{"product_id":"9780571281503","title":"Ban This Filth!: Letters From the Mary Whitehouse Archive","description":"\u003cp\u003eIn 1964, Mary Whitehouse launched a campaign to fight what she called the 'propaganda of disbelief, doubt and dirt' being poured into homes through the nation's radio and television sets. Whitehouse, senior mistress at a Shropshire secondary school, became the unlikely figurehead of a mass movement for censorship: the National Viewers' and Listeners' Association, now Mediawatch-uk.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eFor almost forty years, she kept up the fight against the programme makers, politicians, pop stars and playwrights who she felt were dragging British culture into a sewer of blasphemy and obscenity. From \u003ci\u003eDoctor Who\u003c\/i\u003e ('Teatime brutality for tots') to Dennis Potter (whose mother sued her for libel and won) to the Beatles - whose \u003ci\u003eMagical Mystery Tour\u003c\/i\u003e escaped her intervention by the skin of its psychedelic teeth - the list of Mary Whitehouse's targets will read to some like a nostalgic roll of honour.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eCaricatured while she lived as a figure of middle-brow reaction, Mary Whitehouse was held in contempt by the country's intellectual elite. But were some of the dangers she warned of more real than they imagined?  \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e  Ben Thompson's selection of material from her extraordinary archive shows Mary Whitehouse's legacy in a startling new light. From her exquisitely testy exchanges with successive BBC Directors General, to the anguished screeds penned by her television and radio vigilantes, these letters reveal a complex and combative individual, whose anxieties about culture and morality are often eerily relevant to the age of the internet.  \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e  'A fantastic read . . . I can't recommend it highly enough.' Lauren Laverne, BBC Radio 6 Music\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Faber and Faber","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47178235412720,"sku":"9780571281503","price":11.66,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9780571281503_p0.jpg?v=1763718013","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9780571281503","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}