‘Stupid old bat.’ That’s what my father always used to say when Mary Whitehouse appeared on the screen, and the older I grew the more I agreed with him. What right had this ghastly woman with her horn-rimmed specs and silly hats and Black Country accent to stand between me and ‘the torrents of filth’ I would happily have watched on TV all day and all night?
But Filth: The Mary Whitehouse Story (BBC2, Wednesday) wasn’t going to let us off so easily. It opened up in one of those picture-perfect villages from the past we’d all like to live in — the steepled church, the well-tended hedges, the working post office, grown-ups smiling greetings to one another on their bicycles, boys in blazers and caps who were probably at the local C of E and getting the sort of unashamedly rigorous education you now only get at private schools…
‘Now see here,’ it seemed to be saying to people like me.
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