The admirable Mrs Whitehouse

Richard West

The BBC, which is 60 years old this year, recently put out a television film on the first 30 years of its radio service. Those like mYself, who are old enough to remember some of those programmes, and those too Young to remember ITMA, Dick Barton and Workers' Playtime, were nevertheless united in finding the programme delightful; its simply for its nostalgic qualities but for !ts good entertainment. On the same even- ing this programme appeared, the BBC gave us a replay from its more recent ar- chives: one instalment of its satirical pro- gramme That Was The Week That Was, dating from 1962. I never thought at the time that TWTWTW merited staying up late to watch. Twenty years later, it seems just ghastly. Even the few good jokes were killed when spoken by people like David Prost. Most of the script was rude and Petulant. Above all, it failed as satire because it attacked only the more obvious bogey figures in politics, the police, the law and the literary establishment. It was in ef- fect like those satire shows one is taken to see in Eastern Europe where fun is made of bureaucrats but not of the Communist sYstem as such. And TWTWTW did not at- tack the received liberal opinion as typified by the BBC. Indeed, the BBC in some way resembles a totalitarian state: over-staffed, self-serving, corrupt (in the way that some executives and most union members feather their nests or fiddle expenses) and above all it is secretive. As Private Eye has discovered, the BBC fires any employee who talks to the press about its corruption, nd gives financial support to anyone bring- ing a libel action.

,...The BBC that gave us That Was The *leek That Was was solidly liberal or left- wIng, libertarian in morality, hostile to the Police and champion of the non-white races. Four-fifths of its television executives cattle from the old middle-class and had gone to Oxford or Cambridge. Partly from Ideological doctrine, partly from old- fashioned social disdain, the BBC has loathed and tried, when possible, to sup- press the two people in England who have a genuine grass-roots support, who are not torn the old middle-class and who were in- deed once neighbours in Wolverhampton: Enoch Powell and Mary Whitehouse. It was they who warned of the dangers of, respectively, coloured immigrants and porn- ography. As late as 1981 Mrs Whitehouse was told by someone inside the BBC that she was one of the only two people whose names have to be 'referred up' before being

invited on television: 'One is Enoch Powell and the other is you'.

It was in fact watching the BBC that set Mrs Whitehouse off on her famous cam- paign. A group of the fourth form girls she was teaching wanted to ask her about one of the television programmes on sex that preached what then was described by the BBC as 'the new morality'. In 1963, the year of the John Profumo affair and the

Bishop of Woolwich's Honest to God, the BBC gave ever greater licence to scenes of various kinds of sex. What she saw as a general attack on morality and authority appeared to be mounted from public funds.

As Christopher Booker wrote in The Neophiliacs (quoted here by Mrs Whitehouse): 'That Was The Week That Was was watched as an obsessive ritual by millions of people with its huge team of

writers earning comparatively astronomical sums for mass producing personal abuse and bitter attacks on every kind of authority'. Propagating the 'new morality' was swiftly becoming a lucrative branch of the Sex Industry, now an immense corpora- tion embracing pornography, contracep- tion, sex education and abortion.

The campaign to clean up the BBC went on to encounter the ITA and all kinds of pornographers. Some battles were lost, like

the prosecution of Inside Linda Lovelace, where the defence called expert witnesses

such as the late Kenneth Tynan, Molly Parkin and Dr Richards. Here is an instance of Dr Richards's learned advice:

Counsel: 'This is a picture of a female in chains, tied up and a naked man poin- ting a sword at the woman's genitals .. Dr Richards: 'This is for the public good because it produces a masturbatory situation. I would certainly prescribe this for a patient.'

Counsel: 'Picture of a naked man with a cat of ninetails striking a woman on genitals.'

Dr Richards: 'This can stimulate a man. It has great therapeutic value'.

Some of Mrs Whitehouse's battles ended in victory. It was largely thanks to her that a Dane was prevented from coming here to make a homosexual film about Christ. She brought a successful action for criminal

blasphemy against Gay News. She writes

with humour and some affection of the Australian barrister Geoffrey Robertson who was one of the two defence counsels; she has less affection for Robertson's senior colleague John Mortimer.

In the aftermath of the Gay News trial, Mrs Whitehouse was shocked by the hatred

of 'gays' who showed her photograph next to that of Hitler. But anyone who is good at conducting rallies — like Mrs Whitehouse — is bound to invoke the Hitler com- parison. We do not like rabble-rousers.

Furthermore, Mrs Whitehouse is rather shifty about the financial support for her many campaigns. Does it come from Moral Rearmament, or the Oxford Group as she calls that organisation? Most of us are in- clined to suspect such religious pressure groups that work outside the established churches, that claim a special relationship with God, that are short on doubt and humility. However it must be said that Mrs

Whitehouse got little help from the Archbishop of Canterbury in fighting the blasphemy of the poem in Gay News. She understandably abhors such clergymen as the Rev Paul Oestreicher.

And surely Mrs Whitehouse was almost entirely right. Pornography does incite the most unpleasant, perverted sex crimes such as the rape of small girls, incest and sadism. It is commercial and also corrupt in the financial sense: the London Vice Squad that seemed unwilling to prosecute porno- graphers were in fact taking bribes. Again, Mrs Whitehouse understood from the start that pornography harms children. It not only gives them a loveless and cruel idea of sex but robs them of childhood. A recent article in the Sunday Times, that voice of the 'new morality', described how a team of Australian sociologists had inter- viewed eight-year-old children in England and Sweden, and found that the English were hopelessly backward because, unlike the Swedes, they could not name five dif- ferent kinds of contraceptive device. 'Heaven lies about us in our infancy', Wordsworth wrote; but not in Sweden evidently. Just as Mr Gradgrind, in Dickens, tried to instil in children facts and science, and filed to drive out stories of dwarfs, goblins and fairies, so our modern ideologues try to instil in children joyless, adult notions.

It is a very good joke against the BBC that everything Mrs Whitehouse said is now becoming accepted wisdom in liberal think- ing. The feminists have at last understood that pornography debases women. When the Yorkshire Ripper was still at large, a number of left-wing feminists wrote to The Times to protest at the films on circuit that seemed to encourage violent attacks on women; next to their letters appeared one from Mrs Whitehouse saying the same thing. Now an English feminist has produc- ed a documentary film attacking por- nography in Canada and the United States. Feminist writers in Spare Rib and the Guar- dian rant away at pornography as worse even than Sexual Harrassment at Work. And they are right. Pornography does cor- rode respect for women just as it poisons the minds of children. Far from being a 'therapy' or an 'aid to masturbation', porno- graphy really incites to crime. We now learn from her memoirs that Linda Lovelace, whose putative story started the court case seven years ago, was beaten up and sexually brutalised by the man who also exploited her in a film, in a book and as a prostitute.