Censorship
Monday 26 May 2008 21:45-22:30 (Radio 3)
In a special programme, Philip Dodd and guests discuss the subject of censorship. Ahead of the forthcoming television drama - Filth: The Mary Whitehouse Story - which tells the story of the tireless taste and decency campaigner and her battle to keep 'filth' out of the family home, Philip asks whether Mary Whitehouse was right after all and things have now gone too far. They trace the history of censorship in this country and ask whether society has become dangerously desensitized to sex and violence on our screens, and to what extent does the consumption of violent films, video games and pornography lead to violent behaviour and unhealthy attitudes towards the opposite sex? And with a seemingly limitless availability of such images, is it time liberals reappraised their position and recognised that the buck must stop somewhere?
Playlist
Was Mary Whitehouse right?
As a new BBC drama revisits the life and work of Mary Whitehouse - with Julie Walters portraying the housewife turned moral crusader - Night Waves asks if the passing of time has actually proved that she was right.
Derided as a figure of fun by the media in the 60s and 70s, Whitehouse created the Clean Up TV campaign and went on to fight all manner of artistic endeavour which she believed would destroy the nation's moral fabric.
Her often unsophisticated criticisms of works such as The Singing Detective by Dennis Potter won her few allies in the world of journalism and broadcast media. But today - in a world of internet pornography, reality television and graphic screen violence and sex - have some of her early critics been forced to change their tune?
Philip Dodd asks whether it's time to reassess Mary Whitehouse and to rescue her and her legacy from the enormous condescension of her adversaries.
Philip is joined by the TV critic Chris Dunkley - who argued with Whitehouse on many occasions; the author Fay Weldon; the columnist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown and Anthony Julius, the author of Transgressions, a history of provocative art.
Filth: The Mary Whitehouse Story is on BBC Two on Wednesday 28 May at 9pm.
