THREAD: Woke prudes are as bad as Mary Whitehouse
Libby Purves
The Times

Long ago, when the present censorious generation were in nappies, for three decades Mrs Mary Whitehouse campaigned to “Clean Up TV”. In rallies, pamphlets and innumerable letters she waged war on profanity,

homosexuality, “the propaganda of disbelief, doubt and dirt . . . promiscuity, infidelity and drinking”. She called Hugh Greene, director-general of the BBC, “the devil incarnate”. She abhorred screen violence, including Vietnam War coverage and film of the liberation of Belsen.

She targeted Benny Hill, Dennis Potter and the Daleks (“teatime brutality for tots”). She gave an award to the apparently saintly Jimmy Savile and, embarrassingly, another one to the Today programme of the early 1980s. I remember the presentation of a spiky metal object to a

reluctant programme editor. John Timpson muttered “a bit phallic!”, I muttered back “depends what you’re used to”, and made him choke on his drink. Happy memories.

Why remember Whitehouse now? Because her spirit is back, in the form of “woke” censorship. It’s different in

emphasis but shares her exaggerated sense of its own virtue. It should take warning, for the tragedy of Whitehouse was that her useful campaigns — one led to the law against indecent photos of children — were fatally damaged by the allied absurdities. Useful protests about

gratuitous pornography were devalued by pearl-clutching horror at the word “knickers” in a Beatles lyric or the depiction of unmarried couples waking up together in bed. Her attitude to homosexuality was already outdated, and her failure to respect serious art or a good joke made

her risible. She lost.

Today’s Whitehousery has the same blind, angry piety but with a fresh twist of punitive sadism. Its hair-trigger instinct will “call out” racism, sexism, ableism, privilege, “transphobia” or implied insensitivity. It demands not just censorship but

vengeance: one wrong word and a manager must resign, an author be boycotted, a broadcaster fined or some powerless Twitter nonentity vilified. Corporations and businesses cringe: note how the Innocent drinks company publicly criticised a woman who didn’t believe in gender

reassignment, or how an Australian bookshop piously apologised for hosting Julie Bindel, a fine campaigner against the global sex trade but dissenter on the philosophical concept of gender.

Persecution is one aspect of the new-Whitehousery, and its fear of open debate is

depressing, but at least it purports to be about how we should treat people today. What is worse is when it reaches its cold claw back into history, and demands that former entertainers and writers be blotted out for not thinking and speaking our way. Ofcom is now investigating

the tiny channel Talking Pictures TV, family-run from a shed in Watford to enliven the Freeview spectrum with forgotten films and TV shows.

Some are neglected classics, some feed monochrome nostalgia for what Charles Moore lovingly calls “people in proper hats”. Some are

comfortingly familiar to anyone over 50 — welcome back, Rumpole of the Bailey! — others are terrible. And although captions warn of dated expressions, the new puritans keep setting Ofcom on it. In the latest case, someone in a stupid 1970s comedy wears blackface; others condemned

the language used in A Family at War. Though since that drama is 50 years old and set in 1930s Liverpool, it would be worryingly inauthentic if words now forbidden hadn’t crept in.

Censoring the ignorant rudeness of the past is dangerous. It is unlikely to corrupt a new

generation, and we need to be reminded how social attitudes change over time and that otherwise decent people can hold prejudices. We need to see modern liberal attitudes as a necessary corrective, not a timeless human code. Moreover, when dated shows still hang about they can

remind us what the forerunners of today’s minorities suffered, and how fragile many of them still feel.

If that takes an occasional bad word on vintage TV, or in an old play or novel, fine. I read a lot of 1930s novels, and notice not only the n-word and scornful homophobia but

the period’s casual antisemitism. Knowing where tolerance of that routine expression led is salutary. You find it in Agatha Christie and early Josephine Tey; Evelyn Waugh is guilty, and everyone remembers John Buchan’s line about world conspiracies centred on “a little white-

faced Jew in a bath-chair with an eye like a rattlesnake”. Though, even as we gasp, we might remember that Buchan was a friend of Chaim Weizmann, Israel’s first president, and how in the next sentence the bitterness of his villain is explained “because his aunt was outraged and

his father flogged in some one-horse location on the Volga”. I have younger friends too pious to read Buchan, though oddly they seem able to forgive older fictions provided there are bonnets. Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park gets a free pass even though Sir Thomas Bertram, too moral

to allow amateur dramatics, lives off West Indian slave plantations.

But pushing different attitudes into the far historic past is not enough. Just as we must make rueful peace with the empire at its worst and best, we need a truce with the day before yesterday. Accept, without

hysteria, the way our great-grandparents or grandparents thought and spoke. We might even notice some of the nobler presumptions that are taken more for granted in the quaint world of Talking Pictures TV than they are today: fidelity, family, duty. Sometimes it’s the good people

who use a dreadful word: better to think why than to flinch in disgust.