Mary Mary on the wall
Monday 26th May 2008
I was fascinated to see that Julie Walters and Hugh Bonneville, two of the nicest and most brilliant actors I’ve ever met are starring in the BBC play about Mary Whitehouse this week. Julie plays Mary Whitehouse and Hugh, who had a leading role in ITV’s production of the film adaptation of one of my books, The Man Who Made Husband’s Jealous, is playing her adversary Hugh Carlton-Greene, the head of the BBC.
In retrospect, Mrs Whitehouse probably had a point in trying to curb the increase of sex and violence on television. But at the time, in the early seventies, when we were luxuriating in a new-found sexual freedom, we thought she was a frightful kill-joy.
When her autobiography, Who Does She Think She Is, came out I therefore took her to the cleaners in my Sunday Times column.
Except for the time I attacked the Health Service after a stint in hospital, I have never received so many furious readers’ letters – over 700 – saying “Hands off our Sainted Mary.”
I did on the other hand, get some lovely letters of support, particularly from Lady Gaitskell, who agreed with me that Mary Whitehouse was a sinister influence.
Mrs Whitehouse seems to have been unbowed by my attack, however. A few months later I was at the same Foyle’s Literary Lunch as her. Fearing her ire, I begged Christina Foyle to seat me as far away from Mrs W as possible.
Imagine my horror, just as I was getting up from my chair after lunch, when Mrs Whitehouse, clad in aquamarine tulle like a pantomime fairy, tapped my shoulder,
“I hear you don’t want to meet me, dear.”
“That’s because I don’t ap-p-p-p-prove of you,” I stammered and fled.
It was big hearted of her not to take offence.
The play evidently portrays her in a very sympathetic light. My Sunday Times piece, which was reproduced in a book of collected pieces, called Jolly Super Too in 1973, is printed below. It’s shamefully bitchy, but I still stand by it.
MARY WHITEHOUSE
Mary, Mary on the Wall
I am convinced that Mr Heath is
Queen Victoria (although I haven’t cast anyone as John Bre-own yet). Likewise
I am sourly convinced that the Permissive Society is finished, and we are racing
towards a new Victorian era. Table legs will soon be covered up, and
the fornication detector van will be policing the streets flushing out people
without a sexual licence.
I am forced to this conclusion having
just read Mary Whitehouse’s autobiography Who Does She Think She
Is, and although it’s a good giggle – particularly when read
out loud in a Scottish accent after several gins – I think au fond it
is a sinister and chilling book.
Mrs Whitehouse has become an Establishment
darling.
‘As the dreadful tidal wave of filth
mounts,’ writes Malcolm Muggeridge in the foreword, ‘but for her
the total demolition of all Christian values in this country would have taken
place without a word of public protest.’ Rubbish!
He sees her as some lady traffic
warden standing four square on the Gadarene slope and shouting ‘No Entry’ to
the piggies as they hurtle towards her.
The reviews of her book have been incredibly gentle, ranging from approval to tolerant amusement – in fact she’s become so grand that even the President of the U.S. names his official residence after her.
But who is she anyway? This cosy granny – this Mild Green Fairy
Lighthouse intent on cleaning up the media. Her book tells us that
she was keen Girl Guide, a whizz kid at maths, and then a school ma’am – who
once (significantly?) got 0 out of 300 for biology.
She writes in Old Girls’ Mag terms of her ‘hectic’ youth
when ‘scout dances introduced me to the social whirl of the twenties’,
and how ‘subjects like free love and communism were fearlessly discussed
and practically discarded’. How do you practically discard
free love?
Later, as ‘senior mistress’ at a large co-educational school,
she became worried that her pupils were being corrupted by television. A
teenage boy came up to hr and pleaded:
‘Will you please stop the girls teasing and tantalizing us into deeper
sexual relationships?’ And she took him seriously.
She became co-founder of the Clean-Up TV Campaign which later grew into
the National Viewers and Listeners Association.
What is particularly chilling is the apparent kick she and her team of
monitors seem to get out of their indignation as they sit in their prig-sties
awaiting the affrontal nudes and the possibility that Basil Brush might
say ‘Bother’ in family viewing time, poised to jam the wires
to each other with cries of ‘filth’ and ‘disgusting’.
There is something slightly unnerving, too, in the way Fairy Lighthouse
manages to get hold of scripts before programmes, go through them with
a toothcomb for obscene lines, ring up the BBC to demand their removal,
but nevertheless is still prepared to turn on the programme to see if they’ve
been cut out, ringing up afterwards to say how ‘soiled’ she
felt by the experience.
She has an almost pathological disgust of pornography, whatever that may
be. Her trip to Denmark, for example, when World in Action asked
her to go the Sex Fair. At first she refused, then Malcolm Muggeridge
said: ‘Destroy the Denmark myth, Mary.’
‘Should I? I went to bed feeling overwhelmed by the responsibility and
size of the undertaking.’
But in the end she went on condition ‘that I wouldn’t be taken
anywhere near the Sex Fair and no shots would give the impression I was
looking at pornography’. How can you judge anything if you
run away from it? At least Lord Longford went and saw it all for
himself.
Mrs Whitehouse is endlessly on the warpath about the BBC’s sex education
films: ‘The headmaster of a children’s home in the South of
England told me that he had found children getting into bed with one another
to experiment in their innocence with the information they had been given.’
Doesn’t she realise a lot of children have always done this? They
don’t need a sex education film as a script.
She bangs on too about nudity on television, wanting to banish a programme
of Spike Milligan’s in which a ‘nude sat in a chair and seemed
to have no obvious function except titillation and increased viewing figures’. Presumably
a lot of people enjoyed viewing the figure.
Or she writes of a friend who for ‘rather sad personal reasons had
never married and had never seen a naked man. She had watched the
programme the previous evening and suddenly found herself confronted by
a male nude on the screen in her living room.’
‘Such a person – like all of us,’ claims Mrs Whitehouse, ‘has
a right to her privacy.’ Of course she has. No
one is forcing this woman to watch nudes on television; all she has to
do is to turn her set off.
And surely Mrs Whitehouse was restricting my private freedom when
she tried to get programmes like TW3 and Till Death Us Do Part taken off.
‘We didn’t want it taken off,’ she said of the latter. ‘We
just said it was “dirty, blasphemous and full of bad language.”’ Surely
that can’t be the sort of programme she wants on.
One of the good things about the Sixties was that a great many people stopped
feeling guilty about sex and started realising that feelings and desires
they’d always been ashamed of were perfectly normal and common to
other people. My main complaint about Mrs Whitehouse is she seems
likely to re-create these feelings of guilt.
Malcolm Muggeridge says that what is really funny cannot be objectionable. Mrs
Whitehouse on the other hand seems to think that what she sees as objectionable,
which is a great deal, cannot be seen as funny. I think her Scottish
puritanism must have something to do with it. As Sidney Smith said, ‘It
requires a surgical operation to get a joke into a Scot’s understanding.’
But I think what gets one in the end is an impression of smugness. The
way she points out, when she has as call from America, that she is ‘careful
to emphasize, as always when talking to foreign correspondents, the high
quality of our programmes.’ Or:
‘”London Weekend on the phone to you, Mary” called my hostess. I
was just leaving her Brighton home to speak at a meeting, but: “What
can I do for you?”
‘Would I go on the Frost Show? In principle yes, but who else is taking
part? The produced reeled off a list of very permissive names.
And so it goes on.
Perhaps I shouldn’t get worked up about Mrs Whitehouse. As
my mother said: ‘How can you take anyone seriously, darling, who
wears flicked up spectacles?’
Even so I’m twitchy over where she’ll turn hr beady censoring
eyes next. Will it be Fleet Street or will she expurgate the walls
of the public lavatories, where far ‘filthier’ things can be
read than ever graced the pages of Oz. I have chilling visions
of a future where you can take a Whitehouse anywhere.
But soft, do I hear the phone trilling from the lounge?