43 Facts About Mary Whitehouse

Constance Mary Whitehouse was a British teacher and conservative activist.

Mary Whitehouse campaigned against social liberalism and the mainstream British media, both of which she accused of encouraging a more permissive society.

Mary Whitehouse was the founder and first president of the National Viewers' and Listeners' Association, through which she led a longstanding campaign against the BBC.

Mary Whitehouse became a public figure via the Clean-Up TV pressure group, established in 1964, in which she was the most prominent figure.

Mary Whitehouse initiated a successful private prosecution against Gay News on the grounds of blasphemous libel, the first such case for more than 50 years.

Mary Whitehouse was the second of four children of a "less-than-successful businessman" and a "necessarily resourceful mother".

Mary Whitehouse joined the Wolverhampton branch of the Oxford Group, later known as Moral Re-Armament, in 1935.

At MRA meetings she met Ernest Raymond Mary Whitehouse; they married at Chester on 23 March 1940 and remained married until he died in Colchester, Essex, aged 87, in 2000.

Mary Whitehouse gave up teaching at the end of 1964 to concentrate on her campaigning.

Mary Whitehouse began her activism in 1963 with a letter to the BBC requesting to see Hugh Greene, the BBC's Director-General.

Mary Whitehouse complained in 1993 that during Greene's period at the BBC "hardly a week went by without a sniping reference to me".

Mary Whitehouse defended the right of the BBC "to be ahead of public opinion".

Greene ignored Mary Whitehouse, blocked her from participation in BBC broadcasts, and purchased a painting of Mary Whitehouse with five breasts by James Lawrence Isherwood.

However Hill was prepared to meet Mary Whitehouse at Broadcasting House.

Mary Whitehouse complained about this "filth" being allowed on air as "it was bound to shock and offend".

Later in 1965, the decision by the BBC not to broadcast Peter Watkins' The War Game on 6 August 1965 led to Mary Whitehouse writing to Sir Hugh Greene and Harold Wilson on 5 September, and again to the Home Secretary Frank Soskice on 6 October.

The contemporary coverage of the Vietnam War, "the first 'television war", demonstrated for Mary Whitehouse that television was "an ally of pacifism".

Mary Whitehouse criticised the work of Dennis Potter from Son of Man onwards, arguing that the BBC was at the centre "of a conspiracy to remove the myth of god from the minds of men", and A Clockwork Orange.

Mary Whitehouse was unsuccessful in trying to persuade the BBC to ban it, but her campaign to stop Alice Cooper's "School's Out" being featured on Top of the Pops was successful.

Simon Farquhar, in an obituary for The Independent of the series' creator, Richard Carpenter, wrote that Mary Whitehouse "objected to the [show's] relentless slaughter and blasphemous religious elements, but was deftly silenced by Carpenter in public when he introduced himself to her and the audience by saying "I'm Richard Carpenter, and I'm a professional writer.

In 1984 Mary Whitehouse won a case in the High Court against John Whitney, director-general of the Independent Broadcasting Authority, who had failed to forward the feature film Scum for consideration by other IBA board members to decide if Channel 4 should transmit it.

Mary Whitehouse's supporters have asserted that her campaigns helped end Channel 4's "red triangle" series of films in 1986, so named after the warning preceding them which featured a red triangle with a white centre.

Mary Whitehouse was said to have had a role in the establishment of the Broadcasting Standards Council in 1988, which later became the Broadcasting Standards Commission and was subsumed into the Office of Communications in 2004.

Mary Whitehouse claimed that Dennis Potter's mother had "committed adultery with a strange man and that the shock of witnessing this had caused her son to be afflicted" with psoriatic arthropathy.

Mary Whitehouse alleged she had a blackout at the interview's halfway point and claimed her comments were not intentional.

Mary Whitehouse stepped down as President of the National Viewers and Listeners Association in May 1994.

Mary Whitehouse had taken up other campaigns against the permissive society by the early 1970s.

Mary Whitehouse had around 300 speaking engagements during the period of her highest profile.

Mary Whitehouse mentioned the connection in a speech, asserting that public funds were being used to subsidise paedophile groups, and the Trust withdrew its support for the production of the pamphlet in 1977.

Mary Whitehouse urged the Conservative opposition to push for a bill on the subject, in the absence of interest from the Labour government.

Mary Whitehouse took private prosecutions in a number of cases where official action was not forthcoming.

Mary Whitehouse was the plaintiff in a charge of blasphemous libel against Gay News, a trial at the Old Bailey between 4 and 7 July 1977.

Mary Whitehouse had hoped to use the blasphemy laws against material other than Kirkup's poem and was interested in pursuing a possible action against allegedly blasphemous content for some time.

Mary Whitehouse gained more widespread support regarding Thorsen than in the Gay News dispute.

Since Mary Whitehouse had not seen the play, the prosecution evidence rested on the testimony of her solicitor, Graham Ross-Cornes, who claimed he saw the actor's penis.

Mary Whitehouse screened edited highlights from these films for MPs at the House of Commons in late 1983, which included extracts from The Evil Dead considered by her "the number one nasty".

Mary Whitehouse died, aged 91, in a nursing home in Colchester, Essex, on 23 November 2001.

Mary Whitehouse was not, as the BBC seemed officially to proclaim, a mere figure of fun.

Whitehouse's early campaign and her disagreements with the BBC under Greene were the basis of a drama first broadcast in 2008 entitled Filth: The Mary Whitehouse Story, written by Amanda Coe.

Mary Whitehouse had privately expressed gratitude to Dennis Potter and the BBC for his television play Where Adam Stood in 1976.

Mary Whitehouse sat laughing next to Thatcher as the Prime Minister acted out a sketch, written principally by her press secretary, Bernard Ingham, alongside a reluctant Paul Eddington and Nigel Hawthorne, the lead actors in the programme.

In 1989 a sketch comedy show began on BBC Radio 1 called The Mary Whitehouse Experience, starring alternative comedians David Baddiel, Rob Newman, Steve Punt and Hugh Dennis.

The title was an oblique reference to Mary Whitehouse's campaigning against her perception of declining values on TV and radio, although she was rarely satirised directly.