TV preview - Half-decent effort

Published on Friday 23 May 2008 17:06

IT'S not enough to snigger at Mary Whitehouse when there's a bigger story to tell

Filth: The Mary Whitehouse Story Wednesday, BBC2, 9pm

Kiss of Death Monday, BBC1, 9pm

Eurovision Saturday, BBC1, 8pm

HISTORY BEING WRITTEN BY THE winners, it's no surprise that the Mary Whitehouse story has been turned into a BBC comedy, with smutty jokes and even – as if just to spite her – a mild sex scene. Because, of course, her campaign to clean up TV failed utterly. She never really stood a chance.

The things she found so shocking in 1963 seem quaint now; it's easy to imagine how apoplectic she would have been made by virtually anything today. Sex and the City would probably have made her explode. And while the organisation she founded still exists, it's a spent force as the ethical debate about TV has moved on to other issues.

I can't say I'm unhappy about that, as Filth (though only half the drama it should have been) does remind us how narrow and authoritarian Whitehouse's vision was. Television wasn't something to open up the world, but shut it down, providing the approved version of how to live, in heterosexual, traditional Christian families only. A channel run on her intolerant principles would have been deadly.

But this film is flawed, even if it shows how her offputting campaign did her cause no favours. In the 1960s, satirists were provoked into making Whitehouse a figure of fun, and this version of her life mines the same seam. While spotting naughty undertones in Andy Pandy, Whitehouse blithely fails to see two men having sex on a country walk, gives her fledgling organisation a dubious acronym, and so on. In the opening scene, she's gaily riding around on her Pashley bicycle (every TV props department's vehicle of choice for eccentric old ladies – I only notice because I've got one myself) only to run over a dog's, er, leavings, as she would probably have put it.

All this sniggering stuff is a bit cheap and silly, as she would no doubt also have pointed out, and not that funny. Worse, it gets in the way of what could have been an interesting exploration of what lay behind her campaign: we never really learn why she felt so driven.

Whitehouse and her husband were originally members of the controversial Oxford Group, a cult-like religious movement; she campaigned against what she saw as the BBC's left wing bias as much as its sexual permissiveness; when sued for libel, her curious defence was that she'd had a blackout. But you'd know none of this from Filth, which skates along on the surface of her life.

It is, though, anchored by very solid and sympathetic performances from Julie Walters and Alun Armstrong as the Whitehouses and from Hugh Bonneville as her blinkered nemesis, Sir Hugh Carleton Greene of the BBC, who refuses to take her campaign seriously. His successors, or at least those who made this, are still refusing to engage. It's an opportunity missed: you don't have to be a Whitehouse fan to wonder how we've ended up with a TV culture of under-the-blankets live sex on Big Brother, F*** Off I'm Fat and Celebrity Rehab.

Or, indeed, Kiss of Death, yet another gloomy forensic drama with gory body parts being picked over by police scientists. I knew in advance that this was a one-off drama (though I imagine they're hoping for a series to follow), but kept forgetting and thinking that I must have missed an earlier episode, because it's massively confusing.

A bunch of unlikeable characters are investigating a murder, but spend most of their time having loud arguments with each other about things that happened previously; there are a couple of flashbacks, but they don't really help. Letting the audience do a bit of work is good, but working out the complicated backstory here is a real slog.

Everyone has a guilty secret or trauma – alcoholism, being accused of murdering a daughter, being Danny Dyer. Meanwhile, a woman is imprisoned in a walled-up cupboard, wrapped in cellophane, her slow suffocation transmitted to the investigators over a live webcam. It's all just a big wallow in unpleasantness, leaving you drained.

The writer, Barbara Machin, also created Waking the Dead, but while that show features stalwart actors, such as Trevor Eve and Sue Johnston, Kiss of Death's line-up (Louise Lombard, Lyndsey Marshall, Shaun Parkes and Dyer) are not quite in their league.

Thank goodness for Eurovision, the annual celebration of British cynicism in the face of European unity – although these days they seem to be mainly united in not voting for us. Poor Andy Abraham is this year's sacrificial victim to have to pretend to take it seriously amid a crowd of singing turkey puppets, vampires and pirates. It should be fun to hear Terry Wogan taking shots at the Danish Eurovision director who said that Wogan was the one making it "ridiculous".