Mary Whitehouse was right to try to clean up TV, says Julie Walters
SHE was a self-proclaimed hippy with a keen interest in women’s liberation, free love and the Pill.
So it is perhaps not surprising that the young Julie Walters wasn’t a big fan of family values campaigner Mary Whitehouse.
Now, at the age of 64, the actress has finally admitted Mrs Whitehouse was right all along.
Despite once regarding her as a busybody intent on ruining everyone’s fun, she now feels Britain’s self-appointed moral guardian did the right thing by pushing for a TV watershed. Her comments come amid concern that the 9pm cut-off – designed to prevent children being exposed to violence, sex and swearing – is being abolished by stealth, with explicit content increasingly aired earlier in the evening.
Miss Walters, who has an adult daughter called Maisie, said playing the late campaigner in a 2008 film called Filth: The Mary Whitehouse Story had made her understand the importance of the watershed.
‘It made me really like her,’ she said. ‘I thought, “Yes, you have a point. We do need a [watershed]”. And we did. She was right.’
The BAFTA-winning actress, who played Mrs Overall in Victoria Wood’s Acorn Antiques and starred in films including Educating Rita and Billy Elliot, was in her early 20s at the time of Mrs Whitehouse’s Clean Up TV campaign.
She said: ‘Mary Whitehouse was at her height in about 1972. I was of the sixties generation – I was sort of 21, 22, 23. Of course, we all hated her because we were part of the revolution.
‘Women’s lib had started, the Pill, free love, all that sort of thing.’ Speaking at a Bafta event earlier this week, Miss Walters added: ‘We were hippies, stu-
‘Part of the revolution’
dents, and there was Mary Whitehouse saying “No, it’s not right”.
‘She was my mother’s generation – we hated all that.’
In recent months, media campaign groups have warned of a ‘slippery slope’, with increasingly adult themes featuring in pre-watershed programmes.
In particular, series such as The X Factor and Britain’s Got Talent have been criticised for screening raunchy early-evening performances by singers such as Jennifer Lopez and Rihanna. There is also concern about music videos that are available online and can be viewed by children of any age.
Mrs Whitehouse was ridiculed by some as being out of touch after she railed against broadcasters and artists whose work she felt was obscene.
In 1965 she founded the National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association, using it as a platform to criticise the BBC for its perceived lack of accountability and excessive portrayals of sex, violence and bad language.
At the time, she was loathed by liberals such as then BBC Director General Sir Hugh Carleton Greene, whom she once called the ‘devil incarnate’.
But since her death aged 91 in 2001, a growing number of commentators have said her views on the dangers of broadcasting gratuitous sex and violence had been ahead of their time.
In 2010 veteran broadcaster Dame Joan Bakewell, who fought for a new liberal age of freedom, admitted that she had come to agree with her one-time bête noire.