Joan Bakewell: I granted Mary Whitehouse the freedom to protest

I was one of the last to be threatened with prosecution. It was over a gay poem over which Mary Whitehouse successfully prosecuted in 1977 and which I quoted from in my 2001 BBC2 series Taboo. You can't talk about the history of taboos without... er... quoting examples.

In the late 1970s, the verdict was guilty, and the editor of Gay News, in which the poem appeared, was sentenced to a nine-month suspended prison sentence. But in 2001 my offence never came to court.

By the 1980s Mrs Whitehouse was running out of steam. But this week she stormed back with a charming and generous play on BBC television... the very institution that had banned her from its programmes. I visited her in her last days, in a very comfy old people's home. She reminisced about what a struggle it had been, rather like an old warrior showing his scars and recalling battles long ago.

I had been part of those battles, presenting Late Night Line-Up, a daily talk show that fearlessly confronted all the taboos of the day – issues like abortion, divorce, homosexuality... and Mary Whitehouse! Strangely also this week – on Bank Holiday Monday – the BBC ran an entire evening on the Parliament Channel called "The Permissive Night", where, for the first time in 36 years, I chaired a Late Night Line-Up discussion about whether the 1960s' legacy was good or bad. It demonstrated what today's television is missing: almost an hour of intelligent conversation with divergent opinions heard and challenged.

Mrs Whitehouse was a Sixties phenomenon, far more fiercely dogmatic than the kindly figure portrayed on film by Julie Walters. She was a proud woman convinced that her own opinions were unassailable, that she had God on her side. She mobilised support through the network of parish churches whose large congregations responded to her populist outrage. Now one or two are beginning to think she may have been right after all. But the churches are empty.

Early on in his confrontations with her, the BBC's then director-general, Sir Hugh Carleton Greene, had issued an instruction throughout the BBC that no one was to give her airtime. He had ushered in the cheekily disrespectful That Was The Week That Was, which went hammer and tongues after all the petty hypocrisies and contradictions of political life. Young audiences yelped with glee; older viewers knew things would never be the same again. Mrs Whitehouse became their self-appointed leader.

Late Night Line-Up considered Greene had been wrong to deny her a chance to speak. We decided we would defy his injunction. But we would do it wittily: we invited Mrs Whitehouse to review the new show opening at London's Roundhouse: Oh! Calcutta! As most of the cast were nude most of the time, she was bound to disapprove. She did, but nothing daunted she turned up and was given time to discuss her ideas. Unlike her or Greene, we didn't believe in censorship.

Her last battle came as late as 1980, when the play The Romans in Britain at the National Theatre featured a simulated rape of an ancient druid by the occupying Romans. For Mrs Whitehouse it was the sex that offended, not the fact that the whole thing was an allegory for British presence in Northern Ireland.

The legal system had long been unwilling to prosecute such matters because juries were unlikely to bring a guilty verdict. Mrs Whitehouse usually took out a private prosecution, backed by the fighting fund of her different organisations. Her glory days were over.

So was Mary Whitehouse right? Over sex I think she was wrong. Sex in the 1950s and 1960s was seen as secret and even dirty. It was the subject of rude jokes and rude postcards; nakedness, Barbara Windsor-style was cheeky and naughty. The consequences of sex – unwanted pregnancy, illegal abortion – were hushed up and kept in the shadows. Likewise unhappy marriages: easier divorce was opposed by those who wanted society to present a happy face to the world, to sustain the belief that all was well, and Christian families were the bedrock of society. There was no allowance for human misery. The truth is television in the Sixties stripped bare the illusion of all things being well. In doing so it created our more open, more truthful but more conflicted, society.

About violence she was right. We see too much of it. Fictional violence on our screens is now beyond the control of the watershed and the internet censors. The virus is out there and creating havoc among the aimless young. At the same time actual violence – natural catastrophes or man-made atrocities – is our daily news fare. Today's world is transformed from the comfy, limited place where Mrs Whitehouse could make her gentle protests. And there's no going back.

joan.bakewell@virgin.net

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