Mary Whitehouse

Hard on the heels of Permissive Night, BBC2 tonight screens Filth, a biopic of Mary Whitehouse, starring Julie Walters.

I shall be interested to see how it is handled, but some of the previews have already been ruminating on whether or not she was a Good Thing. Julie Walters, interviewed on BBC Breakfast News last week, admitted that whilst she had despised Whitehouse at the time, the experience of making the film had inspired a grudging respect [see also a mention in the Guardian]. The TV critic David Stubbs poses the question whether we should have listened to her, but concludes in the negative, in the Guardian TV Guide.

Permissive Night

An excellent series of programmes last night, on BBC Parliament (and not very well trailed), hosted by Joan Bakewell. It consisted of some very well chosen BBC archive footage of documentaries and debate programmes on several parts of the contentious social legislation of the 60s, including the reforms of the law on divorce, abortion, capital punishment and more. Some of them are available to watch again (for the next week) through the BBC iPlayer.

Geoffrey Fisher

I note a recent exchange of views concerning the recent study of Archbishop Fisher by David Hein: see a TLS review by John Whale, which is highly critical of Fisher, and a response by Andrew Chandler, also in the TLS.

The culture of US evangelicals

I note a small spate of interest in the loosening of the connection between US evangelicals and right-wing politics:
(i) Bernice Martin takes issue with Stephen Bates' recent God's Own Country, and with Charles Marsh's Wayward Christian Soldiers, in the TLS (April 16th).
(ii) Giles Fraser, no evangelical, wrote in the Guardian of his own surprising encounters in the US (Guardian, February 8th).

It strikes me that there are probably similar movements within British evangelicalism, but that they have not yet made it onto the media radar. The parallels are not exact by any means, but perhaps worth exploring.

[See also earlier post regarding Michael Lind on the US situation.]

War memorials after 1945

I'm bound to draw attention here to my own article on the Church of England and war memorials after 1945, which is now available online (to subscribing libraries), ahead of print publication in the Forum for Modern Language Studies. I've tried to explore the debates that took place between planners, artists, architects and clergy between 1940 and 1947, and the differing emphases on beauty and utility.
For the purposes of this blog, it is of most interest (I hope) in its examination of the ways in which the various sections of the 'establishment' interact in this period. A fruitful angle from which to view the processes of secularisation is the way in which the informal influence of clergy and lay Christians in the myriad committees in government and civil society changes. It is a theme that Ian Jones and I examined in one of our articles on "establishment" reactions to "pop" church music (in Studies in Church History 42), and also features in my own forthcoming piece on the "revival" in the visual arts (Studies in Church History 44).