Intro

In the second half of the 1970s, Mary Whitehouse was already a prominent and highly influential figure in the public discourse concerning morality and the “unstoppable” bad taste in Britain.

Coming from a christian background, after a career as a teacher of Art History and Sexual Education, she began to comment and organising protests against or in favour of particular moral issues: sexual education for children, the tv—especially the BBC—as a messenger of filthy values and debatable proper taste and campaigns to promulgate specific acts, through the government, for the collectivity (e.g. The Protection of Children Act 1978).

Highly interesting is how, almost since the beginning, her public persona became so well known and seen, often times, as a simple minded old lady disgusted with the “new world”, that she became a catalyst and a constant reference for the cultural world at large.

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Outro

In the background of this period, a somehow haunting silhouette spread and found a resurgence: the far right.

From The National Front, to other nazi-influenced subcultures (e.g. nazi-skinhead), also the working class of the time, living one of the toughest period of the century, often found comfort in such politics: for example *Till Death Us Do Part*’s main character, the father of the family, expresses sympathy for right-wing conservative politics. They were portrayed in a manner so exaggerate that the effect, from the public’s point of view, was one of laughing to such behaviours instead of take him seriously.

Nonetheless, all the industrial and neofolk movement which developed at the beginning of the 1980s drew so much from the WW II nazi imaginary, that often they were accused of being neo-nazi sympathisers—when often the opposite was true.

But thatcherism was going strong at the time, and Mary Whitehouse collaborated many times with the Prime Minister.

Mary Whitehouse

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