Filth: The Mary Whitehouse Story

Although Julie Walters looks a bit like Caroline Aherne as her Mrs Merton character in quite a few scenes this is quite a true and very fair portrayal of Mrs Whitehouse. Whatever you think of her prudery and her lack of humour you actually feel sympathetic to her when she gets heckled at meetings and gets abusive letters and phonecalls. It's fair to say that the permissive society had an inpermissive nature, if you get my meaning. She was also not a lady to mess with and you said unfavourable things about her at your peril. The film mentions her successful defamation actions. It's fair to say that if you were up against Mrs Whitehouse in court your chances of success were slim. The end credits mention Whitehouse v Lemon (aka The Gay News Case) which was very much on the Pythons' minds when they made The Life of Brian. To her credit she was one of the first people to campaign against child pornography but she turned herself into a figure of fun by finding fault with Dr Who and Pinky & Perky. I wondered how on earth was Pinky & Perky corruptive? Well, I suppose it was. It inspired many 60s and 70s kids to play LPs at 78rpm and I think that might have been bad for the records. Sir Hugh Carleton-Greene is not portrayed favourably. He is shown to be arrogant, smug, coarse, foul-mouthed and lecherous. I have no idea what he was like as a person so I can't judge how fair a portrayal this was. Julie Walters these days is of course best known as Molly Weasley in the Harry Potter films and I imagined a scene where Sir Hugh gets a howler from Mary Whitehouse. The letter gets delivered by owl on his desk and then shouts, in Julie Walters' voice, "Hugh Carleton-Greene, I am absolutely disgusted" and then goes on to complain about the number of bloodys in Till Death Us Do Part, Dr Who having nightmare qualities etc and what kind of example certain programmes are to the young people of the country and then goes on in the gentler "Oh and Ginny dear" voice to say "Oh and last Sunday's Songs of Praise was lovely", then blowing a raspberry and self-shredding. Mrs Whitehouse died the year the first Harry Potter film came out. It's fair to say she'd have some criticisms to make of Harry Potter.

Now a beneficiary like The Krays of sixties nostalgia, Mary Whitehouse has here become an amusing English eccentric out of an Ealing comedy to an aggressively whimsical musical accompaniment.

Julie Walters moves on from poacher Madame Cyn to gamekeeper Mrs Whitehouse, who'd now be spinning in her grave if she saw how her espousal of direct action against smut spawned today's new puritanism of Woke.

This is based on Mary Whitehouse's early efforts into TV censorship specifically with the BBC. It barely gets into her personal life except when related to the censorship work.

Mary Whitehouse went after more than the BBC, in fact more than TV she went after movies and print media. This movie never goes there. It does try to inject some humor but rarely with any success although it is possible it was successful with a British audience.

I am fairly familiar with Mary Whitehouse and some of her appearances on TV are available on YouTube. This didn't provide any new information unless you are completely unfamiliar with her you might learn the basics.

This was just a lighthearted look at the period and doesn't make any real judgement calls. Worth a watch.

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 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.