Self-appointed conscience of Britain

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32637, 19 June 1971, Page 7

Self-appointed conscience of Britain

(By

SIMON KAVANAUGH)

“I think God has a better sense of humour than Mrs Mary Whitehouse,” observed the comedian, Peter Cook, earlier this year.

Certainly it was Mrs Whitehouse rather than the Almighty who had laid a complaint, under the rarely invoked Blasphemy Act, against Mr Cook and the 8.8. C. over a television skit in which the comedian played God.

; Mary Whitehouse may not be Britain’s foremost bellylaugher, but she does without rest on the seventh day in her self-elected role as the nation’s public conscience. The 60-year-old former teacher has fought the increasing onslaught of the permissive society tirelessly over the last seven years. And if many see her non-stop objections to the mass media’s preoccupation with sex. nakedness, violence, and blasphemy as a trifle absurd,

and her efforts to prevent them a danger to democratic freedom, as many if not more ordinary British families agree with her. MIDDLE-AGED APPROVAL Her National Viewers’ and Listeners* Association has more than a million supporters. Every time she reaches for writing paper to complain in the press, or to the people involved, about the latest act of public permissiveness she knows she will get at least as many hods of approval from midle-aged, middle-class Britons like herself as .she Will baffled laughs from the

young. "When you’ve lived a commonplace life like me it’s difficult suddenly to find your name splattered all over the newspapers,” said Mrs Whitehouse, whose name now has as clear associations with anti-permissiveness in the public mind as Enoch Powell’s has with anti-immi-gration—and so is the butt of occasional easy jokes by comedians.

“Before I started the campaign, I had an almost pathological fear of publicity, and for the first few years afterwards I was permanently sick in the stomach with apprehension,” Mrs Whitehouse says. Not only did she give up her privacy, and lay herself open to the distressing letters from cranks and telephone calls endemic to making a public moral stand on any issue, she also had to give up her job as a schoolteacher (with responsibility for sex education) and the pension that would have followed it after two more years work.

But the nine children she brought up—three of her own, and six wartime evacuees—are grown up, and her husband works for a firm of coppersmiths, so that she is able to devote most of her time to her role as watchdog. And she is unequivocal about her views on public morality. “OBSESSED WITH SEX”

“I would certainly say there was too much openness about sex today," she says. “Ten or even 20 years ago, I think the atmosphere was much more healthy. We have become obsessed with sex now. There is so much of it everywhere that it amounts almost to an attack on pri-

vacy. "I am not saying that we should go back to the Victorian idea. People don’t realise that we had come a long way from that 20 years a?o—1 was always able to talk to my son about sex and answer his questions quite openly, and most other people of my age did the same. We certainly were not against sex.

“But I think that a lot of what is happening today is anti-sex, anti-life and antijoy. Sex and love are an adventure, and discovering them is part of life. We’re denying children the right to be themselves and develop at their own pace—not the pace decided by the media men.” Mary Whitehouse has not confined her complaints to sexual explicitness. She complained, too, about an evening television documentary that showed a man naked and facing the camera. And comedian Frankie Howard’s bawdy television series “Up Pompeii,** came in for a roasting. VARIETY OF GROUNDS Explicit sex gets a hammering from Mrs Whitehouse on a variety of grounds—religious (“what I do is the work of God”); of being antiart, of insulting people’s intelligence, of corrupting the young, and, not least, of encouraging violence. “Any serious student of the violent society," she wrote in a letter to the “Evening Standard,** “will know that permissiveness in sex has gone hand in hand with increased violence.”

There is no doubt that even many of the people who do not agree with her now take Mrs Whitehouse seriously. Mrs Whitehouse would like to see an ombudsman watching broadcasting. Although she admits that there may be less need for strihgent control of the theatre and cinema because they are not projected into private homes, she says: “The trouble is that they influence television, and you cannot turn a television set off until after something has happened. You cannot really separate these things.” , Groups who might want to 1 destroy society should not be given television time, says Mrs Whitehouse. “We are fools if we do not realise that television can be used to promote anarchistic ideas.” QUEEN’S BROADCAST Monarchic ideas, however, are another thing altogether. When the Queen decided to discontinue her annual Christi mas broadcasts, Mrs Whitehouse petitioned her to think again. “Within our own family, the whole of our Christmas afternoons have been built round the broadcasts,” she said. It is easy to laugh at Mrs Whitehouse, but not so easy to dismiss her. She is 'not a “nutcase,” nor is she a fanatical puritan. She is rather ordinary and unsophisticated housewife and mother, genuinely worried about the increase in venereal disease, violence, and disillusion with society among the young, and feels that blame for much of those changes since her own youth can be laid at the door of the mass media.

“All the present permissiveness is a direct result of middle-aged entrepreneurs, the creative people, writers and actors, who nave always had their own unique moral code,” she says. “The difference nowadays is that instead of keeping it to themselves they have used the fantastically potent medium of television which is part of the family.” AUTOBIOGRAPHY Her anti-permissive book, “Cleaning Up TV,” was once burned on television by Alt Garnett, in the person of Warren Mitchell. It reflected the extremes of feeling the mild Mrs Whitehouse arouses both for and against her campaign. She sums up neatly attitudes to herself in the title of her'forthcoming autobiography, “Who does she think she is?” An answer could be: Mrs Average Briton.