Filth: The Mary Whitehouse Story (2008)

Recommended

UK

Television Film

Director: Andy DeEmmony

Writers: Amanda Coe, Patrick Reams

Cinematographer: David Odd

Composers: Nick Green, Tristin Norwell

Cast: Julie Walters, Alun Armstrong, Hugh Bonneville, Georgie Glen, Timothy Davies

Though this BBC portrait of Mary Whitehouse, the suburban art teacher turned moral crusader, who was intent upon forcing her own peculiar brand of unnatural, puritanical protestant morality onto the rest of the nation through her Clean Up TV campaign, is played mostly for laughs (which it provides plentifully), it also manages, against all the odds, to capture affectingly the humanity its oft fun-poked heroine. Iain.Stott