Francis Wheen
Scourge of Obscenity
Ban This Filth! Letters from the Mary Whitehouse Archive
By Ben Thompson (Ed)
Faber & Faber 408pp £16.99 order from our bookshop
Although Mary Whitehouse was often portrayed as a prudish busybody, a latter-day Dr Bowdler or Mrs Grundy, she preferred to see herself as a Christian martyr. Her Clean-Up TV campaign, later renamed the National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association, sprang from the creepy Moral Re-Armament cult of which both Whitehouse and her husband, Ernest, were devotedly evangelical members. ‘This’, she wrote in her diary, ‘is the Cross – to realise there is no glamour, no appreciation to be asked or expected, nothing but ridicule, pain and loss … it is in this loneliness, and this alone, that one finds Christ.’
It was the events of 1963 that spurred her into action – the Profumo scandal, the satire boom, and what she called ‘a stream of suggestive and erotic plays [on television] which present promiscuity, infidelity and drinking as normal and inevitable’. As she wrote with characteristically crazy overstatement in one
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'In 2007, German scientists analysed the soil of this lunar landscape and found that 17 per cent of its weight was made up of arsenic. The ground wasn’t poisoned – it was poison.'
http://ow.ly/Ck7j50Er3mu
'Rivalries are intense and dangerous, and someone has to die.'
@NJCooper_crime on new thrillers by @HenryCPorter, @k_faulkner, @annafbailey, @mserinkelly, @JoelDicker, @AlanJParks, @whartonswords and more.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/april-2021-crime-round-up
This spring, give the gift of reading.
Give a friend a gift subscription to Literary Review for only £33.50.
https://www.mymagazinesub.co.uk/literary-review/promo/spring21/