Filth: The Mary Whitehouse Story is a 2008 BBC Television docudrama written by Amanda Coe, telling the life story of the British morality campaigner Mary Whitehouse. Julie Walters plays the part of Whitehouse, Alun Armstrong her husband Ernest, William Beck plays David Turner, Nicholas Woodeson played Harman Grisewood Assistant Director General of the BBC, and Hugh Bonneville plays Sir Hugh Greene, the Director-General of the BBC, who is taken as embodying the liberalizing forces of the "permissive society" against which Mrs. Whitehouse campaigned.
It was broadcast on 28 May 2008 on BBC2, aired in the United States on 16 November 2008 as part of the Masterpiece series on PBS and was aired in Australia on 31 May 2009 on ABC1. The show drew heavily on the Max Caulfield biography Mary Whitehouse published in 1976 and featured a degree of dramatic licence. For example, Whitehouse and others supposedly called their nascent group "Clean Up National TV" until her husband pointed out the unfortunate acronym - they then changed it to "Clean Up TV."
Among the many reviews published in the press were two contrasting examples in The Scotsman and The Sunday Times.
Famous quotes containing the word story:
“Who were the fools who spread the story that brute force cannot kill ideas? Nothing is easier. And once they are dead they are no more than corpses.”
—Simone Weil (1909–1943)