before joining the BBC in 1946, soon working as a television producer, whose credits included Come Dancing and Songs of Praise. Barrie Edgar's father, and David Edgar's grandfather, was the early broadcaster Percy Edgar who had been the founding manager of 5IT – the first BBC radio station to open outside London – and the first regional Director of the BBC Midland Region. Being brought up in what he later recalled as a "more or less upper-middle-class family" with both parents, three grandparents, and "various other slightly more distant relatives" all involved in the theatre or broadcasting, Edgar remembers having seen most of the Shakespeare canon by the age of fifteen, either in his native Birmingham or in nearby Stratford-upon-Avon, plus the complete Agatha Christie and many more of "the sort of plays one would never go to now." His father converted a garden shed into a twelve-seat theatre for him in their garden and the young Edgar began to write plays for "the theatre in the shed" from the age of five with the intention of giving himself the starring role. By the age of nine he had written his first full-scale work, The Life and Times of William Shakespeare. "At this stage", Edgar recalled, "the idea of being a playwright who would write large parts for other people had not entered my consciousness." He really wanted to be an actor, "I wrote the 'Life and Times' for the sole purpose of playing Shakespeare's lead actor Richard Burbage." But after some tactful advice from his mother regarding his acting ability he decided that acting was not for him and turned his hand to writing more seriously. At Oundle School in Northamptonshire, Edgar became immersed in theatre and was the first pupil in over 300 years of school history to be permitted to direct a play. Undeterred by his actors all being male, he chose Bertolt Brecht's Mother Courage, a play calling for six female roles and, forgetting his mother's advice, cast himself in the lead role as the woman who hopes to profit from war by running a canteen for soldiers, but loses all three of her children to the war from which she had hoped to profit. After leaving school in 1966, Edgar taught for one term at a preparatory school and then went to Manchester University to read drama with a view to becoming a playwright. In