The moral minority

Mary Whitehouse spent her life campaigning against 'dirt, promiscuity, infidelity and drinking' on our TV screens. Should we have listened to her warnings? Perhaps, says David Stubbs

"Last Thursday evening, we sat as a family and watched a programme that started at 6.35. And it was the dirtiest programme I have seen for a very long time."

With those words, at Birmingham Town Hall one evening in 1964, the Clean Up TV Campaign, later to evolve into the National Viewers' And Listeners' Association, was introduced to the nation by a disgruntled West Midlands teacher called Mary Whitehouse. A committed Christian, Whitehouse had turned to her faith following the break up of her parents' own marriage and a lengthy but unconsummated infatuation with a married man. She now watched with mounting disgust as the 60s got into full swing with the Profumo affair, That Was The Week That Was and a programme highlighting the issue of premarital sex, which had elicited some snickering queries from her older, female pupils.

She reserved most of her ire for the BBC, and in particular its director-general, Hugh Carleton Greene, brother of Graham Greene. She held him responsible for unleashing the sluices to let a tide of smut and depravity into every British household. She accused the Beeb of promulgating "the propaganda of disbelief, doubt and dirt ... promiscuity, infidelity and drinking". Rather, she urged, the BBC should be broadcasting shows which "encourage and sustain faith in God and bring Him back to the heart of our family and national life".

The objects of her ire ranged from dubious foreign movies and the Beatles to Till Death Us Do Part. Carleton Greene, in turn, regarded her as beneath contempt and refused to meet her, or her ridiculous organisation. However, in the end, he was displaced, in 1969, by a rather more conservative DG more sympathetic to Whitehouse's views.

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