Censor sensibility

Julie Walters, who plays Mary Whitehouse this week on BBC2, tells Michael Deacon that there was more to the campaigner than angry rants...

We can never know what Mary Whitehouse would have made of the news that Julie Walters is to play her in a film of her life. But we can take a reasonable guess. “I’m sure she would have disapproved of some things I’ve done,” says Walters. “The Wife of Bath, Personal Services… Someone in America said, ‘There’s something there to offend the whole family.’”

Personal Services was a 1987 film in which Walters starred as the madam of a brothel – not exactly Whitehouse’s cup of tea. And you could say that about more than a few things on television. From 1963 until her death in 2001, the Nuneaton-born teacher-turned-campaigner protested against what she saw as British television’s flouting of decent moral standards.

As BBC2’s new one-off drama, Filth: the Mary Whitehouse Story, shows, she fired off endless letters of complaint to broadcasters and gave impassioned public speeches. Televised discussions of premarital sex, swearing in Till Death Us Do Part, the wanton disregard for authority displayed by the children’s puppets Pinky and Perky… All were contributing, Whitehouse believed, to a collapse in morality in British society. To fight back, she famously launched the Clean Up TV Campaign and formed the National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association (now known as Mediawatch UK).

When Walters was young, however, she thought Whitehouse was merely a killjoy. “She figured highly in my teens and twenties,” she says. “To my generation, she represented our parents. It felt like she was spoiling the fun.” Unsurprisingly, a lot of people who made television weren’t too keen on Whitehouse either. Walters recalls seeing her “cruelly lampooned” by ITV’s Eighties puppet satire Spitting Image.

But Filth, says the star of Educating Rita and Billy Elliot, doesn’t mock Whitehouse. If that had been the aim, she says, she wouldn’t have taken the part. “I was sent another script about her, but it was having a lot of fun at her expense,” she says. “This one was different – it was very balanced. It explains who she was, where she was coming from. It’s easy to take the piss out of someone like her.” No, that’s not an expression Whitehouse would have cared for. But Walters is right: Filth is, a lot of the time, sympathetic to the tireless campaigner (although some scenes make her seem a little dotty, or short-tempered).

It starts by showing what prompted Whitehouse to launch her protests, then her efforts to form a pressure group made up of like-minded West Midlands women. But the central story is about Whitehouse’s long and fiery battle with the BBC’s Director General from 1960-68, Sir Hugh Carlton Greene, played as a crude, sneering bully by Hugh Bonneville. Time and again he refuses to meet her – but she devises plenty of other ploys to get his attention.

Researching and playing the part changed Walters’s opinion of Whitehouse, she says: “I was surprised by her compassion, and she was a good mum. In retrospect, she had a point. There’s a watershed because of her. Children shouldn’t view things that they’re not emotionally developed enough to deal with. I don’t have a Mary Whitehouse attitude, but I do believe in the watershed.” After all, Walters is a mother herself. When her daughter Maisie was a child, they were watching a drama (Walters can’t remember its title) that contained a scene of a nature Walters hadn’t bargained for. “Mum,” said Maisie, “why has that woman taken her knickers off?” Walters said, “I think it’s by accident…”

She didn’t feel the need to shield Maisie from every programme that Whitehouse disapproved of, though – soaps in particular. “I couldn’t stop that because of my own addictions,” she says. “When she was born, we came home from the hospital and we were sitting on the sofa and the EastEnders theme tune came on. Her little head looked straight at the telly.”

Of late, Walters has been working on plenty of family-friendly entertainment, with the exception of Filth (which inevitably contains swearing). She’ll be Ron Weasley’s mum again in the fifth Harry Potter film, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (out before Christmas), and will play Aunt Betsey in a new film version of David Copperfield (which should be out next year). In July she appears in Mamma Mia!, an Abba-inspired romantic comedy film.

At 58, Walters is one of Britain’s best-loved actresses, and this year she was made CBE for services to drama. She’s recently been writing her autobiography. She seems so pleasant in person that it’s hard to imagine the book containing many Whitehouse-style tirades. Still, she says, there are things that make her angry: “Rudeness, racism, snobbery, tiredness, Cellophane things you can’t open…”

Swearing and sex scenes on television, though, aren’t among them. Indeed, Walters confesses to being a fan of one modern-day show that would surely have horrified Mary Whitehouse more than any from the past. “I was glued to Celebrity Big Brother,” she says. “It was grubby stuff, but I couldn’t switch it off.”

Filth: the Mary Whitehouse Story is on BBC2 on Wednesday at 9.00pm