It’s difficult for those who weren’t around at the time to imagine Mary Whitehouse. There is no shortage of attempts at pithy description in the BBC’s new two-part documentary, Banned! The Mary Whitehouse Story: the “avenging angel of middle England”; a latter-day “Boudica”; a bully. None of them quite captures her.
Whitehouse was not a complex figure, narrow-minded in her beliefs and driven as a Fury. But the sea of cultural changes against which she chose to take arms was turbulent and fast-moving, and even her staunchest critics confess the need, today, to reappraise the validity and impact of her moral crusades.
In countering a counterculture that regarded itself as unstoppable, Whitehouse allowed herself to be ridiculed, and cared not a jot. Her campaign to arrest Britain’s slide into what she regarded as moral anarchy started early — 1963 — and never wavered. Her provocateur-in-chief was the BBC’s urbane director-general Hugh Greene, born in the same year as Whitehouse, 1910, and keen to bring a touch of Weimar-era Berlin cabaret (he had reported on the rise of Nazi Germany) to the stuffy corporation.
Whitehouse was never going to play Sally Bowles to that particular project, and kicked back. Her Clean-Up TV campaign, promoting the “Christian way of life”, organised petitions and rallied against Greene’s progressive, or decadent, programming: Steptoe and Son, Til Death Us Do Part, Up the Junction. Greene ignored her, by and large. The latter play’s director, Ken Loach, admits the ensuing debates over its social realist style were “the best publicity we ever got”. Whitehouse’s dilemma was evident: she was drawing attention to malign forces that might otherwise have quietly passed into obscurity.
Still she charged. Having lost several battles against Greene, she won the war when her complaint over a reference to a girl letting her “knickers” down in The Beatles’ 1967 film Magical Mystery Tour (shown on Boxing Day!) led to the BBC chief’s downfall. But in truth, descending underwear was merely an opening salvo of the permissive society’s assault on “right thinking”.
When an illustration of Rupert Bear in an aroused state appeared in the School Kids issue of the underground magazine Oz (never did middle England more desperately need an avenging angel), Whitehouse became a prominent figure in the attempt to prosecute the magazine’s editors. The case attracted much attention (check out the David Frost interview with the teenage illustrator, alongside his mum, naturally) and it eventually failed.
But other forces were on the rise. Hannah Berryman’s documentary switches tone as it briefly chronicles the rise of David Sullivan, described as a “former pornographer”, who cheerily recounts his beginnings selling pictures of “naked stunners” that brought him £1,000 a week by the age of 21. And here, we slowly begin to sympathise with Whitehouse’s position.
She is seen in a Cambridge Union debate, contending that pornography was a “male commodity, made by men for men”, and it comes as a genuine shock to hear the groans that greet what is today a pretty mainstream view. There are interviews with self-confessed paedophiles that chill the blood; Whitehouse was one of their most determined antagonists.
The feminist writer Beatrix Campbell acknowledges Whitehouse’s concern for the values of chastity and fidelity, but adds that she “lashes them to a patriarchal dead zone, as if that dead zone is safe”. New Statesman columnist Louise Perry lauds Whitehouse’s prescience in understanding how pornography had “had the effect of draining sexual relationships of love and of intimacy” in its pursuit of profit.
Eventually, it was technology that accounted for Mary Whitehouse. The moral corruption she saw seeping into Britain is today streaming, fast and furious, across the globe. When you can instantly and simply access something like Isis beheading videos, the game is over.
But the debate on how and why we should act, a topic that stretches back to Socrates, is far from over. Today we call those conversations around sexual morality “culture wars”, and we realise more than ever how much they matter. Why else would Vladimir Putin, among his hateful expansionist tirades, slide in a sudden reference to JK Rowling and her views on transgender rights?
Why else do we have so-called cancel culture, the latest wave in the seemingly never-ending desire to police human activity in order to stamp out offence? The question hangs heavy at the end of this fascinating programme: will we ever stop ourselves from banning?
★★★★☆
Part one at 9pm on March 29 on BBC2 and iPlayer thereafter; part two on April 5