Ben Thompson (2)

I was a child of the 80s, but my first awareness of Mary Whitehouse, the crusading housewife out to 'clean up TV', came from the 1990s sketch show The Mary Whitehouse Experience. The woman was a national institution, and her name still triggers a reaction from anyone over 30. Ben Thompson's irreverent yet awestruck biography is wonderfully entertaining - he has a wry style that balances the absurdities of the Mary Whitehouse 'archives', including Mary's own barbed correspondence with the show more high and the mighty of the BBC, plus some corkers from the mentally unstable members of 'CUTV' and 'NVALA' (that's the National Viewers and Listeners Association, founded by Whitehouse, and not 'a fictional African chief', as Thompson points out!)

Mrs Whitehouse might sound completely bonkers, yes, but she was crazy like a fox - her technique for presenting humourless and narrow-minded requests for censorship in politely practical letters to BBC bosses and MPs read like a masterstroke of manipulation. Not many of her target recipients accepted her views, of course, but that didn't put her off. Mad Mary even packed in her job - she was formerly a teacher, which makes perfect sense - to dedicate her life to harassing TV execs and other distributors of tasteless material.

I started reading the book in state of shock - primarily at Mrs Whitehouse's unshakeable belief that the nation should be protected from her own viewing prejudices, but also from the knowledge that TV in the 1960s could actually be shocking! There were only two stations, and I though they both shut down at midnight. But after a few chapters, I developed a grudging respect for Mary - she had the right idea, and the intelligence to plan a campaign and set her protests into practice, however ineffectual, but she was fighting the wrong battles. Instead of focusing on the sexual exploitation of women, or the banning of A Clockwork Orange, she counts the number of times 'bloody' is spoken in an episode of Starsky and Hutch, or complains about the risqué dancers on the Benny Hill show. I detest the sort of nanny state she was seeking, where people must be protected from their own weaknesses - that's what the 'OFF' button on the TV set is for - but if Mary were alive today, she would be rolling in her grave!

Some of the best excerpts are from NVALA letters - reviews of films like The Exorcist ('I will not dwell upon the details of this transformation except to say that from then on her teeth were discoloured'); Walkabout ('Just imagine the thoughts in these children's minds, wondering if ever their father would [shoot at them]?'); and Casanova ('We switched off, having been too stunned before'). Like the viewers today who watch an entire programme that offends them, just so that they can write in to Points of View. Scary.

I couldn't decide whether to be glad that we have so much freedom of choice on television today, or sad that standards - both of programming and morals - have declined so much since Mary's heyday. TV today, for all the hundreds of channels available, is dismal, and sadly well beyond the control of a bunch of middle-class, middle-aged ladies. I did enjoy Ben Thompson's retrospective championing of Mary's best intentions, though! show less

Until I read this book, I did not realise the extent to which Mary Whitehouse campaigned and wasted so much time of other people. I did not realise how much she was out of touch with what was going on around her. You couldn't make it up,