Let's Hear it for "Filth"
By Brian Lambert
Much as I'm inclined to gas on about the auto industry "bailout," I am
making an effort to devote more attention to the purely "media" end of
this blog, better programming in particular.
To that end--and because, of course, the title caught my attention--I spent ninety minutes enjoying Filth the other night. You should, too, this Sunday when it plays on Masterpiece Theatre--Contemporary (8 p.m. TPT, ch. 2).
The nut of this largely true story is one Mary Whitehouse, a tart-tongued British housewife and mother who has very specific ideas on what constitutes acceptable public entertainment. Forty years old when the so-called Profumo sex scandals lit up the British media in 1962--(Trivia quiz for geezers: Who remembers Mandy Rice Davies and Christine Keeler?)--Whitehouse developed an obsession with forcing the BBC to dial back on what she regarded as salacious humor, beginning with the enormously popular satirical weekly news program That Was the Week that Was, a progenitor of Saturday Night Live's 'Weekend Update."
As the chairman of the BBC at the time, one Sir Hugh Greene quickly learned that Mary Whitehouse was no garden variety prude and scold. A canny political games(wo)man with a touch for the kind of acid phrasing that the press can never resist, Whitehouse battered Greene and the BBC for years, building a huge following of supporters in the public and eventually within Britain's Labor government, which eventually used her to stick a shiv in Greene and other BBC pashas with whom they had grown annoyed.
Whitehouse's campaigns for "decency" and regular, high profile objections to "art" that coarsened polite British society was key to getting legendary film director Stanley Kubrick to pull his film A Clockwork Orange out of British theaters for more than twenty-five years. (Kubrick died in 1999, Whitehouse in 2001 . . . at the age of ninety.)
As played by Julie Walters, in a script that presents her story as a charming light comedy, Mary Whitehouse is far and away the hero of the piece. Greene and most of the other BBC characters are portrayed as shallow, self-absorbed hedonists swimming in the envelope-pushing bubble of "swinging London," oblivious to the "values" of small-town and rural Britain.
Stop me if any of this sounds familiar.
In real life, Whitehouse was considerably more intolerant and, as I say, obsessively more narrow-minded than we see here. That's a complaint only in that as social therapy, it'd be nice to feel the full (dreary) effect of someone this determined to control other people's lives. But that kind of realism can wait for a documentary.
What Walters, her writer, and director do achieve is a reminder that not all of the moral watchdogs braying at the doorsteps of Hollywood and 30 Rock are in it for fame and profit. Whitehouse, by all accounts, was a fine mother to her three boys and a devoted wife to her like-minded husband, with never a hint of attempting to profit personally from her vendetta against the "smut peddlers."
Even better, for every American glazey-eyed from the tired, sanctimonious, money-making rhetoric of Dr. James Dobson and the rest of our religious right, the film reminds us that Mary Whitehouse was blessed with a sharp English wit and enjoyed a good clash of ideas with whomever would dare a tiptoe across her web. (As the film shows, Sir Greene adamantly refused to ever meet Whitehouse.)
Here is Whitehouse's obituary in the Guardian.
To that end--and because, of course, the title caught my attention--I spent ninety minutes enjoying Filth the other night. You should, too, this Sunday when it plays on Masterpiece Theatre--Contemporary (8 p.m. TPT, ch. 2).
The nut of this largely true story is one Mary Whitehouse, a tart-tongued British housewife and mother who has very specific ideas on what constitutes acceptable public entertainment. Forty years old when the so-called Profumo sex scandals lit up the British media in 1962--(Trivia quiz for geezers: Who remembers Mandy Rice Davies and Christine Keeler?)--Whitehouse developed an obsession with forcing the BBC to dial back on what she regarded as salacious humor, beginning with the enormously popular satirical weekly news program That Was the Week that Was, a progenitor of Saturday Night Live's 'Weekend Update."
As the chairman of the BBC at the time, one Sir Hugh Greene quickly learned that Mary Whitehouse was no garden variety prude and scold. A canny political games(wo)man with a touch for the kind of acid phrasing that the press can never resist, Whitehouse battered Greene and the BBC for years, building a huge following of supporters in the public and eventually within Britain's Labor government, which eventually used her to stick a shiv in Greene and other BBC pashas with whom they had grown annoyed.
Whitehouse's campaigns for "decency" and regular, high profile objections to "art" that coarsened polite British society was key to getting legendary film director Stanley Kubrick to pull his film A Clockwork Orange out of British theaters for more than twenty-five years. (Kubrick died in 1999, Whitehouse in 2001 . . . at the age of ninety.)
As played by Julie Walters, in a script that presents her story as a charming light comedy, Mary Whitehouse is far and away the hero of the piece. Greene and most of the other BBC characters are portrayed as shallow, self-absorbed hedonists swimming in the envelope-pushing bubble of "swinging London," oblivious to the "values" of small-town and rural Britain.
Stop me if any of this sounds familiar.
In real life, Whitehouse was considerably more intolerant and, as I say, obsessively more narrow-minded than we see here. That's a complaint only in that as social therapy, it'd be nice to feel the full (dreary) effect of someone this determined to control other people's lives. But that kind of realism can wait for a documentary.
What Walters, her writer, and director do achieve is a reminder that not all of the moral watchdogs braying at the doorsteps of Hollywood and 30 Rock are in it for fame and profit. Whitehouse, by all accounts, was a fine mother to her three boys and a devoted wife to her like-minded husband, with never a hint of attempting to profit personally from her vendetta against the "smut peddlers."
Even better, for every American glazey-eyed from the tired, sanctimonious, money-making rhetoric of Dr. James Dobson and the rest of our religious right, the film reminds us that Mary Whitehouse was blessed with a sharp English wit and enjoyed a good clash of ideas with whomever would dare a tiptoe across her web. (As the film shows, Sir Greene adamantly refused to ever meet Whitehouse.)
Here is Whitehouse's obituary in the Guardian.
© 2008 MSP Communications, Inc. All rights reserved
Oh come now, like there’s any reason to change course now. That’s why people read you. You don’t see anyone reading Platt do you? My sense would be your reticence to discuss the auto bailout is the lack of Republicans to shiv.
I think you got had on the Paulson / Bush / Pelosi bailout.
LAMBERT: There is an interesting dilemma for Democrats in the auto bail-out. Namely all those union jobs in Michigan and Ohio. The idea that the Big Three would be better off going into bankruptcy has some appeal to me, in that it would force the U.S. auto industry into ... immediately ... shifting gears to better products. A "bail out" without controls stopping them from introducing a new collection of 5000 pound "crossovers" seems pointless. Obviously something should have done about this long before now. But that list is very, very long.
Posted by: 108 on November 14, 2008 at 12:32 PM
Brian, second to last paragraph, "accounts". Oops.
LAMBERT: Damn.
Posted by: Jeff on November 14, 2008 at 1:17 PM
Just as many (indeed many many more) are tired of the anything goes, let's get down to the lowest common denominator, pornification of the culture.
Is that what you're for, if you're a'gin the calls for decency?
Let's get your cards on the table here, Lambert.
You start out well enough critiquing a media property, then you pull out the ol' Lambo-liberal shiv and use it on...Dobson and the "religious right (your most feared enemy).
You just can't help it, can you?
LAMBERT: Are you volunteering to be the poster boy for family values and moral rectitude?
Posted by: bertram jr on November 14, 2008 at 1:23 PM
Absolutely.
Not sure I like that "rectitude" word.
Sounds like something "ClaudeNRick (tm) would write about.
Posted by: bertram jr on November 14, 2008 at 2:47 PM
You opened the door...
Poor products is only one problem. Legacy health care costs are another. Bankruptcy simply passes those costs right to medicare and other bankruptcy courts.
My in-laws would be in deep but for the 30 years of union work and the legacy health care that was garnered. Cancer, two knee replacements, diabetes and just plain old age would leave these already frugal people in bankruptcy by now...
I would like to see how a "bail out" effects not only the current workforce (and related feeder manufacturing jobs) but the impact to the retirees and their health care costs.
Does the bailout just push the billions to the government in a different cost?
LAMBERT: Short answer? Yes. I'm curious if the Feds might be better off "just" picking up the legacy costs and letting Gm and Chrysler go where they may.
Posted by: Pat B on November 14, 2008 at 4:30 PM
It's a peculiar view that one has a right to go through the world without ever having to be offended. And only one form of offensiveness ever feels the censor's heavy hand: bigotry, moronic violence, crass stupidity and lies, no problem; show a glimpse of a tit, and the sky falls.
I'm also curious about where all those innocent children are. Joe Scarborough, before his fall from linguistic grace when he was still a piety pusher, complained that Bono's utterance of the fatal gerund occurred while Joe's ten year old son was watching the show. Ah, Joe, no ten year old I've ever heard of, known or been, has to go to Wentworth and Flexner to look the f-word up. South Park is probably closer to actual childhood than the Victorian fantasy land of the religious right.
LAMBERT: The FCC's "obscenity" laws are another matter hideously gamed by "the base".
Posted by: john sherman on November 15, 2008 at 8:15 PM
More geezer trivia:
Lest we underestimate the impact she actually had on the generation, here are the pertinent lyrics about Ms. Whitehouse from the song "Pigs," released in 1977 by Pink Floyd on their "Animals" album, which reached #2 in the UK and #3 on the US charts:
"Hey you, Whitehouse
Ha Ha charade you are.
You house proud town mouse
Ha Ha charade you are.
You're tying to keep our feelings off the street.
You're nearly a real treat.
All tight lips and cold feet.
And do you feel abused?
You gotta stem the evil tide
and keep it all on the inside.
Mary you're nearly a treat.
Mary you're nearly a treat.
But you're really a cry."
-- Dave
LAMBERT: Was Syd Barrett still with them when they wrote that?
Posted by: Dave on November 17, 2008 at 7:43 PM
Hey BL, you running on post-election withdrawal, how about you dig into this item with a local media flair--
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-sirota/the-big-heist_b_144576.html
I've been trying not to sound tin-foil hat over this bank bailout, but now that economists are crunching numbers showing the myth. I feel aluminized.
Dang, where's my wallet?
LAMBERT: There have to be indictments attached to this.
Posted by: The Other Mike on November 18, 2008 at 2:36 PM
In an unprecedentedly moronic display of idiotic proportions, TOM, and millions like him, voted for the very guy (in Chicago see: ACORN)who was instrumentally involved with the likes of Barney (the BFer) Frank in forcing banks to lend to the unworthy (circa 1999) via anti-redlining legislation, signed into law by....Willie J. Clinton.
Of course, for TOM and the unfortunate millions like him, when confronted by these facts, there is ....silence.
LAMBERT: The silence may ... just may ... be at so stunning a display of misinformed hysteria.
Posted by: bertram jr on November 19, 2008 at 2:50 PM
BJ...you do know the definition of insanity, right?
Doing the same old thing over and over and yet expecting a new result...is what I see from you.
And I will continue to urge you to stop it, to change, to make yourself a better person and our country a better place.
Change..yes, you can.
Posted by: The Other Mike on November 19, 2008 at 10:59 PM
So then tell me what is inaccurate, or where the "hysteria" lies.
Look it up. Look at the legislation signed by Clinton.
Look at who pressured the banks and created the investment vehicles to accommodate the legislation.
You are unable to refute, that much is clear.
That's why liberal radio fails, too.
Posted by: bertram jr on November 20, 2008 at 2:05 PM
No, seriously BJ, change.
Yet you insist on calling me out, so I will insist on your changing.
Dude, this has nothing to do with talk radio, gays, right, left, or any other bullshit labeling; this is now personal--you call me out, you are talking to me, 1-on-1.
And I'm no effing enabler, you call on me, and I'm going to call you out back and ask you--Bertie, is this how you want to live out your final years, as a sour SOB bringing up things from 10 years ago?
Is this your legacy--riding bad politics into the ground while the county is screwed up?
Honestly Bert, we are not talking up some Springsteen 'Glory Days' here, you are talking obscure spin from some dude's wet dream spin-o-rama of the truth!! Buddy, that curveball struck you out, why do you want to relive it!!!
Is this truly what you want to ride into the ground, like Slim Picken's riding that bomb into the ground in that old black n white movie?
Think BJ think! For yourself, not what might please the God of Rush or Hannity. Think, those guys are in a whole different tax bracket...shouldn't that be your first hint!!!
THINK! You and I are in MN for God's sake, and these flowers of politicss, have they ever shot a pheasant in the WILD? Have they ever dragged a deer across 40 acres? I have.
THINK! You and I might like to go fishing someday, do you know that there is no water in MN that does not have mercury poisoning in it? I know it.
THINK! What is really important to you here? Dude, we are here in MN...don't screw with me, it is 10 effing degrees tonight and my house is damn cold. I have a mortgage worth at least 20% more than the house it is on, my sons have no health insurance, my job is one small burp from going under...think BJ, how much of your 1990s gay-bashing bullshit am I going to take from you.
Period.
I recommend you not call me out. You don't have the firepower to handle it.
Posted by: The Other Mike on November 20, 2008 at 11:39 PM
"Was Syd Barrett still with them when they wrote that?"
No. When Animals hit the high point on the charts, Syd was living in his mother's basement in Cambridge. I believe it was around day 428 of a 793-day Augustus Owsley Stanley III-brand Orange Sunshine excursion.
However, I did hear from a Pict grooving in a Scottish cave that Syd did like the song -- at least during the time he watched the shag carpet wave like a wheat field in the wind as the paint dripped down his walls and the cat telekinetically turned the volume up and down on his stereo.
Syd, Syd, Syd. (sigh)
-- Dave
LAMBERT: Ha! I'm calling a very pleasant afternoon I spent in Grantchester Meadow. Ad our ritual of playing "Umma Gumma" on mini-speakers at the bottom of he Grand Canyon. Syd's influence was felt.
Posted by: Dave on November 20, 2008 at 11:54 PM
Fannie and Freddie put at risk, maybe, $20 billion and was supported by Bush and his "ownership society" initiative. The deregulated subprime and derivatives market that Warren Buffett warned back in 2006 was a "time bomb waiting to explode" is a $500 trillion dollar risk to the economy. When it exploded, it took everything down including Freddie and Fannie.
In certain upscale neighborhoods of Orange County California, they found 75% of the homes were financed with commercial subprime non-Freddie or Fannie loans. These risky loans in upper middle class neighborhoods were made to 2 income earning families and not poor people. In a properly regulated banking industry these loans should never have been made.
Refute that brain dead bertram jr. You're an idiot and no matter how often you repeat yourself, you'll still be an idiot. Do you know why a discussion with right-wing extremists always boils down to smarter citizens questioning their intelligence because it is always a question of their views lacking intelligence.
LAMBERT: I'm sure this will shut him up.
Posted by: Michelle on November 21, 2008 at 9:18 AM
Far out, man!
Death to the capitalist pigs! Heh.
Hey, TOM, I am calling YOU and the other millions of Zogby-revealed hopey-changitude nincompoops out.
Show me some results.
So far, you can't muster a cogent refutation on the well documented origins of the sub-prime debacle. That's fundamental stuff, TOM.
Try to keep up.
LAMBERT: I don't even have to ask where you're getting your "documentation" do I?
Posted by: bertram jr on November 21, 2008 at 2:06 PM
BJ = "origins of the sub-prime debacle"
Oh, that is all you want? It is here--
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/oct/24/economics-creditcrunch-federal-reserve-greenspan
Alan Greenspan, the former chairman of the US Federal Reserve, has apologised, albeit only partially, for adhering to an economic ideology that has led to the massive collapse of financial markets today.
“I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interests of organisations, specifically banks and others, were such that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and their equity in the firms,” he said.
See BJ...it is a bad carpenter who blames his tools.
Which brings me back to my concern for you, as a human being, I urge to you change, to give up this life of divisiveness and rejoin people who are no longer interested in wedge issues from 10 years ago that led the country into the toilet.
I urge you, for your own eternal soul, to change to solving problems instead of creating them. Read some Rilke, like from letter six--
"I can only suggest that perhaps all professions are like that, filled with demands, filled with hostility toward the individual...somehow you must find a way to work at it, and not lose too much time or too much courage at clarifying your attitude toward people."
You must change, but not for me, for you.
Posted by: The Other Mike on November 23, 2008 at 10:02 PM