Ban This Filth!: Letters From the Mary Whitehouse Archive

US: Faber & Faber, 2012. Hardcover. Good/Good. In 1964, Mary Whitehouse launched a campaign to fight what she called the ' propaganda of disbelief, doubt and dirt' being poured into homes through th e nation's radio and television sets. Whitehouse, senior mistress at a Shro pshire secondary school, became the unlikely figurehead of a mass movement for censorship: the National Viewers' and Listeners' Association, now Media watch-uk. For almost forty years, she kept up the fight against the programme makers, politicians, pop stars and playwrights who she felt were dragging British culture into a sewer of blasphemy and obscenity. From Doctor Who ('Teatime brutality for tots') to Dennis Potter (whose mother sued her for libel and won) to the Beatles - whose Magical Mystery Tour escaped her intervention b y the skin of its psychedelic teeth - the list of Mary Whitehouse's targets will read to some like a nostalgic roll of honour. Caricatured while she lived as a figure of middle-brow reaction, Mary White house was held in contempt by the country's intellectual elite. But were so me of the dangers she warned of more real than they imagined? Ben Thompson's selection of material from her extraordinary archive shows M ary Whitehouse's legacy in a startling new light. From her exquisitely test y exchanges with successive BBC Directors General, to the anguished screeds penned by her television and radio vigilantes, these letters reveal a comp lex and combative individual, whose anxieties about culture and morality ar e often eerily relevant to the age of the internet. 'A fantastic read . . . I can't recommend it highly enough.' Lauren Laverne, BBC Radio 6 Music.