In the 1980s I had lunch with Mary Whitehouse. It was an attempt to keep her sweet after I had written something disobliging about her in The Times Diary. I didn’t want any trouble: Mrs Whitehouse, as we were reminded in the delightful comedy-drama Filth: The Mary Whitehouse Story (BBC Two), always had lawyers to consult.

When we met she was still buoyed by having taken money off The Observer, which had serialised the memoirs of her old enemy, Hugh Carleton Greene. She was in a forgiving mood. The offending extract had appeared when the paper’s “real” editor had been on holiday and his inexperienced deputy was at the helm. This inexperienced deputy was, in fact, Anthony Howard, one of Fleet Street’s most seasoned editors. The hand-out had paid for a tennis court in her garden.

I was struck then, as I was struck again last night, by how Whitehouse’s naivety – stupidity even – coexisted with nous in knowing how to get her way. In Filth, the writer Amanda Coe portrayed her as the village art mistress who could not recognise a phallus when it stared out of a canvas at her. Although there was one misguided scene in which she had an erotic dream about Greene, it was not, Coe conceded, Whitehouse who had the dirty mind. After all, it was Greene, brother of Graham, who had a portrait of a multibreasted woman in his office and named it Mrs Whitehouse.

Instinct tells me that Whitehouse was wrong about television and that Greene, the BBC’s most liberal Director-General, may also have been its greatest. If I put my mind to it, I could even declare myself offended by Hugh Bonneville’s expert impression of the man as a clumsy, intellectual elitist with an overappreciative eye for the ladies (so long as they were not over 50 and wearing a hat).

From the Archive: Letters to the Editor from Mary Whitehouse

No warning was given before the programme, not even as to the terribly disturbing effect it might have on pregnant women

• Blasphemy as a crime

• Video violence

• The Romans in Britain

It seems he had a mouth like a sewer. “S****ing Christ!” he declared, as he precariously opened a window in stuffy Broadcasting House, a metaphor for his dangerous but enlightening regime. In the baronial splendour of his home he demanded his soon-to-be-divorced wife to pass the butter. “What’s the magic word?” she asked. “Pass the f***ing butter,” he grumped back.

But Mrs Whitehouse’s relics in mediawatch-UK and beyond will no doubt be similarly cross with Filth for showing their heroine as a dimwit unable to spot the acronym in Clean Up National Television and confusing Hughie Opportunity Knocks Greene with the BBC Director-General. Julie Walters, giving a slightly familiar performance, made her as sympathetic as she could while still making her ridiculous. Coe wrote the story as a comedy. Perhaps there is no other way to tell it.

In this version and probably in actuality, Whitehouse started her complaints in the spirit of Disappointed of Claverley rather than Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells, but ended up a trainspotter of porn, crouched in front of her television with a notebook on her lap. She ended up complaining about Pinky and Perky, porcine puppets she felt “unkind to the point of callousness to the grown-up in the programme”. This complaint she really did make, although I doubt it really prompted Greene to resign.

In his memoirs, a later D-G, Alasdair Milne, wrote that Greene’s refusal to meet or correspond with Whitehouse was misguided. It was, and the play made the corporation look pretty shabby in its attempts to flatten a licence payer. I have no memory of the 1964 programme Swizzlewick (a drama rather than a sitcom, from what I can discover) but if, to get at her, it really parodied a road accident in which her husband was blamelessly involved, that was not very grown up.

In the end, her frustration with Till Death Us Do Partand The Wednesday Play was, as she claimed, only that of many of her class and generation; Greene’s BBC should have treated it with less contempt. On Monday BBC Parliament showed a 1968 edition of a complaints show, Talkback, concerning a Panorama on censorship that showed a bit more than it probably should have. A teacher said his pupils faced “a desperate battle for personal purity”. Derrick Amoore, the assistant head of current affairs, literally puffed smoke in the older man’s face.

Out of the box

— Two further thoughts on the Whitehouse legacy: the first from a lecture Greene gave to students in Birmingham in 1968 in which he described the debate as a battle between Cavalier and Roundhead, Sir Toby Belch versus Malvolio. “It was not,” he said, speaking, oddly, in the past tense, “a split between old and young or Left and Right or between those who favoured delicacy and those who favoured candour. It was something much more complicated than that, and if one could stand back for a bit as the brickbats flew it provided a fascinating glimpse of the national mood.”

— And this e-mail from a reader: “Your question: ‘Who knew that it would lead to a primetime cop opening in her hallway a box containing a severed head from which maggots crawled for our entertainment?’ (A. Billen, Times2, May 27) Answer: Among thousands of others, except of course media critics such as yourself, Mrs Whitehouse.”

andrew.billen@thetimes.co.uk

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