 For four decades a figurehead for little-Englander moral conservatism, Mary
Whitehouse waged a tireless crusade against the tide of filth she saw engulfing
British society. With her concrete-set hairdo, horn-rimmed spectacles and
sternly reproachful tone, she always resembled the provincial 1950s
schoolteacher that she had once been, but her frumpy image disguised a canny
operator who, for all her distaste for the media, was more than capable of
manipulating it to advance her cause. Nevertheless, despite a consistently high
public profile from the early 1960s to her death in 2001, her influence on the
development of British culture in general, and television in particular, was
limited.
Actively Christian all of her life, in the late 1930s she became involved in
the Oxford Movement (later Moral Rearmament), in which context she met her
husband of 60 years and father of her three sons, Ernest Whitehouse. It was
while teaching art and sex education in a Shropshire school that she became
convinced that television was responsible for her pupils' inappropriate
attitudes to sex. What began as a one-woman crusade built up steam until, in
1964, she called a public meeting in Birmingham town hall which brought in
supporters from across the country, more than filling the venue's 2000 seat
capacity. It was at that meeting that the Clean Up TV Campaign came into being,
evolving in due course into the organisation the National Viewers' and Listeners
Association.
Mrs Whitehouse's crusade drew support not just from her natural constituency
of conservative, middle-aged, middle-class, middle-Englanders, but from a broad
subsection of British society alarmed at the rapid arrival of the 'permissive
society': the rise of promiscuity fuelled by the pill and the coming of age of
the confident baby boomer generation; the clamour to legalise homosexuality; the
increasing prevalence of casual drug use; the relaxation of censorship of stage
and screen. Whitehouse shared these concerns, and offered a simple villain:
television, or at least those controlling television who, for reasons of profit
or ideology, used the medium to chip away at the edifice of British moral life.
Television, she argued, had a unique influence due to its occupation of the
family living room which brought with it a unique moral responsibility.
Her chief target in the early days was Hugh Carleton Greene, director general
of the BBC since 1960. Instinctively liberal, Greene was irritated by
Whitehouse's attacks but refused to acknowledge her authority, treating her with
a patrician disdain which only strengthened her vitriol. She claimed credit for
Greene's downfall in 1969, although the true reasons were more complex,
involving internal BBC machinations and the behind-the-scenes manipulation of
prime minister Harold Wilson.
In the early '70s, she joined forces in the 'Festival of Light' movement with
Malcolm Muggeridge, Lord Longford and Cliff Richard, among others, and successfully brought a private prosecution against Gay News for publishing a
poem depicting Jesus's homoerotic attraction to a Roman soldier while on the Cross. The counter-culture magazine OZ was another common target.
But her obsessive focus on sex and sexual or blasphemous language blinded her
to subtleties, laying her open to dismissal as narrow-minded and reactionary,
and often causing her to miss more worthy targets. She overlooked the satire in
Johnny Speight's Till Death Us Do Part (BBC, 1966-75), and missed the powerful
moral convictions underlying the works of Dennis Potter. Moreover, her
single-mindedness meant that she increasingly fell out of step with those who
considered television violence a much greater concern.
With the election of the superficially similar Margaret Thatcher in 1979,
Whitehouse might have expected to find a powerful ally. But while Thatcher spoke
fondly of a return to Victorian values, any wish to impose such values on
television was pushed aside by the far greater imperative of market
deregulation. In a further irony, it was the first Thatcher government that
established Channel 4, which was to become the moralists' greatest bugbear in
the ensuing decades.
Despite her best efforts and a few minor victories, British television at her
death in 2001 was unrecognisably more liberal than the medium she had begun
opposing so vociferously some 37 years earlier. But the community she
represented has not departed, and may even have grown stronger since her death,
as indicated by the recent frenzy surrounding the BBC's broadcast of the stage
musical Jerry Springer: the Opera (tx. 8/1/2005).
She was awarded a CBE in 1980 and, even after stepping down as Chair of NVALA
in the 1990s, she remained the visible figurehead of the movement she founded.
Since her death, on 23 November 2001, the organisation renamed itself
MediaWatch-UK, but under Mrs Whitehouse's successor, John Beyer, has yet to regain the prominence she brought it.
Mark Duguid
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FILM & TV CREDITS
