Horror of horrors! Can it really be the case that UK Christian Right stalwart Mary Whitehouse (1910-2001)  has returned from the dead, or is this just a BBC play about the life of the dreadful elderly female moralist?

Mary Whitehouse was the inspiration for many another of her ilk across the world- Fred Nile invited her to tour Australia in the seventies, and she probably corresponded with her celibate Catholic counterpart down here, the similarly late Patricia Bartlett. Whitehouse got her start earlier than Bartlett though, and began her National Viewers and Listeners Association (NVALA- now Mediawatch UK) in the mid-sixties, in response to the BBC’s openness to modern cultural influences and changing attitudes about profanity, nudity, sexuality, drugs, and religion.

She was disparaged throughout the seventies, but is reviled within the British UK LGBT communities for her victory against Gay News in 1979, and her revival of the archaic “offence” of “blasphemy” when that publication printed James Kirkup’s awful poem about Christ and a gay centurion, “The Love That Dares to Speak its Name.” Fortunately, Gay News had friends, which paid its court costs, but the magazine collapsed soon after.

At the same time, Margaret Thatcher had come into power, and combined New Right fervour for slashed government spending and privatisation with conservative Christian moralism, resulting in greater respectability and an increased profile for Whitehouse, who found a new target in her campaign against cheap, newly available video horror or violent crime films, labelled “video nasties.”

After Thatcher was deposed in 1990, and the Conservative Party’s hold on power began to irretrievably erode due to factionalism, Whitehouse found that her advanced age was no match for continuing cultural liberalisation. Her fate was rather like that of Patricia Bartlett down here, who died at about the same time.

As with Bartlett too, Whitehouse was one of the foremost figures of a cohort of conservative Christian female ‘moral guardians’ who opposed feminism, LGBT rights, free speech, and all of the other indices of social liberalisation.  With a handful of exceptions, those women have now died off, leaving conservative Christian politics a “boy’s club”. Whitehouse has reverted to the figure of ignorant, prurient and prudish censorious curmudgeonry that she was held to be before the dark days of Thatcher and the eighties in the United Kingdom.  Incidentally, much like its equally shrivelled New Zealand counterpart, the Society for Promotion of Community Standards, NVALA outlived its founder, but in a more diminutive form.

One is entitled to wonder what a similar series about Patricia Bartlett would be like.  Come to think of it, isn’t it about time that someone did produce a life story of the Wimple of Wrath?

Recommended:

David Tracy: Whitehouse: London: Macmillan: 1980.