TV: by Damien Love
THERE'S a moment early in Filth: The Mary Whitehouse Story (BBC Two, Wednesday, 9pm) that sets the generally confused tone. It's the early 1960s, just before her long years of campaigning started, and we see Mrs Whitehouse (Julie Walters) at home, still an unknown art teacher, preparing for school the next day. Her pupils have been making abstract designs, and she is framing their work, aided by her patient husband, Ernest (Alun Armstrong), who, as she twitters briskly and obliviously away beside him, makes a small, quiet discovery. Rotating one of the pictures through 90 degrees, Ernest realises that what he is looking at is not so abstract after all, but an image of a huge, rudely erect penis. As, indeed, is every other picture in the pile.
The obvious point - underlined by a running gag that sees her bicycling through her little summery village and repeatedly failing to notice glaring, Carry On-style signs of sex, adultery and domestic violence everywhere - is that Mary is somewhat out of touch with what is going on in the society rapidly changing all around her. Her pious mind is an unspoiled garden that does not entertain filth, and so is simply not tuned to recognise it.
That's fair enough, but it fails to take into account the contrary idea, expressed in all the old jokes about her, that in fact Mary Whitehouse's mind was itself the filthiest place in Britain. Here was a woman who not only wouldn't fail to recognise what she called "private parts", but who saw them everywhere. (She once passed on a complaint to the BBC about them being seen in Jackanory.) Despite the gags, the intention of writer Amanda Coe's film, which considers Whitehouse's long-running, long-distance battle with the BBC's Director General, Sir Hugh Carleton Greene (Hugh Bonneville) across the 1960s, is not to present her as a figure of fun. The real Mary Whitehouse did too good a job of that herself. The challenge today is instead to try to take her seriously and, if not sympathise with her motives, at least understand the nature of them.
When the film tries to get down to it, though, it's at a loss. Coe is on solid ground piling up background gags - Ernest gently points out that maybe "Clean Up National Television" isn't the best name for Mary's fledgling campaign, given the unfortunate acronym - but gets squeamish when it comes to what Whitehouse was really about.
To an extent, going knowingly against accepted opinion, Coe seeks to reposition Whitehouse as something of a heroine. Between jokes, the message is, "You might not agree with everything she did, but you have to admit she had a point, and admire the courage it took for her to fight for it". But if that's the idea, the drama needs to be honest about what was driving Whitehouse, which, when you pull it into the light, was a cold, hard set of attitudes rooted in a specific, right-wing interpretation of Christianity; the sure, not particularly pleasant kind of We-Know-Better belief that is unconcerned about condemning something, while in the same breath admitting, "of course, I haven't seen it".
Apart from a few shots of Mary and Ernest praying together, though, Coe tackles this by sidestepping it, attempting absolutely no exploration of the strength or nature of Whitehouse's faith or the mission she felt it put her upon. Ultimately, Filth leaves us no understanding as to why Whitehouse devoted over 30 years to her cause. In its favour, though, it does have Walters and Armstrong, whose warm, intimate portrayals paper over the cracks; if Whitehouse does emerge as more human it's all down to them.
The great casualty of the piece, however, is Greene, the man Whitehouse branded as "responsible for the moral collapse in this country". In the role, Hugh Bonneville has little to do but be a bluff, distant, superior caricature, pausing occasionally to lech over secretaries' legs.
Of course, it would look churlish of the BBC to broadcast a drama that presented him as a hero and Whitehouse as an interfering old battleaxe he was right to ignore. But during his modernising tenure at the Beeb, Greene (the brother of Graham) ushered in, among many others, such wonders as Steptoe And Son, Till Death Us Do Part, Cathy Come Home and Dennis Potter's first work - all programmes Whitehouse would rather we never had seen. He deserves better than this. Before the BBC, he was a British journalist in the Berlin of the early 1930s, observing the rise of the Nazi party. When he later stood firm against voices calling for the censorship and banning of "deviant art," he knew why he was doing it.
With its incoherent and implausible script stitching together clichés from every serial-killer thriller of the past 20 years as an excuse to put easy, gratuitous images of (mostly women) suffering on screen, it's safe to say that Mrs Whitehouse would not have been a fan of the hopefully one-off cop drama Kiss Of Death (BBC One, Monday, 9pm). Here, she would have had a point.
