Filth: The Mary Whitehouse Story

Mary Whitehouse appointed herself as the moral guardian of 1960s Britain. Mainly because everything she watched on television especially the BBC shocked her.

In reality she was a voice that was heard by broadcasters. One among many others.

It was only in the 1980s with Mrs Thatcher in power she found an ally. Whitehouse's voice became more powerful especially as she was a Christian conservative. Thatcher did not like television and the BBC.

This is a satirical comedy drama as Mrs Whitehouse (Julie Walters) launches a campaign against the libertarian Director General of the BBC Sir Hugh Carleton Greene (Hugh Bonneville.)

The 1960s saw a change in broadcasting. Censorship became lax, satire became more harsher and cruder. The swinging 1960s and the permissive society was a step too far for Mrs Whitehouse.

Her band of followers created the Clean Up TV campaign group. It consisted of writing lots of letters to the BBC and politicians. It was a form of intimidation and she just wanted another kind of state censorship.

The program makes clear that Mrs Whitehouse had no time for lefties or gays or just modern Britain.

I found this television film disappointing and disjointed. The media poked fun of Mrs Whitehouse straight as she came into prominence. The show Swizzlewick satirised her in the 1960s much to her displeasure.

It has a fantasy sequence where Mrs Whitehouse has an erotic dream about Carleton Greene. It was unnecessarily crude.

Her views should had been combated, instead it decides to go for boorish slogans against her.

It is heavily implied that Mrs Whitehouse eventually saw off Carleton Greene. That is not so. Then prime minister Harold Wilson disliked what Carleton Greene was up to and provocatively appointed a former ITV man as the new chairman of the BBC.

I never did have much truck with Mary Whitehouse. In the early days her heart was probably in the right place, bless her. She saw the onslaught of the permissive society as a catastrophe for the moral fibre of the nation while homosexuality and pre-martial sex were the start of the slippery slope to hellfire and damnation. She was right, to the teeniest, weeniest degree, about what our children should or should not be exposed to and that full frontal nudity and sodomy might do more than frighten the horses when we are about to sit down to our evening meal. But she was also a bigot, the narrowness of whose vision would have been awesome were it not so awesomely worrying. And she never listened; never took on board the opinion of anyone but herself.

"Filth" starts off portraying her as a sympathetic, matronly type, a school mistress with a genuine affection for her students, and a caring wife and mother, quite prepared to enjoy a bit of the old heave-ho herself in the sanctity of the marriage bed. But the moment television started to reflect the real world as it was in the early sixties, (heaving and ho-ing outside the marriage bed, cussing and swearing on every street corner), Mary had apoplexy and demanded that Sir Hugh Carleton Greene, Director General of the BBC, call a halt to it.

Now I am not knocking morality. There is right and there is wrong and there is the expression of both but there is also freedom of speech; there are often two sides of almost every story and there's nowt as queer as folk, as they say. Mary simply didn't see it that way. She didn't so much quote the Bible as rewrite it in her own words. Interestingly, "Filth" began by making her sympathetic, (as I've said, her heart was in the right place), and making Carleton Greene the villain of the piece, (sexist, patronizing, condescending, arrogant, you name it), but as Mary's fame grew, (she came to love the limelight, the attention and above all, the power she wielded), our sympathies shifted to the poor, put-upon Greene, driven close to bonkers by this needling, insidious little woman.

Were it not for the fact that she strove to silence all forms of expression with which she didn't agree, destroying reputations and careers as she went, she might just have been considered another eccentric and I worried that Julie Walters would play her as an extension of her eccentric persona's such as Mrs Overall. However, I really ought to have had more faith in Walters who is one of our finest actresses and who is outstanding here. (The fact that she made me almost like Mary is testimony to that). Hugh Bonneville, too, had a lot to do with making Greene change from arrogant snob to crusader to victim in the space of ninety minutes. (The film only concentrates on the period of the 'feud' between Whitehouse and Greene).

Perhaps the writing could have been sharper at times, though the period was beautifully delineated from the outset. This was indeed a vanished England of simplicity and innocence that made you wonder, at least initially, if Mrs. W might not have been right about the tide of 'filth' that was coming down the tube to change it all. But as you watched her change from village school-ma-rm to Mussolini in a twin-set and pearls, you realized it wasn't the 'filth' was was the problem but the knight in very tarnished armour.

Mary Whitehouse played by the divine Julie Walters CBE could have been silly, over-reacting, or just a caricature of a woman who fought and won in her own mind. The film is quite a tribute to a woman who caused a lot of trouble in the 1960s regarding television content. Whitehouse is a schoolteacher, mother, and wife to Ernest. They live not in London but in Wolverhampton and she is concerned by the explosion of sexuality on television through the BBC which is national television. She gathers and recruits quite easily mostly housewives who have the same concern. All she wants is some time with the director of the BBC which was Sir Hugh Carleton Greene who is portrayed a chauvinistic boss and unlikely character. Whitehouse has her moments like when she telephones the BBC regarding a sketch spoofing her husband involved in a car accident as crossing the line. There is more to it. Despite all of the hatred and vulgarity in the letters and telephone calls, Whitehouse is persistent in trying to clean up the filth in national television.

Mary Whitehouse is a Midlands housewife with a perfectly respectable family and village life. Whenever she hears the girls at school talking about premarital sex following a discussion programme on the subject on the BBC it turns out to be only one of many impacts that she perceives the BBC's output to be having on the morality and good fibre of British society. As a result of several letters, Whitehouse forms a small group to challenge the filth flooding into the homes of millions of families on a nightly basis and quickly finds her campaign getting national attention and becoming a thorn in the side of the more progressive Sir Hugh Greene, Director General of the BBC.

I'm no fan of Mary Whitehouse nor of censorship. Neither do I believe that the decline of standards in society are entirely down to the depiction thereof in the media. However this is not the same as just saying that anyone can broadcast whatever they want without any sort of checks, balances or controls in place. Many people will share these views and agree that, while adults should be treated as adults, children should be protected and unsecured flows of media cannot contain the same content as media streams that are filtered as to audience (ie ratings, timings etc). Filth also thinks this I believe and it structures its telling very well. Whitehouse is not painted as a crazy old woman at first but rather a perfectly reasonable person concerned by what she sees on television and the effect it appears to be having directly on teenagers but gradually she is revealed to be just as frustrated with changes in society and that perhaps the BBC is just a focal point for her frustrations.

The script does this really well and the delivery is gradual so that it is clear without being obvious. I did worry that this would just be a 90 minute kicking of Whitehouse but it did do her justice because it showed the good elements of her as well as the bad (of which it must be said there are more). Julie Walters didn't totally convince me in the title role but this was because she was just a little too much like Mrs Merton for me. However her performance does back up the gradual nature of the script again where it could have been easy to play her as simply a batty old lady stuck in the past and nothing more. I thought Armstrong did well alongside her while Bonneville is light and fun in his BBC role.

Filth may have a terrible title card (a bike going over a dog turd) but as a film it is actually very good. The tone is light but not to the point of easy mockery; the script allows for Whitehouse to be shown in a fair light – thus good and bad are on display – while the performances are mostly good and fitting the film. You my not have agreed with her or you may lament her loss, but either way Filth is a fair and entertaining film that is a job well done.

This account of the transformation of an ordinary suburban mum and art teacher into a controversial national figure is a lot better than it might have been. Julie Walters as Mary captures her ordinariness and her determination. She is much helped by Alun Armstrong's subtle performance as Mary's supportive if sometime baffled husband Ernest. Hugh Bonneville though at times rather Basil Fawlty-ish as the progressive but arrogant BBC director-general Hugh Greene provides an admirable foil (they never actually meet).

Mary Whitehouse started her campaign to clean up television (originally unfortunately named "Clean Up National Television") after seeing a rather dull discussion program on pre-marital sex broadcast by the BBC in the early evening. Despite widespread opposition she developed a taste for being in the public eye, and was an active promoter of TV censorship for the next 30 years. The film credits her with forcing Greene's resignation, though others claim the real issue was Greene's failure to get along with Lord Hill, the oleaginous BBC chairman after 1967. Certainly Greene's philosophy on broadcasting was completely opposed to Mary's, and it has to be said that it was partly due to her that the BBC became less adventurous in the face of her attacks, some of which were downright silly, the attacks on "Dr Who" and the Beatles's lyrics for example. With all respect to her son Richard, who has a review on this page, she may have been serious and sincere, but she represented and aroused the forces of bigotry, ignorance and prejudice. The worst that can be said of Greene is that he did not handle her very well. Later directors-general, including his immediate successor Charles Curran were better at it. Even so she had a chilling effect on British television.

This program goes fairly easy on Mary and does not fail to point out that Greene and other opponents often over-reacted. She had imitators elsewhere, Patricia Bartlett in New Zealand and Fred Nile in Australia for example, and of course the US is full of anti-smut crusaders. Unlike the US, Britain's media is rather centralized – the BBC had a monopoly in TV until 1956 and there was a duopoly with ITV until the 1980s – and this gave someone like Mary unwonted influence. The atmosphere of the sixties is wonderfully re-created and the BBC has to be congratulated for its even-handed telling of a story very painful to some broadcasters.