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Ban This Filth!: Letters From the Mary Whitehouse Archive
The launch of Mary Whitehouse's 'Clean Up TV' campaign (at Birmingham Town Hall in 1964) made this devoutly Christian Shropshire school-teacher a media star overnight. Over the next 37 years, her name became a byword for censoriousness. All the hundreds of letters this redoubtable campaigner sent, and most of the many thousands she subsequently received, were preserved in the archives of her National Viewers and Listeners Association.
Sifting through this unique compendium of outrage and affront, Ben Thompson uncovers a startling new perspective on Mary Whitehouse's stand against a tsunami of swearing and sexual license. Far from the last of a dying breed, might she actually have been the harbinger - if not quite the agent - of a change in the tide of cultural history?
Sifting through this unique compendium of outrage and affront, Ben Thompson uncovers a startling new perspective on Mary Whitehouse's stand against a tsunami of swearing and sexual license. Far from the last of a dying breed, might she actually have been the harbinger - if not quite the agent - of a change in the tide of cultural history?
406 pages, Hardcover
First published October 31, 2012
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About the author
Ben Thompson
6 books2 followersBen Thompson is one of Britain's most respected cultural critics. He currently contributes to the FT, Mojo and the Sunday Telegraph.
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Displaying 1 - 22 of 22 reviews
March 27, 2025
Mary Whitehouse was born with a maximal sense of outrage and a minimal sense of proportion. Ben Thompson has edited together an eclectic mix of Whitehouse’s letters with the aim of explaining how the ‘Nuneaton Nostradamus’ became a household name.
We're told early on that if Mary Whitehouse and her proper Christian course had got its way ‘our artistic heritage would have been immeasurably impoverished.’ It seems easy to believe. Dr. Who, Whitehouse informed the world, was ‘teatime brutality for tots.' Pinky and Perky were no good – they encouraged bullying; all non-religious music merely encouraged anarchy. Some took that as a compliment: Alice Cooper sent Whitehouse a thank-you card after the shrillness of her protests ensured the chart success of evergreen single ‘Schools Out.'
Whitehouse saw moral decay everywhere. People suddenly had the sheer disregard to say ‘bloody’ on national television and even openly reference pre-marital sex. Some, the truly damned, not only referred to oral sex, but admitted it was, in fact, rather nice. The Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour was so ‘filthy’ she pulled out all the stops to ensure it was never broadcast - and almost succeeded. The Kenny Everett Show was a bridge that led people ‘from adult pornography to child pornography’. TV shows, she ranted, showed their contempt for Christianity by their dogged refusal to proselytise for it, or to cave to Whitehouse’s every whim.
Mrs Whitehouse’s acolytes in the National Viewers and Listeners Association (NVLA) get ample space. They're a toxic blend of cringe comedy, pedantry and rank hypocrisy. The NVLAs idea of campaigning for moral rearmament was posting death threats to TV producers and posting child pornography to each other. A long summary written by a member after seeing The Exorcist is a comedy of errors. (‘He [Damien Karras] was seen visiting his aged Italian mother in a poor part of a city. I was at a loss to decide – both then and now – why his mother was in such poor circumstances and why she died later in a mental hospital’.)
The NVLA encouraged its members to watch television between certain hours and record their impressions. If you think the critics that count the number of swear words in James Kelman's novels are uptight to the point of madness, try pages 198-200. Here’s The Day of the Triffids, as filtered through the NVLA:
‘14/3/84, 7.40 pm. One man beating woman with a stick, group of football supporters threaten young woman. One says “I want a woman.” Her defender gets beaten up. Looting. Whip lash violent attacks by triffid plant forms. Blind people hammering on occupied car – their attitudes menacing and frightening.’
Here’s classic comedy The Young Ones:
‘Some lines were funny, but unnecessary violence and vandalism, obscene phrases and gestures, childish references to excrement, phlegm, masturbation etc. made it extremely bad taste. An appealing [sic] thing for children to follow as an example.’
To some, Whitehouse’s Christian evangelism made her a shining beacon in a fog of permissiveness. To wiser heads, she was an obvious, rancid bigot who found corruption wherever she looked for it and often, by sheer coincidence, whenever her media profile was dimming.
One of the few genuinely shocking things in the book is the depth of Whitehouse’s bigotry. There was the racism, sadly common at the time (and place). Even more visceral was her hatred of gays. Acceptance of homosexuality, she said, was 'one of the avowed objectives of Communism.’ Programs that showed gay people as anything other than objects of pity or mere cyphers for the effects of bad parenting encouraged 'the spread of AIDS.'
Like all cranks before and since, Whitehouse liked to spin her bigotries into grandiose conspiracy theories. She genuinely believed a ‘homosexual/intellectual/humanist lobby’ operated out of Oxford, intent on destroying the Christian religion and brainwashing the nation. More disturbing than the number of people that bought it into this was just how high up in society they ranked. One letter, quoted in full, comes from the Scottish Free Presbyterian Church Synod, applauding Whitehouse's 'unflinching stand against sodomites [...] The Synod appreciates your efforts and were glad that they were crowned with success.’
Thompson also asks us to see a different side to Mary Whitehouse. She had, we are assured, a drier sense of humour than commonly supposed, and even an artistic sensibility. She indulged the occasional bout of creativity, producing poems and short stories, though never seeing them into print.
From here it gets strange. Despite her obsessive hatred of gays, Thompson assures us Whitehouse was ‘almost’ a ‘gay icon’. She managed to be not only ‘implicitly Marxist’, but also the woman who inspired Margaret Thatcher’s dress sense. Everyone from Jeremy Paxman to Mumsnet moderators, Thompson claims, has been influenced by her. Whitehouse even found time to become a proto-punk rocker. ‘Punk’, you may be surprised to learn, ‘was a kind of moral re-armament’, and Whitehouse’s poems were 'punk rock songs’. There’s taking a balanced view of your subject, then there’s taking a schizophrenic one.
Thompson’s prose, like his conclusions, rarely holds up to scrutiny and concision seems beyond him. Like many writers, he has a lot to say. Like many unskilled writers, he tries to say it all at once. You wish a sentence like this had been prised apart beforehand, perhaps with the aid of heavy machinery:
‘When the Guinness Book of Records founder and Conservative campaigner Ross McWhirter (who within two years would be assassinated by the IRA after offering a £50,000 reward for information leading to the capture of the gang, whose members ultimately killed him) managed to persuade three judges to place an injunction on the late-night ITV broadcast of an arts documentary – David Bailey’s profile of Andy Warhol – which none of those concerned had actually seen, new IRA boss Brian Young felt confident enough in Mary Whitehouse’s common sense to challenge the legitimacy of her attempts to drum up support for them.’
As a cure for insomnia, Thompson’s writing is useful. For imparting information or cleaving to the point of an argument, it's useless. G.K. Chesterton once said the reformer is not a brother but a supercilious aunt. It seems an apt summary of Mary Whitehouse's career. I wish the editors at Faber and Faber had given this text the same obsessive attention Whitehouse gave the media.
We're told early on that if Mary Whitehouse and her proper Christian course had got its way ‘our artistic heritage would have been immeasurably impoverished.’ It seems easy to believe. Dr. Who, Whitehouse informed the world, was ‘teatime brutality for tots.' Pinky and Perky were no good – they encouraged bullying; all non-religious music merely encouraged anarchy. Some took that as a compliment: Alice Cooper sent Whitehouse a thank-you card after the shrillness of her protests ensured the chart success of evergreen single ‘Schools Out.'
Whitehouse saw moral decay everywhere. People suddenly had the sheer disregard to say ‘bloody’ on national television and even openly reference pre-marital sex. Some, the truly damned, not only referred to oral sex, but admitted it was, in fact, rather nice. The Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour was so ‘filthy’ she pulled out all the stops to ensure it was never broadcast - and almost succeeded. The Kenny Everett Show was a bridge that led people ‘from adult pornography to child pornography’. TV shows, she ranted, showed their contempt for Christianity by their dogged refusal to proselytise for it, or to cave to Whitehouse’s every whim.
Mrs Whitehouse’s acolytes in the National Viewers and Listeners Association (NVLA) get ample space. They're a toxic blend of cringe comedy, pedantry and rank hypocrisy. The NVLAs idea of campaigning for moral rearmament was posting death threats to TV producers and posting child pornography to each other. A long summary written by a member after seeing The Exorcist is a comedy of errors. (‘He [Damien Karras] was seen visiting his aged Italian mother in a poor part of a city. I was at a loss to decide – both then and now – why his mother was in such poor circumstances and why she died later in a mental hospital’.)
The NVLA encouraged its members to watch television between certain hours and record their impressions. If you think the critics that count the number of swear words in James Kelman's novels are uptight to the point of madness, try pages 198-200. Here’s The Day of the Triffids, as filtered through the NVLA:
‘14/3/84, 7.40 pm. One man beating woman with a stick, group of football supporters threaten young woman. One says “I want a woman.” Her defender gets beaten up. Looting. Whip lash violent attacks by triffid plant forms. Blind people hammering on occupied car – their attitudes menacing and frightening.’
Here’s classic comedy The Young Ones:
‘Some lines were funny, but unnecessary violence and vandalism, obscene phrases and gestures, childish references to excrement, phlegm, masturbation etc. made it extremely bad taste. An appealing [sic] thing for children to follow as an example.’
To some, Whitehouse’s Christian evangelism made her a shining beacon in a fog of permissiveness. To wiser heads, she was an obvious, rancid bigot who found corruption wherever she looked for it and often, by sheer coincidence, whenever her media profile was dimming.
One of the few genuinely shocking things in the book is the depth of Whitehouse’s bigotry. There was the racism, sadly common at the time (and place). Even more visceral was her hatred of gays. Acceptance of homosexuality, she said, was 'one of the avowed objectives of Communism.’ Programs that showed gay people as anything other than objects of pity or mere cyphers for the effects of bad parenting encouraged 'the spread of AIDS.'
Like all cranks before and since, Whitehouse liked to spin her bigotries into grandiose conspiracy theories. She genuinely believed a ‘homosexual/intellectual/humanist lobby’ operated out of Oxford, intent on destroying the Christian religion and brainwashing the nation. More disturbing than the number of people that bought it into this was just how high up in society they ranked. One letter, quoted in full, comes from the Scottish Free Presbyterian Church Synod, applauding Whitehouse's 'unflinching stand against sodomites [...] The Synod appreciates your efforts and were glad that they were crowned with success.’
Thompson also asks us to see a different side to Mary Whitehouse. She had, we are assured, a drier sense of humour than commonly supposed, and even an artistic sensibility. She indulged the occasional bout of creativity, producing poems and short stories, though never seeing them into print.
From here it gets strange. Despite her obsessive hatred of gays, Thompson assures us Whitehouse was ‘almost’ a ‘gay icon’. She managed to be not only ‘implicitly Marxist’, but also the woman who inspired Margaret Thatcher’s dress sense. Everyone from Jeremy Paxman to Mumsnet moderators, Thompson claims, has been influenced by her. Whitehouse even found time to become a proto-punk rocker. ‘Punk’, you may be surprised to learn, ‘was a kind of moral re-armament’, and Whitehouse’s poems were 'punk rock songs’. There’s taking a balanced view of your subject, then there’s taking a schizophrenic one.
Thompson’s prose, like his conclusions, rarely holds up to scrutiny and concision seems beyond him. Like many writers, he has a lot to say. Like many unskilled writers, he tries to say it all at once. You wish a sentence like this had been prised apart beforehand, perhaps with the aid of heavy machinery:
‘When the Guinness Book of Records founder and Conservative campaigner Ross McWhirter (who within two years would be assassinated by the IRA after offering a £50,000 reward for information leading to the capture of the gang, whose members ultimately killed him) managed to persuade three judges to place an injunction on the late-night ITV broadcast of an arts documentary – David Bailey’s profile of Andy Warhol – which none of those concerned had actually seen, new IRA boss Brian Young felt confident enough in Mary Whitehouse’s common sense to challenge the legitimacy of her attempts to drum up support for them.’
As a cure for insomnia, Thompson’s writing is useful. For imparting information or cleaving to the point of an argument, it's useless. G.K. Chesterton once said the reformer is not a brother but a supercilious aunt. It seems an apt summary of Mary Whitehouse's career. I wish the editors at Faber and Faber had given this text the same obsessive attention Whitehouse gave the media.
April 4, 2014
What an abominable woman. She basically stood for nearly everything I am opposed to. As an atheist, who is divorced, and has lived with my partner for nine years and had two children 'out of wedlock' (to use that dreadfully outdated turn of phrase) who is anti-censorship (despite actually having no fondness for violence or porn), pro-gay, pro-choice, pro-sex ed and pro-decriminalisation (of drugs) - she would have hated me. I found myself reading this never quite sure what the author actually felt about Whitehouse. The idea anyone could actaully feel sympathy for her bigotry (oh yeah, she was racist too) is a bit disturbing. I found it amusing that she was at first pleased and then gradually disillusioned with Thatcher. Well duh, lady. Economic conservatives use religious 'morality' as a cover to get the afraid masses to vote for them. Then they implement financial policies that are inhumane and surely contrary to every religious tenet. Happens every time.
I found it an interesting insight into the social issues of Britain from the 60s through 80s from a viewpoint I wouldn't necessarily seek out myself. I didn't find it dry. I couldn't put it down. But then I'm used to reading textbooks so my tolerance for dry is probably higher than most. I just wish the author had been less approving of Mary and her narrow-minded bigotry (and I don't find the 'it was at least partly a performance' explanation satisfying at all for many reasons) and her dreadfully brutish tactics. That the people she wrote to maintained such professionalism and politeness in their replies to her constant stream of drivel says great things about them.
I found it an interesting insight into the social issues of Britain from the 60s through 80s from a viewpoint I wouldn't necessarily seek out myself. I didn't find it dry. I couldn't put it down. But then I'm used to reading textbooks so my tolerance for dry is probably higher than most. I just wish the author had been less approving of Mary and her narrow-minded bigotry (and I don't find the 'it was at least partly a performance' explanation satisfying at all for many reasons) and her dreadfully brutish tactics. That the people she wrote to maintained such professionalism and politeness in their replies to her constant stream of drivel says great things about them.
September 6, 2017
The book piqued my interest in a cheap bookshop because I have found discussions about TV and film censorship interesting in the past. Though there was perhaps a bit less of this kind of information than I perhaps expected, there was a lot more biographical detail about the woman and her motivation - which was surprisingly interesting (esp. finding out that both she and Enoch Powell once lived very close to where I lived in Wolverhampton) so overall I was pretty happy with this thoroughly-researched and even-handed biography of the moral campaigner.
January 26, 2013
My first interaction with the name Mary Whitehouse was an interview with her on TV just before her death in 2001. My Nan was babysitting me and proceeded to tell me how much she admired Mary Whitehouse for getting all the ‘filth’ off television. In the decade that followed I was aware of her name mainly through the light mocking of her on various comedy shows and documentaries. By the time I got to university and I was studying Post-War British culture, where Whitehouse always seemed to lurk in the background, my mind was pretty much made up. Conservative privileged lady terrified of the changing times. When my boyfriend bought me this book for my birthday ("it had you written all over it") I thought it was time for a re-evaluation of The Whitehouse.
For the first part of this book I did find myself warming to Mary more than I have done in the past. When I put myself in her shoes, circa. 1950s, it must have been genuinely terrifying that the new medium of television was changing the cultural landscape. It brought to mind a scene in The Krays where, after Mrs Kray is bought a new set by her delightful twin boys, the neighbours come round to marvel at this tiny box as if a spaceship had just landed in her living room. While her tone is sometimes over the top you have to admire her intentions and her gift for letter writing that would blow the average YouTube troll’s mind. The second half the book, however, digs deeper into her more objectionable aspects of character. Her political, religious and homophobic viewpoints muddy the waters of her cause somewhat as thinly veiled social engineering. As any good comedian knows you should always punch upwards, not downwards. So reading Whitehouse’s glee at successfully getting “Gay News” prosecuted under obscenity laws jarred with me. A product of the times or not she saw fit to target an oppressed minority and the rare outlet that they had in the media that (much as Mary would beg to differ) largely ignored them.
All that to one side, Ben Thompson makes a great revisionist case for Whitehouse. I particularly liked the parallels he drew between Mary and the Punk movement as being “two apples from the same tree”. Thompson is clearly enamoured with his subject but by no means shies away from her flaws. What could be just a dry book full of letters is turned into something witty and engaging. He is a writer who has his own distinctive voice, I was only a couple of pages in when I realised that I have read one of his previous books Sunshine on Putty a few years back. I highly recommend.
For the first part of this book I did find myself warming to Mary more than I have done in the past. When I put myself in her shoes, circa. 1950s, it must have been genuinely terrifying that the new medium of television was changing the cultural landscape. It brought to mind a scene in The Krays where, after Mrs Kray is bought a new set by her delightful twin boys, the neighbours come round to marvel at this tiny box as if a spaceship had just landed in her living room. While her tone is sometimes over the top you have to admire her intentions and her gift for letter writing that would blow the average YouTube troll’s mind. The second half the book, however, digs deeper into her more objectionable aspects of character. Her political, religious and homophobic viewpoints muddy the waters of her cause somewhat as thinly veiled social engineering. As any good comedian knows you should always punch upwards, not downwards. So reading Whitehouse’s glee at successfully getting “Gay News” prosecuted under obscenity laws jarred with me. A product of the times or not she saw fit to target an oppressed minority and the rare outlet that they had in the media that (much as Mary would beg to differ) largely ignored them.
All that to one side, Ben Thompson makes a great revisionist case for Whitehouse. I particularly liked the parallels he drew between Mary and the Punk movement as being “two apples from the same tree”. Thompson is clearly enamoured with his subject but by no means shies away from her flaws. What could be just a dry book full of letters is turned into something witty and engaging. He is a writer who has his own distinctive voice, I was only a couple of pages in when I realised that I have read one of his previous books Sunshine on Putty a few years back. I highly recommend.
June 1, 2013
Picture this... A fascinating whilst not damning look at the written work of Mary Whitehouse and the National Viewers and Listeners Association. It would be nice to have more in depth pieces on certain programmes - especially comedy - but this touches on a little bit of everything whilst not opting for the easy demonisation that many could (and some might argue should) throw her way. Picture this...
April 1, 2013
Very funny but what a narrow minded ninny she was. More a book to delve into than devour.
November 8, 2014
dreadful woman, with no sense of humour and worried that you might be enjoying life without Jesus!
August 5, 2025
Epistles of a neo-Victorian reactionary. Mrs. Mary Whitehouse was a longtime gadfly to the BBC upper brass. Informed by her ultraconservative Christian beliefs, she led a counterrevolutionary crusade against the permissive society of postwar Britain. In her self-declared capacity as loyal opposition to the BBC Board, she was a voice for the silent majority of Brits offended by the steadily encroaching tide of nihilistic depravity and filth pushed by the global elite. This book consists of selected correspondence between Mrs. Whitehouse, her various organizational supporters, BBC executives, and clergymen. The editor, whose commentary is interspersed throughout, treats his subject respectfully and with sympathy despite generally disagreeing with her.
Mary Whitehouse was responsible for the most recent criminal blasphemy conviction in the UK, against the publisher of a sodomite newspaper. She often comes off as a pearl-clutching schoolmarm and her media literacy is sometimes lacking. Nevertheless, she was right more often than she was wrong. Mrs. Whitehouse was ahead of the curve in recognizing the destructive impact of pornography on the fabric of society. She stood firm against the internationalism of Edward Heath, the Whiggishness of Labour, and the libertarianism of Margaret Thatcher. If only she had told people to just turn off the damn television.
Mary Whitehouse was responsible for the most recent criminal blasphemy conviction in the UK, against the publisher of a sodomite newspaper. She often comes off as a pearl-clutching schoolmarm and her media literacy is sometimes lacking. Nevertheless, she was right more often than she was wrong. Mrs. Whitehouse was ahead of the curve in recognizing the destructive impact of pornography on the fabric of society. She stood firm against the internationalism of Edward Heath, the Whiggishness of Labour, and the libertarianism of Margaret Thatcher. If only she had told people to just turn off the damn television.
January 20, 2019
I got about 100 pages in before giving up. Too much of this consists the original letters which get repetitive quickly and Thompson's writing is often just as wordy rather than a welcome respite. I could perhaps stomach an essay on Mary Whitehouse but not a whole book
August 5, 2018
Rather than dismissing her as just the archetypal religious-conservative idiot, how about treating her as a scared and angry lady who prefigured modern ambivalence about the extremes of our culture?
OK, so it turns out paying attention doesn’t make her less ridiculous, but she’s certainly no longer alone: moral criticism of pop is an enormous cottage internet industry. Her small-mindedness put her, somehow, on the same lines as nominally compassionate ideology does some of our contemporaries. (The ends meet in the middle?)
Ahem: the actual book. Whitehouse’s letters are just boring, monotonous and prim – the patronising or bureaucratic replies from the BBC or Granada are much more interesting (in which the Establishment stands up for smut). Thomson’s a thorough but overheated curator – for instance when he likens Whitehouse to Lenin because they were each dead good at getting loads of people involved in things. (Call his enthusiasm Golden Hammer Marxism.) Thomson:
Hrm: she's not the reason people use complaint as a political tool! (Particularly not if you view protest as organised complaint. There is a distinction between complaint and protest - one is the expression of distaste, the other the ascription of injustice - but it's tricky for beasts like us to tell them strictly apart.) Was she the prototype? Yeah, maybe. Luckily for us she lost.
OK, so it turns out paying attention doesn’t make her less ridiculous, but she’s certainly no longer alone: moral criticism of pop is an enormous cottage internet industry. Her small-mindedness put her, somehow, on the same lines as nominally compassionate ideology does some of our contemporaries. (The ends meet in the middle?)
Ahem: the actual book. Whitehouse’s letters are just boring, monotonous and prim – the patronising or bureaucratic replies from the BBC or Granada are much more interesting (in which the Establishment stands up for smut). Thomson’s a thorough but overheated curator – for instance when he likens Whitehouse to Lenin because they were each dead good at getting loads of people involved in things. (Call his enthusiasm Golden Hammer Marxism.) Thomson:
From feminist anti-porn campaigns to UK Uncut, the Taliban, and Mumsnet, Mary Whitehouse's monuments are all around us.
Hrm: she's not the reason people use complaint as a political tool! (Particularly not if you view protest as organised complaint. There is a distinction between complaint and protest - one is the expression of distaste, the other the ascription of injustice - but it's tricky for beasts like us to tell them strictly apart.) Was she the prototype? Yeah, maybe. Luckily for us she lost.
March 29, 2016
keeping it simple, this is quite interesting and informative but the writer's style and sentence construction is often quite hard work. Several times I had to re-read a sentence because I reached the end of it with no idea of what it was trying to say, or sometimes with the entirely wrong idea because it had been misleading - which was apparent because it was clearly at odds with the rest of the paragraph.
Also, some of the attempts at humour are a little heavy handed and the ultimate conclusion - that Mary Whitehouse was very successful at being Mary Whitehouse - was weak.
Overall then, more informative than I expected but less entertaining than I had hoped.
Also, some of the attempts at humour are a little heavy handed and the ultimate conclusion - that Mary Whitehouse was very successful at being Mary Whitehouse - was weak.
Overall then, more informative than I expected but less entertaining than I had hoped.
May 19, 2016
An interesting selection of letters from Whitehouse, her colleagues on the campaign trail, and the replies from those they inundated.
However, the editorial from Thompson is at times execrable. There is no call to 'recuperate' the witch queen of censorship. I loathe her, I despise what she stood for. It was not protecting children, it was suppression of anything her world view didn't agree with. Dangerous, and dishonest, to claim otherwise.
However, the editorial from Thompson is at times execrable. There is no call to 'recuperate' the witch queen of censorship. I loathe her, I despise what she stood for. It was not protecting children, it was suppression of anything her world view didn't agree with. Dangerous, and dishonest, to claim otherwise.
May 13, 2018
Me having spent most of the seventies in an alcoholic haze, Mary Whitehouse didn't really appear on my radar beyond "she's off again". I was unlikely then (or now) to have had anything in common with her and this book just reinforces that conclusion. However, there was more to her than met the eye, but I suspect that, as with Margaret Thatcher, any more reading about her would put my blood pressure up. Worth the effort, if only to see the bluntness with which Channel responded to her!
June 2, 2015
A well-researched and nicely edited record of an important time in attitudes to British television that manages to give a more rounded picture of Whitehouse than the narrow-minded dragon most will be familiar with (though her followers didn't deviate very far from this stereotype)...
June 17, 2013
Very dry and boring, only made it halfway through and had to give up.
July 16, 2018
another present I otherwise probably wouldn't have read. Interesting insight into the life and times of Mary Whitehouse.
March 3, 2022
Mary Whitehouse was a kind of bogeyman from my childhood so I approached this book with relish; the cover is great, after all. How disappointed I was! Most of it consists of lengthy and repetitive letters from Mary and her association members which are dry and dull. Elsewhere there are endless court transcripts which are even less interesting. The author writes in a droll style, but he seems to lack an editor, self or otherwise, so his endless analogies and long-winded ways of explaining things eventually become tiresome and I was forced to skim in this one in the end.
August 28, 2022
Great idea- going through Mary Whitehouse’s archives but Thompson’s writing and analysis of events are terrible.
I’m hoping one day we’ll get a better book like Kenneth Williams Unseen in which rareties from an archive are published and the writing isn’t sub par.
Another criticism of Thompson’s book- there’s hardly anything on the Video Nasties moral panic which was arguably Whitehouse’s biggest campaign.
I’m hoping one day we’ll get a better book like Kenneth Williams Unseen in which rareties from an archive are published and the writing isn’t sub par.
Another criticism of Thompson’s book- there’s hardly anything on the Video Nasties moral panic which was arguably Whitehouse’s biggest campaign.
June 19, 2025
The detail in this book is remarkable, a lot of research has obviously been undertaken. She is a fascinating case study, Mrs Whitehouse. Whilst her fanaticism will amaze and annoy at times, her conscience and her rantings still have resonance and relevance today.
Read
December 31, 2021Read for uni so no rating but honestly would have read this for fun, a super engaging look at Mary Whitehouse and excellent use of primary source material.
June 19, 2023
A very interesting book, but the author's own beliefs led to some biased interpretations at times.
December 9, 2013
Interesting slice of British cultural history.
Displaying 1 - 22 of 22 reviews