflict, much closer to home than its Balkan setting.
