Whitehouse effect

Filth: The Mary Whitehouse Story (BBC2)

Just when you thought you’d got everyone measured, though, Amanda Coe’s fizzing script and Andy de Emmony’s sharp direction pulled the rug from under your feet. There was a good example of this when Greene asks his wife to pass the butter. ‘What’s the magic word?’ she asks. ‘Pass the f***ing butter,’ he replies, and, for a beat, you think what a saucy, japeish fellow he is. But then the camera pans across the long, patrician Greene dining table, past the faces of his boys, and you suddenly find yourself turning into Mrs Whitehouse. ‘Hang on a second,’ you think. ‘Is that really the message a chap should be sending his children?’

It performed a similarly deft somersault in a scene involving the Whitehouse boys. They’re all at a typical late-Sixties groovy party, and a sexy girl is trying to persuade them to get drunk and dance. But the boys all refuse, because they know from Mum that premarital sex is wrong. ‘Oh dear, the poor, sad, loser squares,’ you think. Cut to a scene in which the girl is apologising to the tabloid journalist who has clearly given her a bribe. ‘Sorry,’ she says. ‘They just weren’t interested.’

So which side did the programme ask us to come down on in the end? The refreshing thing was, it never did. You could despise Mrs Whitehouse for the silliness of her prejudices (she once actually wrote in to complain about a scene in which Pinky and Perky had been shown abusing adults; and she fought hard to have a broadcast of ‘I Am the Walrus’ banned because of the line ‘Boy you’ve been a naughty girl, you’ve let your knickers down’). You could recognise her essential absurdity (if the film was to be believed, she originally planned to call her campaign Clean Up National TV — till her husband pointed out the unfortunate acronym). But nonetheless, the film argued, you had to admire her courage and determination in the face of so much intransigence and abuse.

And in the end, of course, the silly old bat had a point. With its loathing of ‘hideously white’ Middle England, its slow but sure dumbing-down and its lofty disdain towards anyone who doesn’t share its groovy bien-pensant values, the BBC really has helped make Britain a demonstrably worse place than when Mary Whitehouse started her campaign in the late Sixties. Greene’s stint as director-general was the point when the rot set in.

Then, again, this brilliant drama was a BBC production. So it can’t have lost it completely, can it?