Mary Whitehouse
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Mary Whitehouse CBE (13 June 1910 – 23 November 2001) was a British campaigner for her values of morality and decency, derived principally from her Christian religious beliefs, focusing her efforts in particular on the broadcast media where she felt these values were lacking. She was the founder and first president of the National Viewers' and Listeners' Association.
Writing in the Dictionary of National Biography, Mary Warnock comments, "Even if her campaigning did not succeed in ‘cleaning up TV’, still less in making it more fit to watch in other ways, she was of serious intent, and was an influence for good at a crucial stage in the development both of the BBC and of ITV. She was not, as the BBC seemed officially to proclaim, a mere figure of fun".
This sums up the differing views of Mary Whitehouse. Many of the older generation, and those of a more conservative intellectual outlook of whom Baroness Warnock was typical and from which group Governors of the BBC were largely drawn, took her at her face value as a campaigner for standards of morality and decency. However, in the media, particularly television, she was seen as naïve and simplistic, uninformed, an irritant and an irrelevance. To the young generation she represented a granny's eye view on life and was seen as somebody whose opinions were not to be taken seriously.