Ban This Filth!: Letters from the Mary Whitehouse Archive 1963-2001 is a 2012 non-fiction book edited by Ben Thompson and published by Faber & Faber. It is a collection of letters written by Mary Whitehouse, leader of the National Viewers' and Listeners' Association, who perceived a coarsening of material in the BBC.
The author previously served as a ghost writer for books credited to famous people and wrote articles about music for publications. [1]
The book uses content about Whitehouse held at the NVLA archives at Essex University, which occupies 300 files. [1] Jonathan Sale of The Daily Telegraph described some of the contents as "richly humorous". [2]
According to Sale, the comments written by the editor were "droll". [2] Karl Miller of the Irish Times described the style of the comments as "a smart, media-wise, Jack the Lad commentary that knows enough to recognise it’s right to ask: was she right?" [3]
The editor argued that the changes Whitehouse advocated for would have negatively affected British culture, [2] but he also believed that some of her points may have had merits. [3] Martin Fletcher of The Independent wrote "From a liberal perspective, it's not the singularity of her opinions that unsettle, but rather the issues she got right". [4]
The Daily Telegraph ranked the book four of five stars, giving praise for the "relentlessly jaunty tone" in Thompson's commentary. [1]
Stuart Jeffries of The Guardian described the book as "entertaining". [5]
Fletcher praised the book's comments for being "admirably even-handed" and "witty and engaging". [4]
Dennis Christopher George Potter was an English television dramatist, screenwriter and journalist. He is best known for his BBC television serials Pennies from Heaven (1978) and The Singing Detective (1986) as well as the BBC television plays Blue Remembered Hills (1979) and Brimstone and Treacle (1976). His television dramas mixed fantasy and reality, the personal and the social, and often used themes and images from popular culture. Potter is widely regarded as one of the most influential and innovative dramatists to have worked in British television.
The Observer is a British newspaper published on Sundays. It is a sister paper to The Guardian and The Guardian Weekly, having been acquired by their parent company, Guardian Media Group Limited, in 1993. First published in 1791, it is the world's oldest Sunday newspaper.
Constance Mary Whitehouse was a British teacher and conservative activist. She campaigned against social liberalism and the mainstream British media, both of which she accused of encouraging a more permissive society. She was the founder and first president of the National Viewers' and Listeners' Association, through which she led a longstanding campaign against the BBC. A hard-line social conservative, she was termed a reactionary by her socially liberal opponents. Her motivation derived from her Christian beliefs, her aversion to the rapid social and political changes in British society of the 1960s, and her work as a teacher of sex education.
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Sir Hugh Carleton Greene was a British television executive and journalist. He was director-general of the BBC from 1960 to 1969.
Robert Newman is an English comedian, author and political activist. Newman found mainstream fame with The Mary Whitehouse Experience before forming a successful partnership with one of the programme's other comedians, David Baddiel, in the early 1990s.
"My Ding-a-Ling" is a novelty song written and recorded by Dave Bartholomew. It was covered by Chuck Berry in 1972 and became his only number-one Billboard Hot 100 single in the United States. Later that year, a longer version was included on the album The London Chuck Berry Sessions. Guitarist Onnie McIntyre and drummer Robbie McIntosh, who later formed the Average White Band, played on the single, along with Nic Potter of Van der Graaf Generator on bass.
Boosey & Hawkes is a British music publisher, purported to be the largest specialist classical music publisher in the world. Until 2003, it was also a major manufacturer of brass, string and woodwind musical instruments.
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Jonny Trunk, born Jonathan Benton-Hughes, is an English writer, broadcaster and DJ as well as the owner and founder of Trunk Records.
The Daily Telegraph, known online and elsewhere as The Telegraph, is a British daily broadsheet newspaper published in London by Telegraph Media Group and distributed in the United Kingdom and internationally. It was founded by Arthur B. Sleigh in 1855 as The Daily Telegraph and Courier. The Telegraph is considered a newspaper of record in the UK. The paper's motto, "Was, is, and will be", was included in its emblem which was used for over a century starting in 1858.
Where Adam Stood is a television play by Dennis Potter, first broadcast on BBC 2 in 1976. It is a free adaptation, wholly shot on film, of Edmund Gosse's autobiographical book Father and Son (1907).
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Blackeyes is a BBC television miniseries first broadcast in 1989, written and directed by Dennis Potter. It was adapted from Potter's novel of the same name.
Andrea Stuart is a Barbadian-British historian and writer, who was raised in the Caribbean and the UK and now lives in the UK. Her biography of Josephine Bonaparte, entitled The Rose of Martinique, won the Enid McLeod Literary Prize in 2004. Although her three published books so far have been non-fiction, she has spoken of working on a novel set in the 18th century.
Whitehouse magazine, also known as Whitehouse International, was a British pornographic magazine originally published by David Sullivan, and later sold to Gold Star Publications. It was first published in 1974. Billed as "The International Quality Glamour Magazine", it was substantially more explicit than its predecessors, showing uncensored images of genitalia.
[...]it's right to ask: was she right? Yes and no is an answer – his, I think – that would not have pleased the late Mary, for whom black was black and white white.