Banned! The Mary Whitehouse Story

Mary Whitehouse is mostly remembered today as a figure of ridicule, the person who, in her war on porn and violence in the arts, sought unsuccesfully to turn the tide of the 20th century. This documentary shows her to have been highly articulate, and professional: someone who became an "influencer" through her own skilled use of many of the media whose other content she decried (her breakthrough was getting onto the BBC, in order to criticise it). It even makes an interesting case in her defence: that all societies have norms, and while these may be restrictive to some, the fact that something is normative does not necessarily make it bad. The case for censorship is hard to justify, but might the world would be a better place if we at leasr were capable of a measure of restraint? In some ways, however, it is too kind on its subject, who was in favour not just of dacorum in public but also "correct" behaviour, as she would have seen it, in private as well, and who battled not just with those who sought to rich quick through provocative obsenity, but also people like writer Dennis Potter (oddly never mentioned here), whose brilliant works she despised and denounced. There are a few too many irrelevent talking heads on display, yet the programme does make you think, not that Whitehouse was right, but more broadly about the challenges societies face when migrating from one set of norms to another, and the losses and the gains involved in that transition.