Was Mary Whitehouse right?
The “clean-up TV” campaigner has often been maligned, but she anticipated many of today’s culture war debates.
In an early episode of the popular sitcom Till Death Us Do Part, the cantankerous and bigoted white working-class patriarch Alf Garnett is in his living room reading a copy of Cleaning Up TV: From Protest to Participation (1967) by the campaigner Mary Whitehouse. Alf is berated by his progressive daughter Rita (Una Stubbs) and her socialist husband Mike (Anthony Booth) for reading the book, while he launches a spirited defence. ‘That woman is concerned for the moral welfare of your country, in’t she? The moral fibre that’s being rotted away via corrupt television.’
It seems amusing enough for Mike to complain that if Whitehouse had her way ‘all you’d get on television is Pinky and Perky and bloody Noddy’. Little did he realise that, in the very book that Alf is reading, Whitehouse argues that the callous behaviour of these puppet pigs ‘could be the origin of the cruelty some find it hard to understand of juvenile delinquents towards the elderly and helpless’.
Later in the episode, Alf develops a stomach bug, and Rita and Mike take the opportunity to claim that Whitehouse’s book is probably contaminated and therefore must be burned on the fireplace. The climax is semi-ritualistic. ‘He said paper breeds disease,’ exclaims Rita. ‘He’s touched it, so we’ve got to burn it.’ She takes the coal tongs and drops the book into the fire. ‘Burn his clothes!’ shouts Mike. ‘Burn sulphur candles… Unclean!’
Johnny Speight, the show’s creator and writer, made no secret of his loathing for Whitehouse. During an appearance on the BBC’s programme The World at One, Speight had referred to Whitehouse and members of her organisation – the National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association (NVALA) – as ‘Fascists’ who ‘were hypocritically concealing their Fascism under the cloak of a moral campaign’ and who ‘held racialist views and were like the killers of Christ’.
After Whitehouse launched a libel case, Speight and the BBC were forced to pay damages and issue an apology for this ludicrous allegation: ‘The BBC and Mr Speight have made it clear that they at no time intended this meaning which they agree is wholly inapplicable to Mrs Whitehouse and her associates’. Given the connotations of book-burning, one would have thought that Speight might have been more circumspect when it came to accusations of fascism.
Whitehouse has often been mischaracterised. The folk devil persists; a humourless, puritanical, matronly figure in her pearl necklace, round-rimmed spectacles, and a perm like a pristine cauliflower. And yet, in a curious way, she seems to embody aspects of both the ‘woke’ and the ‘anti-woke’ sides of today’s culture war.
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