Mary Whitehouse
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Image:Mary Whitehouse.jpg Mary Whitehouse (13 June 1910—23 November 2001) was a British campaigner for the values of morality and decency in which she believed, particularly in broadcast media, and ultimately derived from her religious beliefs. She was founder and first president of the National Viewers' and Listeners' Association. In 1980 she was honoured with a CBE.
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Early life
Mary Whitehouse was born Mary Hutcheson in Nuneaton, Warwickshire and was educated at a grammar school in Chester, England. She went on to do teacher training at the county college, specialising in art. Her first teaching job was in Wednesfield in Staffordshire. She joined the Oxford Movement (later Moral Rearmament) in the 1930s. At MRA meetings she met Ernest Whitehouse, and they married in 1940.
While a teacher, also responsible for sex education, at Madeley school in Shropshire in the early 1960s, she became concerned at what she, and many others, perceived as declining moral standards in Britain, of the media, and especially of the BBC.
Clean Up TV
Mary Whitehouse began her campaigning in 1963 and among her first targets was Sir Hugh Carleton Greene; she claimed the director-general of the BBC was "more than anybody else... responsible for the moral collapse in this country". Greene ignored her concerns and blocked her from participation in BBC programming. At her first public meeting in Birmingham in April 1964 over 2,000 people attended and the Clean Up TV Campaign was launched. The National Viewers' and Listeners' Association was formed in 1965 and she obtained a total of 500,000 signatures on her Clean Up TV petition, a record for the UK.
Whitehouse caused particular difficulties for civil servants at No 10 Downing Street for the frequent letters sent to Harold Wilson, then prime minister, in particular for her belief that the Government had ultimate responsibility, through the Royal Charter, for BBC output, rather than the BBC's governors who she felt were failing in their duties. For some time Downing Street deliberately "lost" her letters to avoid having to respond to them. When Greene left the BBC in 1969, because of disagreements over the appointment of the Conservative Lord Hill as BBC chairman in 1967, Mrs Whitehouse was given some credit for his departure; other sources pointed more to a political struggle between the BBC and Wilson.
Private prosecutions
In addition to her campaigns regarding television Mrs Whitehouse brought a number of notable legal actions, including a private prosecution for blasphemous libel against Gay News in 1977 (Whitehouse v. Lemon). It was the first such prosecution since 1922 when the Old Bailey sentenced John W Gott to nine months' hard labour for blasphemy. The private prosecution concerned the poem The Love That Dares to Speak its Name by James Kirkup, a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. It resulted in the editor of Gay News, Denis Lemon, being given a nine-month suspended jail sentence, and being told by the judge he had come close to serving it. Appeals to the House of Lords and the European Court were rejected.
She also pursued a private prosecution against Michael Bogdanov, the director of a National Theatre production of Howard Brenton's The Romans in Britain, which had a scene of simulated anal rape between two characters, under the Sexual Offences Act 1956, s13, which described the offence of "procuring an act of gross indecency". As the Act was a general one, there was no defence, similar to that permitted in the Obscene Publications Act, for reasons of artistic merit. The defence argued that the Act did not apply to the theatre; however, the judge ruled that it did. Whitehouse withdrew from the prosecution following this decision and the proceedings were terminated by a nolle prosequi procedure. The case was the subject of a radio play The Third Soldier Holds His Thighs on BBC Radio Four by Mark Lawson in 2005. Whitehouse's account of the trial is recorded in her book 'A Most Dangerous Woman'. ISBN 0-85648-540-3
From 1972 she campaigned for public decency and her efforts played a part in the passage of Protection of Children Act 1978, the Indecent Displays Act (1981), which concerned sex shops and in 1984 she mounted a decisive campaign in the UK about so-called "video nasties", that led to the Video Recordings Act of that year. Later, her campaigns helped bring an end to Channel 4's "red triangle" series of films; claimed by Channel 4 to be intended to warn viewers of material liable to cause offence, the broadcasting of these films had also received criticism from non-supporters of Whitehouse. She also had a role in the 1990 extension of the Broadcasting Act and the establishment of the Broadcasting Standards Council which later became the Broadcasting Standards Commission. From 2004 this was subsumed into the Office of Communications.
Backlash
Some of her opponents claimed that she had an ability to be offended by almost anything, pointing to her complaints about the use of the word "bloody", her concerns about the TV character Alf Garnett, Doctor Who or the violence in Tom and Jerry cartoons. Of Four Weddings and a Funeral, she famously said "I haven't seen it, of course, but I've heard that the opening three minutes contains a stream of four-letter obscenities", after which there were claims that she tended to take any sexualised activity on television or in the theatre as an affront. This was occasionally taken advantage of: the tabloids ambushed her, asking her what she thought of a new children's programme in which children were killed, a reference to Knightmare; she publicly professed her shock, but apologised once she had watched an episode (Knightmare was still "sanitised" in some ways, however — the programme's popular onscreen animation of a walking skeleton in medieval armour, which would fall off piece by piece as the player's health deteriorated, was replaced in the final series by a picture of slices being removed from a pink cake!). Her favourite programmes were Dixon of Dock Green, Neighbours, and coverage of snooker.
Whitehouse became a target for mockery and caricature. One publisher of pornographic magazines named a magazine Whitehouse, apparently in an attempt to annoy her (this magazine's website is the source of occasional shock and confusion to those searching for the official White House website). British "noise" band Whitehouse also named themselves after her, in mocking tribute, she is the inspiration of Deep Purple's 1973 song Mary Long and the Sensational Alex Harvey Band's Mrs Blackhouse, in which the eponymous Blackhouse is depicted as a demonic, unholy creature. The British punk band The Adicts also wrote a song called Mary Whitehouse, which includes the line "She don't like pornography/ when it's on the BBC", among others. She is, in addition, mentioned by name in the song Pigs (Three Different Ones) on the 1977 Pink Floyd album Animals, depicted as a pig. There was also a BBC TV and Radio comedy series called The Mary Whitehouse Experience. She tried unsuccessfully to get her name removed from the title.
Sometimes if the cast of a TV programme were congratulated by Mary Whitehouse for producing wholesome entertainment, they took it as an insult. This was the case with The Goodies in 1970. After the first season, the cast of The Goodies were worried that an endorsement from Mary Whitehouse would harm their image. They made it their goal to get a complaint from her. To achieve this, they introduced more smut into their show, but with no response. They even went as far as to feature a caricature of her called "Desiree Carthorse" in one episode but even that got no response. In the end, a sequence of Tim Brooke Taylor dancing wearing just leather underpants triggered a complaint.
Base of support
Mary Whitehouse had some support for her aims, particularly among conservatives and many Christians, and for much of the 1960s and 1970s she had more than 250 speaking engagements every year. She was however a despised figure among those who were opposed to her views and actions. Her popularity waned in the 1980s, a combination of changing times and the frailty of her old age.
Retirement
Whitehouse retired as president of the National Viewers' and Listeners' Association in 1994; the Association was re-named mediawatch-uk in 2001 and the current director is John Beyer. The organisation had about 150,000 supporters through corporate memberships at its peak; current membership is less than 40,000.
Illness and death
In 1990, she claimed on BBC radio that Dennis Potter had been influenced by witnessing his mother engaged in adulterous sex. Potter's mother won substantial damages from the BBC and The Listener, who were reportedly unimpressed by Whitehouse's claim to have had a blackout on air and subsequently to have had no recollection of her words. After this her appearances in the media become far less frequent and the ridicule of her increased substantially.
In the 1990s her activity was reduced by illness and a fall which damaged her spine in 1997. Her husband died in July 2000. She died, aged 91, in a nursing home in Colchester, England on 23 November 2001, on the 38th anniversary of the broadcast of the first episode of Doctor Who, a show that she had criticised a number of times over the years.
References
- Geoffrey Robertson (1999) The Justice Game, Random House UK. A memoir of a prominent barrister who, among other historic trials, defended several of Whitehouse's targets in her private prosecutions.
Bibliography
- Max Caulfield (1976) Mary Whitehouse, Mowbray, ISBN 0264661907
- Michael Tracey & David Morrison (1979) Whitehouse, Macmillan, ISBN 0333237900
- Mary Whitehouse (1967) Cleaning-up TV: From Protest to Participation, Blandford, ISBN B0000CNC3I
- Mary Whitehouse (1971) Who Does She Think She is?, New English Library, ISBN 0450009939
- Mary Whitehouse (1977) Whatever Happened to Sex?, Wayland, ISBN 0853404607 (pbk: Hodder & Stoughton, ISBN 0340229063)
- Mary Whitehouse (1982) Most Dangerous Woman?, Lion Hudson, ISBN 0856484083
- Mary Whitehouse (1985) Mightier Than the Sword, Kingsway Publications, ISBN 086065382X
- Mary Whitehouse (1993) Quite Contrary: An Autobiography, Sidgwick & Jackson, ISBN 0283062029
Trivia
- The song Pigs (Three Different Ones) off of Pink Floyd's album Animals has a verse criticizing Whitehouse's actions. It is the last verse that starts: "Hey, you whitehouse / ha ha charade you are..." This verse does not refer to the White House (Residence of the President of the USA).
- The Adicts, a punk band, made a song called Mary Whitehouse on their debut album 'Songs of Praise'(1978) with opening lines "She don't like pornography, when it's on the BBC"
- In the Monty Python election night satire, John Cleese says, "Mary Whitehouse has taken Umbrage -- no surprise there."