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.