Filth: The Mary Whitehouse Story (BBC Two)
This was a hugely entertaining story, which gave probably rather more sympathy to Mary Whitehouse than to her nemesis, Hugh Carlton Greene, who was portrayed in this film as little more than a hedonistic dilettante with a penchant for swearing and pretty secretaries. Quite honestly, I am sure if he had so little work to do as the script seemed to imply, he would have been sacked long before.
This was a hugely entertaining story, which gave probably rather more sympathy to Mary Whitehouse than to her nemesis, Hugh Carlton Greene, who was portrayed in this film as little more than a hedonistic dilettante with a penchant for swearing and pretty secretaries. Quite honestly, I am sure if he had so little work to do as the script seemed to imply, he would have been sacked long before.
The press conference scene in which he complains about a room being too hot and stuffy and climbs up to open a window to "blow the cobwebs away" was all to obviously symbolic, and gave the impression of the script beating the audience to death with a blunt instrument just to make absolutely sure that they got the point. There was also a bizarre fantasy dream sequence in which Mary Whitehouse has a nightmare of being seduced by Greene, with his hands reaching up to fondle her breasts. Shown to show how sexually repressed she was, it was again a sledgehammer approach which jarred very badly.
Julie Waters gave an excellent and nuanced performance as Mary Whitehouse. Hugh Bonneville, on the other hand, was such a grotesque caricature of an unlikeable pompous and clumsy human being that it seriously detracted from the realism of the piece. Alun Armstrong was more convincing as the supportive husband.
What was interesting was the huge numbers that Whitehouse managed to draw for her campaign (filling a stadium of thousands, generating a petition in tens of thousands), and the way in which the Corporation reacted to her, by satirising her on an early evening show Swizzlewick" (1964), and then being completely wrong-footed by bringing her husband's motor accident (arising from a suicide concealing themselves on an unlit country road in a brown sack) as the subject for humour.
I think she was misguided in some ways, but made valuable strides in others. We now have the current "watershed" of 9.00 after which more adult material can be shown ( which need not be fictional sex or violence, but could simply be a documentary or news story about a disaster ). It is clear that before her campaigns, the programme makes didn't think about these issues, and early evening programmes might (and sometimes did) contain material offensive to or distressing to young children. Now the makers do think about such matters. I think that part of her legacy is significant, even if it does not quite work out the way she would have liked.
Where she was misguided was in taking all television at its face value, as a kind of fundamentalist literalism, so that she ended up complaining about Pinky and Perky, porcine puppets she felt "unkind to the point of callousness to the grown-up in the programme". While she was undoubtedly right to raise some issues about timing and what was suitable for early evenings, she seems to have lacked a judgment that could discriminate between the serious and the trivial (or even absurd, as in the case of Pinky and Perky).
In like manner, the cartoon fantasy of Tom and Jerry cartoons would be condemned for its violence by her. On that canon, most of Disney's repertoire, and all the Warner Bros Cartoons (Road Runner, Bugs Bunny etc) would go out of the window, and even cartoon adaptations of Beatrix Potter, such as the tale of Jemima Puddleduck, where the dogs savagely eat the duck's eggs, would be condemned. Fantasy in science fiction was another blind spot, and Doctor Who came in for stick for showing a fight between a cybernised human being and a cyberman, in which the cyberman was hurled against a wall
Russell T Davies, who began in children's television, has a strict code of ethics regarding the current Doctor Who, and the kind of extreme violence promulgated at an earlier time under Eric Saward's time as script editor would simply not be allowed by him. That is not to say there is no violence in Doctor Who, but it is now a fantasy violence, and extremely careful to remain so. She would have probably still complained. Children like to be scared, and the point that G.K. Chesterton made so well seems to have passed her by:
Julie Waters gave an excellent and nuanced performance as Mary Whitehouse. Hugh Bonneville, on the other hand, was such a grotesque caricature of an unlikeable pompous and clumsy human being that it seriously detracted from the realism of the piece. Alun Armstrong was more convincing as the supportive husband.
What was interesting was the huge numbers that Whitehouse managed to draw for her campaign (filling a stadium of thousands, generating a petition in tens of thousands), and the way in which the Corporation reacted to her, by satirising her on an early evening show Swizzlewick" (1964), and then being completely wrong-footed by bringing her husband's motor accident (arising from a suicide concealing themselves on an unlit country road in a brown sack) as the subject for humour.
I think she was misguided in some ways, but made valuable strides in others. We now have the current "watershed" of 9.00 after which more adult material can be shown ( which need not be fictional sex or violence, but could simply be a documentary or news story about a disaster ). It is clear that before her campaigns, the programme makes didn't think about these issues, and early evening programmes might (and sometimes did) contain material offensive to or distressing to young children. Now the makers do think about such matters. I think that part of her legacy is significant, even if it does not quite work out the way she would have liked.
Where she was misguided was in taking all television at its face value, as a kind of fundamentalist literalism, so that she ended up complaining about Pinky and Perky, porcine puppets she felt "unkind to the point of callousness to the grown-up in the programme". While she was undoubtedly right to raise some issues about timing and what was suitable for early evenings, she seems to have lacked a judgment that could discriminate between the serious and the trivial (or even absurd, as in the case of Pinky and Perky).
In like manner, the cartoon fantasy of Tom and Jerry cartoons would be condemned for its violence by her. On that canon, most of Disney's repertoire, and all the Warner Bros Cartoons (Road Runner, Bugs Bunny etc) would go out of the window, and even cartoon adaptations of Beatrix Potter, such as the tale of Jemima Puddleduck, where the dogs savagely eat the duck's eggs, would be condemned. Fantasy in science fiction was another blind spot, and Doctor Who came in for stick for showing a fight between a cybernised human being and a cyberman, in which the cyberman was hurled against a wall
Russell T Davies, who began in children's television, has a strict code of ethics regarding the current Doctor Who, and the kind of extreme violence promulgated at an earlier time under Eric Saward's time as script editor would simply not be allowed by him. That is not to say there is no violence in Doctor Who, but it is now a fantasy violence, and extremely careful to remain so. She would have probably still complained. Children like to be scared, and the point that G.K. Chesterton made so well seems to have passed her by:
"What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon," G.K. Chesterton, Tremendous Trifles (1909).
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