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From Wondery, I'm Alice Levine. And I'm Matt Ford. And this is British Scandal. So that's it, Matt, for our series on the Queen of Clean, Mrs Mary Whitehouse. She's obviously got a tricky legacy to try and unpick.
Yes, obviously on one hand it's a David and Goliath story of her taking on the liberal elite, the establishment of the BBC, but then it's also about nasty attacks on the gay community. Yeah, you can't deny her influence though, no matter where you fall on her ideology. Thatcher, letters from the Pope, a say in who was at the top of the BBC. Yes, and of course the fateful five-breasted painting. LAUGHTER
that the Director General had commissioned. Woe betide anyone who tries to make a mockery of Mary Whitehouse. I'm still trying to find a print of that. We've explored what the campaigns were like from Mary's point of view, but what was it like in the eye of the storm within the BBC? We've got a really exciting interview for you
for you today. David Dimbleby is a journalist and presenter who's worked at the BBC for over 50 years, presenting Question Time and commentating on the country's most significant cultural events. In fact, he's not just part of the BBC. For many people, he is the BBC. He also interviewed Mary in 1979. He joins us next.
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David, thank you so much for joining us on British Scandal. You were at the BBC in the 1960s and, of course, for many decades after that. But what was the BBC like at the time? It was a time of big change in the BBC because from the moment that Hugh Carlton Green became Director General, the BBC, which had been very...
stuffy and old-fashioned and small-c conservative, tried to take a leap into the modern world, I suppose is the way to put it. And Hugh Green was very keen on this and he commissioned all kinds of stuff.
including, I think, That Was the Week That Was, which was the first sort of attempt to make a bit of fun of politicians and mock them a bit. Exciting new plays, Dennis Potter and people like that writing what are called social realism plays, trying to
make the BBC more reflective of the world that we were living in in the 60s, which was a very fast-changing world. And I think he thought it was absurd for the BBC not to reflect that and to be left behind, still being very respectable and careful about the way it did things. So he certainly tried to loosen the reins a bit on the BBC, with good effect.
You mentioned how fast changing the world was, huge social and cultural change. What was your sense of what was happening? How did you feel about it? Well, it was odd, really. I mean, I wasn't really part of the sort of swinging 60s in the sense that I was working as a reporter and I was travelling abroad and making films and things. But
Every time you came back to London, you were aware of one or two friends who were part of what was called the scene at the time. I mean, involved in pop music or fashion or whatever.
I suppose the biggest change was the pill, actually, the contraceptive pill. Because I remember in the early 60s, people suddenly, from being rather cautious in the 50s about having sex with each other, suddenly it became something that was accepted as normal and wasn't a great issue for a period. I mean, for a decade or so, or more, I think, it was treated like part of the relationship, part of the conversation you had with people. So, no.
Not getting pregnant really unleashed the appetites. I think that's what happened. And it was not just that, obviously, it was fashion and it was youth, certainly, because I mean, I wasn't a child of the 60s. I was a child of the 50s.
And I went to school where we dressed in suits. And in the holidays, I wore cabaret twill trousers and sports jackets, you know, jeans, for instance. I remember when I went to university and jeans came in. It's difficult to convey this now, but there was a sea change and it was driven by music. It was driven by fashion. And as I say, I think it was driven by culture.
sex being a much safer activity. So that what you did have was a repositioning of society for the young, particularly for the young, not for everybody, but for the young, a feeling that why should we be hidebound? Why should we stick with the attitudes of the post-war years, the 40s and 50s, which had been a period of considerable austerity
In the 50s, there was a feeling that the only way, you know, to survive as a state, as a country, as a society, was to revert to old fashioned values of decency and fair dealing and propriety and honesty and all that. And I think this was just very stultifying for young people. They thought we can't go on living like that.
So the spirit of the 60s was very powerful, even if, like me, you weren't actually out dancing at nightclubs till four in the morning, dressed in, you know, new... I don't know what people wore, what people wore. I just went on dressed as I was, I think. Mary Whitehouse obviously saw that sea change as dangerous and corruptive. Although she represented a constituency of people, do you think her views reflected the views of the mainstream, of the majority?
I think it's very difficult to say. I think that people are always a bit suspicious of people who have a single cause.
And Mary Whitehouse, quite rightly, in terms of her view of the world, decided the BBC should be the cause. That's what she should attack, because that was the vehicle for the spread of these liberal ideas. So she chose the BBC and honed in on the BBC, which a lot of people don't.
as today, hugely admired and respected. And in those days, after all, it was pretty much all there was. I mean, ITV had barely started, you know. BBC Two had only just started at the beginning of the 60s.
So this single attack on the BBC, I think, did open her up to a kind of ridicule. On the other hand, it's perfectly obvious that there were a lot of people who felt like her. I mean, when you see the pictures of her meetings, the famous meeting in Birmingham, for instance, it looks like a lot of middle-aged to late middle-aged women. Well, they may be the people who turned up at the meeting, but I'm sure that her...
idea that somehow the BBC was proselytising for a new kind of society which many people didn't feel comfortable with, and probably did reflect an attitude that was shared with people who never raised their head above the parapet. I mean, there's no way of knowing this. To me, the interesting way of looking at Mary Whitehouse is to think what she would make of today.
and how she would say, "You see, I was right, I was right. We now have children having their first sexual experiences watching people having anal sex on their iPhones. Is that the world you wanted?" she'd say. "Is that what sex is about?" So she was, in a strange way, she detected something happening.
that she thought would lead to the downfall of all the standards she believed in. And she was always very careful to say she didn't mind. It wasn't what people did in private she minded about. She didn't mind what people did in private. In fact, when I interviewed her, which I did in
the late 70s, she said, I don't mind what people get up to in their bedrooms. That's not my business at all. What I don't like is these bedroom scenes being put before the public as they're expected to share, as though they're forced to be part of it. If she were alive today and campaigning as she did now, she'd have huge support because
thousands, millions of people think something's gone wrong with the way that pornography, for instance, is shown on, not on television, but the things that you can get online, that kids get online. We know all about that, you know, and the effect. We don't know about the effect it has, but we have deep suspicions about the effect it has on people's view of sexuality, for instance. If Mary Whitehouse had been hauling her flag up the mast now,
I think she'd have a huge constituency behind her. So in a strange way, she may have been somebody who detected something that was going to turn into a real problem. So she was almost prophetic, right?
In a strange way, yes, I think she was prophetic. Yes, I think she was. I mean, she was also absurd, you know, in the way that she put things. I mean, I remember when I interviewed her, we watched a scene, again, it was a Dennis Potter film, Pennies from Heaven, the beginning, and it has a really sad opening scene where a husband has clearly tried to coerce his wife into
into a sort of display of her body to excite him. And what he wanted was that she painted her nipples red. I think the lipstick it was. And on the television screen, you see the horrible kind of awkwardness of the wife trying to bring the husband back to her because he's been disaffected and he's obviously always sort of longed for her to
do something sexual that he would be excited by, and she's finally done it. And she just reveals her breasts, really hideous embarrassment as she does it. And then he looks at her and says, "Oh, you've done it for me, you've done it." It's really sad and terrifying to watch. Now, that was shown
on television. I don't believe actually that it will be shown today. I think people would say it was too exploitative, not of the actors, too exploitative as an issue to show that way, that it was too demeaning to see it. I don't know. I mean, it was, you know, they were in the age of Last Tango in Paris and all that when all kinds of scenes were shown on television. But the interesting thing about Mary Whitehouse was that
She wasn't kind of prudish about that because I remember talking about it to her and she'd sort of slightly laugh about it and say, she'd say, David, you know, and they painted lipstick on the nipples, sort of demonstrating where it was done, not revealing her, not revealing herself, just demonstrating where it was done and sort of chuckling about it and saying, I didn't mind, you know, people do anything in private. I don't mind that. So,
She did, I mean, she was quite interesting about oral sex. She said, you'd think nobody had ever heard of it because there was talk about in discussion programmes, things about sexuality and what you can do. She said, what people forget though is a lot of people have had perfectly good sex without ever having oral sex.
you don't have to have aural, you know. So she did have a puritanical side about how things should be done and how people should behave. But she didn't want to impose that puritanism, that's my point. She wasn't imposing her own
her own sort of private values, she was concerned about the impact of imposing what she thought of as private issues, private conundrums, private behaviour on a public and in particular on children. So again, she was trying to protect the vulnerable, I think is what she thought, or the susceptible
or people who hadn't had time to experience life, to know, and were having things thrust at them which she thought were dangerous, which is why I make the point that had she been alive today, I think she would have been, in a way, you know, a heroine to many people. The other thing about her is she, I mean, she was very, very good operator. You know, she wasn't... Hugh Carlton Green tried to sort of brush her off and wouldn't speak to her and everything, which was, I think...
really silly of him. And he was a liberaliser in the BBC, true. He wanted to reflect what he thought of as a more liberal society, quite right. He encouraged a sort of more sceptical, lighter touch about politics, quite right, and about social life too. And of course the BBC had to reflect what was going on. But I think where he was arrogant...
And the BBC is often accused, well, it's accused all the time of its arrogance because it's so big and powerful. But he was arrogant in not being willing to listen to her. And that was a very illiberal thing. You know, he should have listened to her.
He banned her from the airwaves and he wouldn't meet her, you know, and I think that was not right. I mean, not only was Mary Whitehouse not listened to, initially she was grossly underestimated. What do you think the view of her from the BBC was? Well, I think at first they simply thought angry housewife from Essex and that's
Then she started to bombard them with letters and I think they thought, "Very irritating woman, must shut her up, you know, what do we do about this one? Oh, put it in the bin, another Mary Whitehouse." It was kind of cliche, Mary Whitehouse won't like this, Mary Whitehouse won't like that. There's a good moment when I was talking to her, when she explained what she did when members of her Viewers and Listeners Association objected to films.
She'd say, "Don't write to me. This is the address. Write to the BBC." So the BBC would keep on getting letters from people via Mary Whitehouse without them realising it was necessarily from Mary Whitehouse. So this bombardment of letters. And then the VALA, the Viewers and Listeners Association, got going. And it was clear that it had many thousands of members. I don't know, we never actually knew. She never actually published how many were paid-up members.
But I think she was never really taken seriously for a long time. And in fact, the reason I did this interview with her was we were interviewing people who had sort of had an impact on social life, but whose impact hadn't been explored. People who had taken a contrary view to the accepted view of the way the world was. People who had had an idea and stuck to it and
in a way changed people's attitudes by that. And I think Meriwet House falls into that category.
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The person-to-person interview that you conduct with her in 1979, where you go and spend a day with her and you do various things with her, you talk to her husband, obviously shows her in more detail and depth than perhaps people might have seen of her elsewhere. Was there any element of her character that surprised you? Was there more to her than the stereotype people might have seen at the time?
Two things, yes. One is her intelligence, because she'd been widely depicted by people who didn't know anything about her as a bit of a bigot. And secondly, her sense of humour. You know, she was always very amusing and jolly. I mean, serious, but, you know, she had a good sense of humour and she was sharp and she was never rude to people. She never insulted people.
the BBC, when in later years she was on programmes and panels arguing about what the BBC was doing, she would be insistent about her point.
But she accepted it was just another point of view, not the point of view to hold. This is just my, Mary Whitehouse's point of view and my organisation. And I've got a lot of people behind me. And it was listen to our voice because you are the BBC and it's your job. We pay for the BBC like everybody else. And it's your job to listen to us. So she wasn't a kind of firebrand and she wasn't by any means, she wasn't sort of stupid. She was, you know, cunning and clever and,
and strategic, I think, in the way she thought about the BBC and how to have an effect on what it broadcast.
As you say, she comes across as good-natured and a kind of compelling sparring partner, not as a nut or a zealot. A huge part of her effectiveness with her campaign against the BBC was how she mobilised housewives across the country to use their voices. That's an extraordinary word for you to use. Can you say that again? Which one? Housewives? Yes. What do you mean by housewives? What?
I'm using the terminology of the time, David. Wash your mouth out. I'm purely using the anachronistic terminology of the time. But that was a word that she would have used. And I think she recognised the power of homemakers and how she could mobilise them and how actually that was probably her secret weapon because it was important that the viewers were holding the BBC to account.
Yes, I think it all goes back to family. She had a strong belief in the importance of family. And by family, she meant a father and mother married, looking after their children until the children were grown up. And she's interesting when she talks about her parents' divorce, she makes great play with the fact that they didn't divorce until the children were adults.
And they had a very happy childhood, she said. So I think her idea was that society needed the nuclear family and that the job of the parents was to bring the children up properly in a morally upright way, understanding the complexity of the world and not being led astray by fantasies about how life could be.
and particularly not being led astray on issues of sexual morality, which she was very certain about in her own mind. I don't think she believed in sex before marriage. I think she gave a kind of grudging acknowledgement
that some people were homosexual, or as she put it, they call themselves gay, I think she said in a rather strange expression, they call themselves gay. I think she accepted that there were aspects of human behaviour which didn't accord to her norm, but she believed that society was best served the norm of homosexuality.
families staying together, mother and father in a faithful relationship, at least until they brought up their children. It was children she was obsessed by. And she thought that this liberation of the 60s would lead children astray, lead them down a dangerous path and a destructive path for themselves. And of course, the background to this was her religious faith.
I mean, she was a member of the Oxford movement and was sort of an evangelical, I suppose is the best way of putting it now, the festival of light they had. So that's the background you have to understand if you were to understand Mary Whitehouse. She was a deeply religious person and she believed that she was doing God's work. And if you don't get that bit of her, I think you don't really understand her. She wasn't just somebody saying,
oh, it's disgusting what's going on. She really believed it was wrong. And that's why she fought as she did for children. She was a teacher. She taught sex education to children, for goodness sake. She just didn't want what, in her view, was a perversion of human behaviour to become orthodox. MUSIC
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I mean, she had a cause and to get the cause across, she needed to get publicity. And when she began to get publicity, she certainly lapped it up. But I think she lapped it up because she felt she was winning something. She was winning the argument. People were coming to her meetings. BBC was interviewing her. I was sent to do a whole day's interview with her. Of course she loved all that because it was victory for her that people were listening.
So I think yes, that but she wasn't a word I want. What is the word you describe people who go completely mad about publicity? What are they called? A demagogue. That's it. Yes. She had a cause. She had a case she wanted to make. And she wanted to make it public and she wanted to get public support. So of course,
As she got publicity, she relished it and she was very good at handling it. She was always, you know, she liked to be the centre of attention. In the billing for her meetings, it changed from being Mrs Ernest Whitehouse, her husband's name, conventional way of doing it at the time, to being Mrs Mary Whitehouse. She realised that she was the sort of focal point. She was the one who got the attention. She was the one people came to see, this Mary Whitehouse.
And as that publicity grew, I think she relished it. But she wasn't a kind of demagogue. She didn't she wasn't, you know, standing on the platform ranting away. Her public appearances were always persuasively bad.
She didn't shout at people. She didn't sort of hammer away. It was using publicity and actually learning how to use it over the years as a way of getting across a message. So you have to go back all the time to what was the message she wanted to get across. And that's the thing that drove her. She wasn't a publicity seeker. She wasn't an attention getter. She didn't just think, oh, the BBC has gone a bit over the rails. I can have some fun by saying,
you know, by mocking them. She was on a crusade to change the BBC and society and to change the BBC as the first step towards changing society's view of the way it was going. And do you think you describe her charming communication style and the way that she spoke on television and in person at live events? Yes. Do you think that was a reflection of her true character or is she a beggar who was just a shrewd communicator?
I spent a day with her and I never felt she was a bigot. I thought she was always... I mean, bigots won't listen to you. Bigots won't argue back. Bigots won't take on board, you know, the points you make. Bigots won't accept any kind of criticism.
Bigots won't be stopped in their tracks. And she always was. I mean, when I make point to her about whether this or that actually mattered or whether she got it right, she'd always listen carefully and then argue back about it. I mean, for instance, when we were talking about whether sex scenes could be shown after midnight because there'd be.
No children watching then because she objected to the nine o'clock watershed when you could loosen up what you showed on television. And she said to me, yes, I haven't thought of that. I'm not sure about that. So she wasn't a bigot and she wasn't a sort of tub thumper, which in a way people at the time, I think, tried to portray her as that because anybody who raises objections to something that has happened
becoming, you know, orthodox, like the swinging 60s, whatever you like to call it. Anyone who says, actually, this is, I don't agree with this. I think there are dangers in this, does get ridiculed and mocked. We are actually, in a very conventional society. We're very easy to mock people whose views we disagree with. And I think she was mocked.
But her arguments were always ones she wanted to win by reason, not by frightening people, not by forcing them to her point of view. She wanted to get through to people why she thought things that were happening on television were dangerous, were wrong and dangerous. And she would just go on arguing that because it's fundamentally what she believed. And for that, all credit to her.
because those are arguments that needed to be had. And as I say, with hindsight, you can see that the arguments that she had in the 60s were arguments we're still having today, only in a much more febrile world.
People might have some sympathy with her views on pornography and the watershed, the sexualisation of society. They might take a very different view of her views on homosexuality. I mean, she was effectively homophobic. So in that regard, would it be fair to call her a bigot? Yeah. Actually, you know, I think she just probably didn't understand homosexuality. I think it was off her radar because remember...
The law on homosexual relations had only just been changed, and was changed in the 60s. And I think people were very ignorant, actually, about sexuality.
and about people's sexual instincts. We understand the complexity of sexuality much better now. Mary Whitehouse didn't understand the complexity of sexuality. I think that's true. She didn't understand the nature of sexual desire. She had a very narrow view about what sexual relationships should be. She, I think, clearly
didn't think that being gay was a perversion. She probably feels sorry for people who were gay because she did have a very narrow orthodoxy in her view about human relations and how they should be conducted. So on a human level, I think she was a sympathetic person. But I think in terms of the structure of society, she would think that
Homosexuality was an aberration that men and women who came out as gay were to be pitied. I think she would think that they're not able to follow the true path, which is the path of man and woman coming together in marriage to procreate. And that's really what she believed in.
And she believed that that kind of society where that was the norm, which it certainly isn't today, that that kind of society would be the good society and incidentally, the society that her God wanted. That's what I think. Do you think that we could describe Mary Whitehouse as the original cancel culture figurehead? Just think about this.
Cancel culture is refusing to hear voices you disagree with. That's my definition of cancel culture, which is why I'm very much against it. I don't think Mary Whitehouse was a cancel culture person. She wanted to hear the voices of people who disagreed with her. She enjoyed argument. She enjoyed putting her case, which she believed in fervently, but she never refused to listen.
to people who disagreed with her, she'd argue with them. In an odd way, the cancel culture in Mary Whitehouse's case was the BBC who decided that she should be cancelled, if you think about it, that she shouldn't be given a voice. She was no platformed. She was no platformed by the BBC, yes. It's curious, isn't it? It's the opposite of what you'd think.
You'd think she was trying to stifle voices. Well, she was trying to prevent voices being broadcast. True. So in that sense, I suppose you could say there was an element of cancel culture in her. If cancel culture is saying that you object to certain sex scenes being on television or whatever, she would be against that, yes. But the people who really cancelled her
And no-platformed her with the BBC, with Hugh Green. Refused even to speak to her. That's odd, isn't it? It's odd if you think about it. Because the conventional view would be that she wanted to stop people doing things and saying things that she didn't like because she was a Puritan and objected to. But when the voice of the Puritan is not allowed to be heard, who is the counsellor? Who is the no-platformer? Maybe they both are.
Well, maybe we all ought to listen more carefully to what other people say.
Well, indeed, there's something she says to you in that interview. I'm going to read it back to you now. She says, David, I have a feeling. I don't know whether I'll be proved right or not. I may not live long enough to say, but I have a feeling that when we get to the year 2000, say, and we can look back, I think when we look back on the last couple of decades, because I think things are changing rapidly, that people will feel that far from being a period of liberation and progress, it will have in fact been a thoroughly reactionary period of our history.
I don't believe that what has happened in the last couple of decades has in any way been progress, not on any level whatever, but we've never been such a sex-obsessed society. Do you think that people like Mary Whitehouse will always say stuff like that about where society will be in 20, 30, 40 years' time? Or do you think she was uniquely farsighted? It depends whether you think she was right. And do you? I'm not going into a whole argument about that.
I'm interested in her as a phenomenon. I wouldn't judge the complexity of our society now as right or wrong. I'd like to take another five hours of podcasts and five hours for you and five hours for Alice as well. Put it like this. I think if Mary Whitehouse were alive today, she'd simply say, I told you so.
David, this has been superb. Thank you so much for being so generous with your time. Many thanks. A great pleasure. I enjoyed it.
A huge thanks to David. I'm off to wash my mouth out. His book, Keep Talking, A Broadcasting Life, is available now. Matt, you're in charge next week and it's a big one. Yes, we're doing something a little different next week. Over five episodes, I'm going to tell you the story of a man who, up until recently, was the most powerful person in the country. From his turbulent upbringing to his debauched university days to the many, many scandals that mark his premiership.
We're taking a deep dive into the world of the most scandalous Prime Minister Britain has ever seen. British scandal is doing Boris Johnson. Finally, so much to get our teeth into. This is the fourth and final episode of our series, The Queen of Clean. If you'd like to know more about this story, you can read Quite Contrarian Autobiography and Mightier Than the Sword, both by Mary Whitehouse. Ban This Filth, Letters from the Mary Whitehouse Archive by Ben Thompson.
And you can also watch Band, the Mary Whitehouse story, on BBC iPlayer. I'm Matt Ford. And I'm Alice Levine. British Scandal is produced by Samizdat Audio. Our producer is Millie Chu. Our senior producer is Joe Sipes. Our managing producers are Tonja Thigpen and Matt Gamp. Our executive producers are Jenny Lower-Beckman, Stephanie Jens and Marshall Louis for Wondery. Wondery.
Hey, I'm Mike Corey, the host of Wondery's podcast, Against the Odds. In each episode, we share thrilling true stories of survival, putting you in the shoes of the people who live to tell the tale. In our next season, it's July 6th, 1988, and workers are settling into the night shift aboard Piper Alpha, the world's largest offshore oil rig.
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