Sex: Dame Joan Bakewell (partly) agrees with nemesis Mary Whitehouse

Dame Joan Bakewell first appeared on British television in the Swinging Sixties.  Her husband at the time, Michael Bakewell, was the head of BBC Plays.  Ms Bakewell, as she was then, presented BBC2’s Late Night Line-Up, which discussed a variety of topics which were taboo.  Dame Joan still broadcasts today at the age of 77 and has also written several books. 

A schoolteacher and married mother of three, Mary Whitehouse, objected to the falling standards in television output.  Mrs Whitehouse started her crusade for a clean-up of media and film, which, when compared with today’s programmes, were quite tame.  Yet, it was to be the beginning of the end for true family viewing.  Mrs Whitehouse founded the National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association in 1965.  It exists today as Mediawatch-UK. 

Mrs Whitehouse, who died in 2001, was a practicing Christian who believed that children should mature of their own volition and not have adult subjects thrust upon them.  Although the message was a heartfelt one, it was rather repetitive to many in Britain.  She was often parodied and ridiculed, possibly because she wasn’t as chic as the media intelligentsia.  She was a concerned wife, teacher and mother who wanted the best for British children and Britain as a whole.

The Telegraph recently featured Dame Joan’s perspective on the tension between her and Mrs Whitehouse, who died in 2001.  Dame Joan recently broadcast a Radio 4 programme about it.  In ‘Sorry, Mrs Whitehouse — I still disagree’ she writes:

She hated all things that spoiled the calm of her safe, middle-class life: that included any display of sex on film and television …

Most especially she attacked the BBC, which in the Sixties was pioneering satire and social realist dramas, both of which audiences loved. She condemned what she called the corporation’s “tide of filth”. I have never been with her on that. As a presenter of BBC Two’s Late Night Line-Up, and target of her ire, I was in favour of bold and adventurous dramas and films. I still am.

The television writers of the Sixties, such as Nell Dunn and Dennis Potter, and film-makers such as Ken Loach, exposed the hypocrisy of Fifties’ values. That’s fine. We need more people to do the same in our culture today, as Michael Winterbottom tried to do with his explicit film 9 Songs.

And, far from seeing the Sixties as a mistake, we should celebrate them as something that desperately needed to happen. The Fifties were dull, repressed, even cruel. I remain thankful for the swathe of new laws – against censorship, legalising homosexuality, abortion, easier divorce – that led to the tolerant society we have today. Mrs Whitehouse wanted homosexuals “cured”: the idea was disgusting then and it remains so today.

I know a wide variety of English people — of varying ages, professions and social classes.  I don’t know any one who likes Michael Winterbottom or knows what 9 Songs is.  No one I know admires Ken Loach. Similarly, they found Dennis Potter tiresome. They would agree that had Messrs Loach’s or Potter’s films never appeared on our screens, life would have gone on much as before, no worse and probably much better. Ditto for Dame Joan herself. So, she is living in a little media-luvvie bubble.  I see her and immediately think Hampstead, full of navel-gazing, self-referential bores who own hugely expensive properties, have overly-paid careers and espouse Fabianism.  ‘For me but not for thee’.  Yes, milady.

She took Mrs Whitehouse’s criticisms personally, as she explains in ‘Dame Joan Bakewell admits Mary Whitehouse was right to fear sexual liberation’:

“I felt she’d got my family in her sights,” Dame Joan said.

Tragic (you can see what I mean about living in a bubble).  She goes on to project, criticising Mrs Whitehouse for sins of which she herself is only too guilty:

She wanted us all to be satisfied with life just as she knew it.

Well, Dame Joan has had a life full of swank restaurants, cutting-edge parties and beautiful surroundings — something most of us could only wonder about. Everything was cool and groovy. 

However, she said she did agree with Mrs Whitehouse on one thing:

For me, what has actually corrupted us is money – and this is where I think Mrs Whitehouse was right (which is a sentence I never imagined myself writing). The conspicuous consumption of exchanging sex for money is now in our faces.  

In every newsagent’s, young children see at eye level images of women seeking male approval through their distorted bodies; clothing chains think it proper to sell ludicrous bikinis to little girls who won’t have breasts for another four years.

Yet there is still resistance in some quarters to explicit sex education for children. No wonder young girls get mixed messages and grow up to make bad decisions. Sex as glamour – good. Sex as normal behaviour – dodgy.

It would seem, however, that Mrs Whitehouse viewed increased sexually-explicit content and violence as the culprits, not the money aspect, which she most likely would have seen as a byproduct of these.

Dame Joan goes on to say that we don’t want to face the ‘hard issues’ associated with sex.  Well, the rest of us do (as you can read in the comments, which are mostly from men), and we lay the causes at the feet of the mediacracy and the mediocracy of postwar socialism. Furthermore, a number of us are sorry we missed out on many aspects of life in the 1950s. The solution is to reclaim the family from the state, which will be no mean feat, given the skyrocketing numbers of teenage mothers and dysfunctional families in ‘Broken Britain’.

Mary Whitehouse saw it coming.