The other night, too tired to move, I got stranded in front of the television with the zapper in my fist. Before long I was gazing at a naked man with a firework up his bottom.
Zap, flip, and blimey! - there were two women demonstrating vibrators. Oh, and a real willy. At this point the cat got up in a marked manner and left the room.
I finally gave up after pushing the video button by accident and starting the previous night’s recording of Joan Bakewell, mincing around among humping couples while a sweaty man with a camcorder explained how important it is to have a professional male porn star who knows how to position his leg to keep the important bits in shot. Feeling as if I should slip a giant prophylactic over the television and douse it in Dettox, I wandered up to bed and said to my spouse, who was chastely reading an article about marine diesels, “Is old Mary Whitehouse still alive? What must she be thinking?” And the very next day, we heard that the doughty old purity campaigner was dead. Many things were said about her: graceful tributes were paid by old foes, and ancient clips surfaced of her addressing mass meetings with the information that she was a teacher “charged with telling children about chastity before marriage and fidelity within it” while being undermined by “dirty programmes”. On the Joan Bakewell Taboo series, she was asked, which dirty programmes? She named the Wednesday Plays. Whereon the usual suspects from the TV industry popped up and sententiously accused her of having wanted an airbrushed suburban version of reality, refusing to accept the vivid world of working-class sexual mores.
The trouble is, they were right. Smarmy, self-righteous, smutty, heartless bargain-basement crypto-intellectuals yes; but right about this particular campaigner.
Seeing dear old Mary Whitehouse again, for all her courage, I was reminded of why she was mocked. You had to. She dismissed as smutty many painful, heartfelt, thoughtful dramas, in which nothing was seen beyond an adulterous kiss or a post-coital bed scene . She objected to any reflection of the fact that sex outside marriage is common, and not necessarily followed by ruin and damnation. She did not want the viewing public to consider the difficulties of homosexuals, nor the fact that their relationships can be as loyal and honourable as any marriage.
She did not accept that drama or documentary should offer something outside her own cosy tastes. When she spoke of gratuitous violence she was on strong ground, and should have stayed there.
When she spoke of sex she was borderline bonkers. Which is why, although she gallantly won some viewer-power off arrogant broadcasters, it was such a tragedy that this mumsy 1950s schoolmarm was our highest-profile campaigner against explicit pornography. That clip of her inveighing about chastity did untold damage to the cause of more moderate objectors . For two decades, anything you said about the increasingly trollopy TV industry could be trumped by the words “Mary Whitehouse”. You simply could not line up with her, because among the things she objected to were many which were good, and moral. You had to distance yourself.
When I was a Today presenter and we were given an award by her for being a nice clean programme, we hung our heads in shame, and staff members made uncharacteristically rude jokes about the trophy being phallic (“depends what you’re used to”, said Brian Redhead, gazing at its spiky outlines in a worried way).
She was so strict that she polarised opinion; and inevitably hers was the losing side. The modern screen shows so much explicit coupling - with or without the excuse of Joan Bakewell frowning at it like a disappointed headmistress - that there can be few children who reach the age of ten without having caught at least a glimpse of bare bouncing bodies. Then, as society becomes ever more worried about“sexual health” they arrive at school to be lectured about diseases and pregnancy, so that this bouncing business seems to them to be inevitable, and imminent (else why would everyone be so anxious to teach you how to make it safe?). And often they grumble that nobody has time to tell them about relationships, and love, and betrayal, and all the real hopes and dreams of complex humanity.
Of course, the porno society is to blame; but so, in a way, is the Whitehouse tendency. There is a long, long scale of human behaviour and morality between strict chastity and humping on a mat while Joan Bakewell peers down at you and Mr Sweaty films your bits. But when the purity campaigners set their marker so far to the right on the scale, it left the rest of society and taste wandering, lost, in the vastness beyond.
