The following year she founded the National Viewers' and Listeners' Association, using it as a platform to criticise the BBC for what she perceived as a lack of accountability and excessive use of bad language and portrayals of sex and violence in its programmes.

According to Ben Thompson, the editor of an anthology of Whitehouse-related letters published in 2012, "From [...] feminist anti-pornography campaigns to the executive naming and shaming strategies of UK Uncut, her ideological and tactical influence has been discernible in all sorts of unexpected places in recent years.

At the Cheshire County Teacher Training College in Crewe, specialising in secondary school art teaching, she was involved with the Student Christian Movement before qualifying in 1932.

That year she broadcast on Woman's Hour on the day before the coronation of Elizabeth II "as a loyal housewife and subject" and wrote an extensive article on homosexuality for The Sunday Times.

[22] She commented about one unnamed television programme, believing it to be "unbalanced" and biased, in which "youngsters were asking questions [and] there was not a single member of the panel who was prepared to say outright that pre-marital relations were wrong.

[23] In a speech Greene delivered in 1965 he argued, without naming Whitehouse direct, that the critics of his liberalisation of broadcasting policy would "attack whatever does not underwrite a set of prior assumptions" and saw the potential for "a dangerous form of censorship ... which works by causing artists and writers not to take risks".

[25] The former cabinet minister Bill Deedes, later editor of The Daily Telegraph, supported the group in that period and was the leading speaker at NVALA's founding conference in Birmingham on 30 April 1966,[26] and acted as a contact between his parliamentary colleagues and Whitehouse.

During his brief period as editor of Panorama (1965–66),[33] Jeremy Isaacs received a letter from Whitehouse complaining about his decision to repeat Richard Dimbleby's coverage of the liberation of the Belsen concentration camp.

[34] Later in 1965, the decision by the BBC not to broadcast Peter Watkins' The War Game on 6 August 1965 led to Whitehouse writing to Sir Hugh Greene and Harold Wilson on 5 September,[35] and again to the Home Secretary Frank Soskice on 6 October.

For a producer to be allowed, as now appears possible, to prejudice the effectiveness of our Civil Defence Services, or the ability of the British people to re-act with courage, initiative and control in a crisis, surely goes far beyond the responsibility" which should be given to someone in this role.

[38] In a 1970 speech to the Royal College of Nursing she argued that "[h]owever good the cause ... the horrific effects on men and terrain of modern warfare as seen on the television screen could well sap the will of a nation to safeguard its own freedom, let alone resist the forces of evil abroad.

[41] Whitehouse was critical of comedians such as Benny Hill and his use of dancers; she described Dave Allen as "offensive, indecent and embarrassing" after a comic account of a conversation following sexual intercourse.

[43] Whitehouse criticised the work of Dennis Potter from Son of Man (1969) onwards, arguing that the BBC was at the centre "of a conspiracy to remove the myth of god from the minds of men",[44] and also A Clockwork Orange (1971).

She described the serial Genesis of the Daleks (1975) as consisting of "teatime brutality for tots",[53] said The Brain of Morbius (1976) "contained some of the sickest and most horrific material seen on children's television",[54] and on The Seeds of Doom (1976), in which the Doctor (Tom Baker) survives an encounter with a giant carnivorous plant monster, she commented: "Strangulation—by hand, by claw, by obscene vegetable matter[19][55]—is the latest gimmick, sufficiently close up so they get the point.

On 25 November, she called for the resignation of the channel's chief executive, Jeremy Isaacs, over a scene in Brookside "in which a young thug had tried to force a schoolgirl to have sex with him", according to an item in The Times.

[62][63] In 1984 Whitehouse won a case in the High Court against John Whitney, director-general of the Independent Broadcasting Authority, who had failed to forward the feature film Scum (1979) for consideration by other IBA board members to decide if Channel 4 should transmit it.

[clarification needed] In 1988, she made an extended appearance on the British TV discussion programme After Dark, alongside James Dearden, Shere Hite, Joan Wyndham, Naim Attallah and others.

She objected to the UK edition of The Little Red Schoolbook, "a manual of children's rights"[75] on sex, drugs and attitudes to adults, which was successfully prosecuted for obscenity in July 1971.

"[78] She was "greatly relieved—for the sake of the children" at the £50 fine and £115.50 costs imposed on Richard Handyside and Geoffrey Collins, its publishers,[79] who also had works by Che Guevara and Fidel Castro on their small list of publications.

[81] Along with the (Catholic) Labour peer Lord Longford, Malcolm Muggeridge and Cliff Richard,[82] Whitehouse was a leading figure in the Nationwide Festival of Light, which protested against the commercial exploitation of sex and violence.

[13] On 25 August that year she had had an audience with Pope Paul VI regarding 'moral pollution',[10] in which she attempted to present the pontiff with Oz28 and the Little Red School Book, but these items found their way to an official of the Papal See instead.

"[52] Following the release on appeal of the defendants in the Oz trial, "an unmitigated disaster for the children of our country",[84] Whitehouse launched the Nationwide Petition for Public Decency in January 1972, which gained 1.35 million signatures by the time it was presented to the Prime Minister, Edward Heath, in April 1973.

The action against Gay News in 1977 concerned "The Love That Dares to Speak Its Name", a poem by James Kirkup, a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature,[93] the theme of which was the sexual fantasies of a Roman centurion about the body of Jesus Christ.

[100] The judge in at the prosecution, Alan King-Hamilton QC, had only allowed novelist Margaret Drabble and journalist Bernard Levin to appear as "character" witnesses for the newspaper.

[106] She had hoped that it could be used as a basis for prosecution if Jens Jørgen Thorsen succeeded in his effort to produce the film The Many Faces of Jesus—which depicted Jesus engaged in sex acts with men and women—in the United Kingdom.

After three days,[118] the action was withdrawn after the prosecution counsel told Whitehouse that he was unable to continue with the case;[120] the litigation was ended by the Attorney General putting forward a plea of nolle prosequi.

[126] Around 1986, papers released in late December 2014 indicate, Whitehouse met Thatcher on at least two occasions to discuss the possibility of banning sex toys using a potential extension of the "deprave and corrupt" provision in the Obscene Publications Act 1959.

"[14] Writing in the Dictionary of National Biography, the philosopher Mary Warnock opined, "Even if her campaigning did not succeed in 'cleaning up TV', still less in making it more fit to watch in other ways, she was of serious intent, and was an influence for good at a crucial stage in the development both of the BBC and of ITV.

Whitehouse sat laughing next to Thatcher as the Prime Minister acted out a sketch, written principally by her press secretary, Bernard Ingham, alongside a reluctant Paul Eddington and Nigel Hawthorne, the lead actors in the programme.

[139] In 1989 a sketch comedy show began on BBC Radio 1 called The Mary Whitehouse Experience, starring alternative comedians David Baddiel, Rob Newman, Steve Punt and Hugh Dennis.