Banned! The Mary Whitehouse Story
BBC Two

The first episode (29 March) of this fascinating two-part documentary about Mary Whitehouse (pictured) was a nuanced and even-handed examination of a figure often denigrated and lampooned. With her spectacles, handbags and constant flow of indignant letters to figures in public life, she became a byword for prudish middle England from the 1960s on, and certainly the footage of followers of her National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association reinforces this image. Who wants to be sitting with rows of pursed-lipped elderly ladies and concerned clergymen when you can be free-loving it with the anti-censorship brigade?

But in 2022, it all looks a lot more complicated. Nowadays, her outrage might easily overlap with current debate on the limits of freedom of expression. She might find common cause with feminists sick of seeing women exploited in images of violent sex or reduced to crude sexual stereotypes. She was mocked for her campaign against Alf Garnett’s blaspheming in Till Death Us Do Part; today it’s denigrated for its depiction of racism. Her campaign against the downward spiral of porn, similarly, looks a lot less square in the age of the internet. In the programme, The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw reflects that her attempts to ban Bertolucci’s nihilistic Last Tango in Paris take on “a moral dimension in real life” in light of Maria Schneider’s recent revelation that she was manipulated into depictions of explicit sex.