Mocked so cruelly, Mary Whitehouse was right all along

Oct 12, 2016 by

by Sarah Vine, Mailonline:

When I was growing up in the Eighties, Mary Whitehouse was a figure of fun.

With her horn-rimmed spectacles, stiff hair and collection of prim hats, she exemplified everything that was repressive about the old order.

The more she carped on about traditional values and ‘dirty’ plays, the more we rolled our eyes and determined to ignore her.

She was a joyless, stuffy, stick-in-the-mud suburban prude, whose very name became a byword for laughable, old-fashioned priggery — so much so that she even had a late-night BBC alternative comedy show, The Mary Whitehouse Experience, named after her.

Just imagine the smug self- congratulation of whoever came up with that name. How clever! How ironic! How brilliantly post-modern!

Now, it turns out, we were wrong, and Mary — object of a thousand cheap jokes — was right all along.

Not only right, but perhaps even a visionary. Or, at least, so says the man who helped thwart her crusade against obscenity in the Eighties, Jeremy Hutchinson QC, now 101.

Related Posts

Tags

Share This