CaptainWaggett

I found it very watchable and Alun Amrstrong and Hugh Bonneville were great. Julie Walters was a bit of a caricature but I guess you can blame the director for that. It probably didn't explain MW very well to Young People but they probably wouldn't have been watching anyway. And how can you explain her?

batman

Miserable, humourless old bag who wanted to stop us watching naughty things on the telly. Some of which she hadn't even watched herself!

"Boom boom a baby .... Banham Zoo .... Banana pants! Hahahaha"

CaptainWaggett

I knew someone would have the right gift for language

Steve Crook

I found it very watchable as well. Although I was puzzled by the Hughie Green character. Was he really that much of an eccentric, obsessed by Whitehouse and his secretaries, chewing up Whitehouse's letters and throwing them against the Picasso? Very odd

There were some very nice touches as Whitehouse was cycling around her perfect little village like the old man leering over the news about the Profumo scandal, the happy young couple waving back and then she turns and we see the bruses on her face, the black lady who asks if they're the people who have been putting dog dirt through her letterbox. Not such a happy village as Whitehouse imagined.

The sons at the party declining offers to drink and dance and the girls there giving the money back to the reporters who were trying to get a bit of scandal to report (plus ca change)

There were a lot of nuns shown at the Birmingham town hall meeting but I thought they might have made more of her main trouble being the way she tried to impose Christian values on a secular society who really just didn't care about them

Steve

Jackdaw

Haven't watched it yet, Cully, but have checked credits on DVD, and her character was Charlotte Daubeny.

cully

Thanks very much, Jackdaw, you're a Trojan!

TimR

I had never heard of Mary Whitehouse, except a reference in Are You Being Served that I now understand after reading this thread.

All I saw here was a biography called Filth.

Whose life story is called Filth?

"I must read this thread" I thought to myself.....

Now I grasp it.

CaptainWaggett

Here's the DNB article on Mary Whitehouse for those new to her. She does get referenced an awful lot in British culture - there was even a phenomenally successful comedy troupe called the Mary Whitehouse Experience, with their own tv series and everything.

Her Puritanism seems to have started early -" However, in 1923 she won a ‘teaching bursary’ to the City and County School, Chester, and after matriculation (in which she scored 0 out of 300 in biology)"

Whitehouse [née Hutcheson], (Constance) Mary (1910–2001), schoolteacher and campaigner
by Mary Warnock
© Oxford University Press 2004–8 All rights reserved

Whitehouse [née Hutcheson], (Constance) Mary (1910–2001), schoolteacher and campaigner, was born on 13 June 1910 at Bridge House, Croft Road, Stockingford, Nuneaton, Warwickshire, the younger daughter and second among the four children of James (Jamie) Hutcheson, draper, and later wholesale cattle feed salesman, and his wife, Beatrice Ethel, née Searancke.
Family, marriage, and teaching
The Hutchesons claimed a distant relationship to the Hutchesons who founded Hutchesons' Grammar School in Glasgow. Mary Hutcheson's grandfather Walter Hutcheson was a fairly well-known artist, and her father had aspirations to become a painter himself, but could not make a living out of it. In her third volume of autobiography, Quite Contrary (1993), she depicted him as generally unhappy. He was both a frustrated artist and given to unwise investments. Her mother, whose family originally came from the Low Countries, but settled in the Hatfield area (providing several mayors of the town), came from the least prosperous branch of the family, being one of twelve children whose father had died young. In the year that Mary was born her elder sister contracted polio, and remained disabled from then on. Their mother was constantly ailing. Mary's cannot have been a happy childhood, and her autobiographies contained few remembered details. She grew up first in Shrewsbury, then in Chester, where she went to school. She recorded that she was not very clever, but was very good at games, especially tennis. However, in 1923 she won a ‘teaching bursary’ to the City and County School, Chester, and after matriculation (in which she scored 0 out of 300 in biology) went on to two years of unpaid apprentice teaching at St John's School, Chester. After her apprenticeship she went to the Cheshire County Teacher Training College, in Crewe, where she specialized in secondary school art teaching and became a qualified teacher in 1932. While there she was president of the Student Christian Movement branch. Her first job was as art teacher at Lichfield Road school, Wednesfield, where she stayed for eight years.

Mary Hutcheson first saw her future husband, Ernest Raymond Whitehouse (1912/13–2000), at a meeting of the Oxford Group (the evangelist movement founded by Frank Buchman) in Wolverhampton, where he was a speaker. He was not Mary's first love. In her autobiography Who Does She Think She Is? (1971) she recorded an unhappy entanglement with a married man, which must have caused her much pain. Ernest Whitehouse was, like his father, John Whitehouse, an industrial coppersmith, specializing in equipment for milk refrigeration. They married on 23 March 1940. By then both were members of what had been the Oxford Group, now renamed Moral Re-Armament, to reflect the wartime context. When Mary joined in 1935 she ‘asked God to take my life and use it’ (Who Does She, 22). Ernest for the rest of his life strongly supported her religious beliefs and moral convictions (between which she made no distinction). They had five sons (including twins who died in infancy). They also took in and brought up as their own a baby niece whose mother had died in South Africa.

Mary Whitehouse returned to full-time teaching in 1960 when her youngest boy was sixteen. Her life now took on its distinctive pattern. She was already devoted to public service, and was even acquainted with publicity, having broadcast an appeal for famine relief in Europe as early as 1945; she had also been chosen by the BBC's Woman's Hour in 1953 to give ‘a housewife's thoughts on the eve of the coronation’. In this talk she expressed her assessment of the onerous duties facing the young queen, and the duties to family and to society at large that fell upon ordinary women like herself. Her moral views were already formed. It was teaching, however, that opened her eyes to what was happening to society in the 1960s. She was teaching art, and later became senior art mistress at Madeley School for Girls in Shropshire; but besides this she also became senior mistress, with responsibility for pastoral care, including sex education. She now discovered at first hand the huge difference that the contraceptive pill had made to the ideas of chastity with which she had been brought up, and which she regarded as derived directly from the Christian religion and its universally binding laws of God.
The NVLA
In her last (and most readable) autobiography, Quite Contrary, Mary Whitehouse referred to 1963 as ‘a climactic year’ (Contrary, 10). The Profumo scandal occurred in this year, in which the sexual escapades of a cabinet minister, married to a famous actress, were rehearsed in the press over weeks of the summer, leading to the resignation of the minister. (In fact Profumo was disgraced as much for lying to parliament about his goings-on as for his extramarital sex.) The same year saw the publication of the book Honest to God, in which the bishop of Woolwich, John Robinson, questioned both the literal truth of the Bible and the need for marital fidelity. And there was an astonishing rise in the popularity of such satirical television shows as That Was The Week That Was, broadcast by the BBC. On 8 March that same year there was what she saw as a shocking edition of the BBC's Meeting Point discussion programme in which premarital sex was discussed. The programme was watched by many of her pupils, whose morals she believed were seriously at risk in consequence. Characteristically, she lumped all these phenomena and others together as proof that morals were being corrupted. She conspicuously lacked the philosopher's or lawyer's habit of distinguishing things that differ. But out of the confusion emerged her powerful and unshakeable belief that the BBC and the rest of the broadcasting media must be held responsible for the decline in morals that she perceived.

Whitehouse's attempts to complain to the BBC about the Meeting Point programme were rebuffed (though Harman Grisewood was sympathetic). Parliament's decision to renew the BBC licence for twelve years in 1964 led to the launch of the ‘Clean-up TV’ campaign. A manifesto was drawn up by Mary and Ernest Whitehouse, Basil Buckland (rector of Longton, Stoke-on-Trent), and his wife, Norah Buckland. On 5 May 1964 the campaign held its inaugural meeting at Birmingham town hall—described by The Times as ‘the most extraordinary meeting ever held’ there (The Times, 6 May 1964). The ‘Clean-up TV’ campaign led directly to the formation in 1965 of the National Viewers' and Listeners' Association (NVLA) of which Mary Whitehouse became general secretary until 1980 and president thereafter until 1993.

The progressive recognition of the need to involve the public in broadcasting standards, especially standards of taste and decency, was Mary Whitehouse's most lasting monument. Every time the BBC charter came to be renewed, the concept of public service broadcasting, by which the licence fee had to be justified, came up for analysis, and with it the need for a channel through which the public could make its views known. For Whitehouse this was an essentially moral imperative. It meant a channel through which what she believed was the decent and right-thinking majority could make their complaints heard. She was not interested in preventing the BBC from sinking into triviality or vulgarity (she may, if she thought of it at all, have thought like many that this would be the inevitable consequence of introducing a commercial rival in the early 1950s in the shape of ITV); she was interested only in saving it, and therefore viewers and their children, from moral corruption.

As the time of the next licence renewal in 1976 approached, the government set up a commission to look into the governance of all television broadcasting, and its standards. This commission, chaired by Lord Annan, provost of King's College, Cambridge, was immensely thorough, and was widely read, though in the end its recommendations were not widely followed by government. Annan admitted to greatly admiring Whitehouse; she led and represented a section of society which, he said, could not be sidelined with impunity, yet which was in danger of being overlooked by broadcasters. Indeed she and her organization helped to restrain the increasing representations of violence and explicit sex on television in the 1970s and 1980s. When the Independent Broadcasting Authority was renewing the licences for the commercial companies in the early 1980s, the constituency collectively known as ‘Whitehouse’ was felt as a constant presence, and each aspiring company had to show in its application how it would deal with it. When at about the same time Channel 4 was inaugurated, promising to be innovative and intellectually satisfying, Whitehouse was horrified at the appointment of its first chief executive, Jeremy Isaacs, already well known as a director of controversially violent films for television. Even he, however, regarded the existence of channels for viewers' complaints as necessary, though tedious and irritating. The NVLA undoubtedly influenced the formation of the Broadcasting Complaints Commission in 1981 and the Broadcasting Standards Council in 1988.

Good-humoured, even jolly, though she was, Mary Whitehouse pursued her enemies ruthlessly, often into the courts, though with varied success. Her motive was doubtless to gain publicity for her cause rather than financial gain. In 1977 she brought a private prosecution for blasphemy against Gay News and its editor, Denis Lemon, for publishing a poem about the sexuality of Jesus; the prosecution was taken over by the crown and succeeded. She was involved in various unsuccessful prosecutions in the early 1980s, one of which left her with a bill for £30,000 in costs (paid by an anonymous supporter). Her last case was one of libel against The Observer newspaper, which had called her ‘an evil woman’. This she won, and paid for a tennis court at her house in Essex with the proceeds.
Broadcasting and morality
The tension between creative freedom for television producers (and the pursuit of ratings) and the taste and decency lobby could not be resolved, and was probably on the whole fruitful. None the less, the nine o'clock watershed before which ‘adult’ programmes might not be shown—though by the time of Whitehouse's death still much insisted on by both BBC and ITV—became increasingly futile, not least since many children were gaining control over their own television sets in their bedrooms. And the existence of multiple channels, to say nothing of the internet, made Whitehouse's hope of returning society to the strict sexual and other moral standards of her own childhood increasingly illusory. For though it became taken for granted that there had to be a ‘viewers' voice’, it was by no means certain, as Whitehouse believed, that the voice would chime with her own. This was indeed her weakness, and the root of what can be seen as the inevitable limit of her influence.

From the 1970s onwards Whitehouse was surrounded by people seeking to analyse the social importance of television; by the rise of media studies, a flourishing branch of sociology in most polytechnics and universities, even taking over from literature as the main content of many degree courses; and by earnest researchers attempting to demonstrate the effect of television on behaviour, though failing to come up with proof that they were in any way connected. She was completely certain that what people, especially young people, saw and heard on television caused changes in their behaviour. She would have none of the social scientists' cautious warnings that no such causal link could be proved. She simply knew, because common sense told her, that violent language could be picked up from television, and that violent language led to violent behaviour; she knew that lack of inhibition against violence was causally connected with lack of inhibition and trivialization in sexual behaviour. She was at least in some respects right, especially perhaps in her linking of language and behaviour. Moreover, common sense in the ordinary world as opposed to the sociologists' library does suggest causal connections. We know intuitively that images of trivialized and vulgarized sex may lead to trivial and vulgar thoughts about sex, and thence perhaps to behaviour that gives reality to these thoughts. Most people, too, would agree that violence treated as an everyday matter on the screen lowers barriers against violence in life. But Whitehouse proclaimed such convictions at the very time when the combination of moral permissiveness and commercial opportunism made them unpopular with broadcasters and absurdly old-fashioned in the eyes of those whose standards of what was acceptable were changing more rapidly than in living memory. Her very certainty of the causal link that others denied made her an object of ridicule, and this seriously obstructed her success.

The other obstacle in Whitehouse's way was her religion. The influence of the Oxford Group, or Moral Re-Armament, never left her. Nevertheless, to be effective in late twentieth-century Britain, moral warnings could not be integrally linked to religious beliefs. There were too many people who either rejected religion or were completely ignorant of it for religious belief to be successfully used to reinforce morality in the public domain (whatever its private role might have been). If they were too obviously meshed together many people were inclined to throw out the morality with the religion. Moreover there were many who were genuinely alarmed by religious simplicities or religious fanaticism, and were therefore inclined to mistrust a morality apparently based on such phenomena. In the 1930s, when Whitehouse joined the movement, the Oxford Group had a considerable following, but it was always a target for ridicule among those who—whether themselves practising Christians or not—disliked and mistrusted the open proclamations of faith, the overwhelming self-righteousness, and the missionary zeal of the ‘Groupers’ or ‘Rearmers’. By the 1960s, to identify someone as a member of Moral Re-Armament was in some circles to discredit him or her. It was this connection that prevented Whitehouse, for all her sincerity and good humour, from being more seriously heard. She also sometimes showed herself extraordinarily stupid. For example, she was furious with Johnny Speight, the author of Till Death Us Do Part, for his character Alf Garnett (a coarse-mouthed and prejudiced working-class nationalist). She argued that such foul language and such blatant prejudice ought not to be represented on the screen. Presumably she thought that other horrible old men would be encouraged to behave as he did. This, like her loathing of the political satires of the 1960s, showed her genuine inability to see that satire, if it is to succeed, must accurately represent its targets so that they are recognizable. They are not objects of emulation, but characters to be shot down by the arrows of wit.
Final years and immediate reputation
Whitehouse was appointed CBE in 1980. She wrote three volumes of autobiography as well as three other books, and was a regular commentator in print as well as on the radio and on television. She loved tennis from her schooldays, and continued to play it into old age. She was an energetic woman until an accident in her garden in 1997 forced her to give up physical activity and live a life of pain and, inevitably, frustration. For many years she and her husband lived at Triangle Farm House, Far Forest, near Kidderminster, but in later years they moved to Ardleigh, Colchester, Essex. Ernest Whitehouse died in 2000. Mary Whitehouse, who in 1999 had entered Abberton Manor Nursing Home, Abberton, Colchester, died there on 23 November 2001. She was survived by three sons.

A memorial service was held in All Souls, Langham Place, next to the BBC, on 10 April 2002. Large numbers of people attended, including many from television. The BBC, however, was not represented. Will Wyatt, a former managing director of BBC Television, attended in a private capacity and was quoted as saying that ‘The BBC will have been invited to be represented and they have chosen not to be. I think it is unfortunate’ (The Times, 11 April 2002). He was surely right. Though frequently the broadcasters' opponent, Mary Whitehouse was a worthy opponent, and should be remembered as such. Even if her campaigning did not succeed in ‘cleaning up TV’, still less in making it more fit to watch in other ways, she was of serious intent, and was an influence for good at a crucial stage in the development both of the BBC and of ITV. She was not, as the BBC seemed officially to proclaim, a mere figure of fun.

MARY WARNOCK
Sources M. Whitehouse, Who does she think she is? (1971) · M. Whitehouse, A most dangerous woman? (1982) · M. Whitehouse, Quite contrary: an autobiography (1993) · M. Caulfield, Mary Whitehouse (1975) · WW (2001) · J. Crookes and A. Green, eds., Debrett's People of today, 14th edn (2001) · The Times (24 Nov 2001) · Daily Telegraph (24 Nov 2001) · The Guardian (24 Nov 2001) · The Independent (24 Nov 2001) · A. Hamilton, ‘Why there really was something about Mary’, The Times (24 Nov 2001) · P. Howard, ‘Boadicea with a queen bee in her bonnet’, The Times (24 Nov 2001) · C. Dunkley, ‘Covering up the naughty bits’, Financial Times (5 Dec 2001) · b. cert. · m. cert. · d. cert.

Archives
FILM BFI NFTVA, The Frost interview, M. Catherwood (director), BBC, 4 Dec 1974 · BFI NFTVA, Credo, J. Gili (director), LWT, 12 Feb 1978 · BFI NFTVA, Tell me why, Tyne Tees Television, 11 July 1978 · BFI NFTVA, Person to person, R. Chapman (director), BBC, 5 July 1979 · BFI NFTVA, The controversialist, P. Steeples (producer), BBC, 16 March 1980 · BFI NFTVA, Time to talk, M. Smith (director), Channel 4, 20 Oct 1988 · BFI NFTVA, Open air, P. Trafford (producer), BBC, 25 Jan 1990 · BFI NFTVA, Books by my bedside, Z. Hardy (director), Thames Television, 1 Nov 1990 · BFI NFTVA, ‘The Mary Whitehouse story’, The late show, C. Bevan (producer), BBC, 23 May 1994 · BFI NFTVA, My favourite hymns, J. Stapleton (presenter), LWT, 10 Sept 2000 · BFI NFTVA, current affairs footage · BFI NFTVA, documentary footage · BFI NFTVA, light entertainment footage
SOUND BL NSA, current affairs recordings · BL NSA, documentary recordings · BL NSA, Person to person, interview with David Dimbleby, T2347W BD1


Likenesses L. Douglas-Menzies, photograph, 1990, NPG [see illus.] · B. Wharton, bromide print, 1972 (with Cliff Richard), NPG · B. Fantoni, caricature, priv. coll. · Trog [W. Fawkes], caricature, repro. in F. Whitford, Trog: forty graphic years: the art of Wally Fawkes (1987), 191 · G. Scarfe, caricature, 1971, repro. in G. Scarfe, Line of attack (1988), 59 · N. Turpin, photograph, repro. in The Independent · photograph, 1991, repro. in The Times · photographs, 1970–2001, Rex Features, London · P. Lichfield, group photograph, 1967, Camera Press, London · E. McCabe, photograph, Camera Press, London · two photographs, 1971–2, Popperfoto, Northampton · photographs, 1969–98, PA Photos, London · photographs, 1965–80, Hult. Arch. · two photographs, 1989, Universal Pictorial Press and Agency, London · photographs, repro. in Caulfield, Mary Whitehouse · photographs, repro. in Whitehouse, Quite contrary · photograph, repro. in Daily Telegraph · photograph, repro. in The Guardian

Wealth at death £155,990: probate, 28 Feb 2002, CGPLA Eng. & Wales



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
© Oxford University Press 2004–8 All rights reserved

Mary Warnock, ‘Whitehouse , (Constance) Mary (1910–2001)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online edn, Oxford University Press, Jan 2005; online edn, Oct 2007 [Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, accessed 29 May 2008]

(Constance) Mary Whitehouse (1910–2001): doi:10.1093/refdnb/76525

GRAEME

The other famous Nuneatoner was Larry Grayson.

What a couple they would have made. I wonder if they ever met?

I rather suspect that MW would have thought LG was a charming gentle and wholesome chap - because fundamentally she was as thick as a plank and unable to grasp context. It was only obvious stuff like someone saying "knickers" that she understood. Larry's little tales of Slack Alice and Everard (Ever Hard!) would have sailed right over her head.

The proof of this is that she actually approved of The Goodies. The tale goes that this annoyed them and they deliberately tried to P her off by putting a MW clone in one of their most risque episodes - Mrs Carthorse played by Beryl Reid. She finally complained about Tim's carrot y-fronts in the Saturday Night Grease episode!

All men leak.

smudge

Pardon my heathen memory but isn't there some minor Biblical reference somewhere which states that this sort of thing should not be done?

So much for taking the moral high ground then.

"Let he who is without sin..." (Or she, for that matter...)

Smudge

Welcome to my house. Enter freely, and of your own will...

dremble wedge

The opening paragraph on Mary Whitehouse's Wikipedia entry has been doctored.
I don't suppose it'll last that long...

Steve Crook

It's like the ex-smokers who become the most strident anti-smoking campaigners. It is sometimes (often?) those that have sinned who then repent the hardest and become the most evangelical

Steve

batman

I had to have a look .... and copied it.

"Boom boom a baby .... Banham Zoo .... Banana pants! Hahahaha"

Steve Crook

I liked the way they were going to call their campaign "Clean up National TV" - until Mr Whitehouse pointed out the initials "Clean Up National TV"

Steve

silverwhistle

The religious aspect was what was very alarming about Whitehouse: a forerunner of some of the Evangelical nutters whom we saw on the C4 documentary last week. Narrow-minded, authoritarian homophobes who take offence at trivia. (The Pinky-and- Perky-as-anti-authoritarian-negative-role-models anecdote was mind-boggling. Porcine versions of The Wild One?!)

"Trust me, I'm a doctor...!"