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 The Mary Whitehouse Letters- Volume 1 Mary Whitehouse- uncompromising guardian of the nation’s morals, or self-righteous, vindictive harpy? The argument has been raging since last Thursday and shows no signs of calming down. Through her pioneering campaigns, Mrs Whitehouse for many years succeeded in alerting generations of television viewers to where the really mucky stuff was, and her tireless promotion of Christian values drew millions away from the nation’s churches and back to their sofas to watch something racy with women taking their tops off. However, we at the Vervoid are in a position to shed some light on Mary Whitehouse and the NVALA. A file of correspondence addressed to Mrs Whitehouse was recently found on a park bench in Graeme Gardens and passed to us. It contains a selection of the Doctor Who-related letters that Mary Whitehouse received, together with the photograph of Robert Holmes which she kept on her dartboard. Over the next few weeks, we will be sharing some of these letters with you, and we are sure that you will agree that these letters are a revealing insight into the kinds of people who would write to Mrs Whitehouse. Upright moral crusader or the only sane one in the asylum? Only time will tell... 23 Disraeli Villas Dear Mrs Whitehouse, I would like to draw to your attention the cavalier attitude of the warped and twisted minds who are making ‘Doctor Who’ these days. Only last Saturday, the recent story ‘The Hand of Fear’ had Doctor Who’s assistant Sarah wandering into a nuclear power station armed only with a lunchbox. Do these people not realise what dangerous messages they are putting into impressionable young minds? Only today I found that my eight-year-old son Oswald had walked into our local nuclear power station with his Tupperware lunchbox and proceeded to eat his lunch next to the reactor. He now glows in the dark, which I wouldn’t mention only the people across the road have complained that the glowing is keeping them awake at night. The doctors also tell me that Oswald is likely to be sterile, which is a bit of a nuisance as I have already knitted twenty-three pairs of bootees for his future offspring. Please use your influence to ensure that no other little boys end up like Oswald (although that said, since Oswald’s accident my husband no longer bumps into things when getting up in the night). Yours self-righteously Daphne Cox-Wallow (Mrs)
Padlock House 21st February 1977 Dear Mrs Whitehouse, As Chief Handlebar of the British Association for Pedalling Safely (the "Purple Helmets"), I would like to make you aware of the potential dangers being promoted by the BBC television programme ‘Doctor Who’. The most recent serial, ‘The Robots of Death’, had a number of characters wantonly sticking reflector discs on each other. Quite apart from the fact that I know of several children who will not now use these useful little items for fear of being strangled by a robot, the older children in our area have taken to wearing reflectors on their jackets. This is an extremely dangerous practice; only the other day, I was cycling home from Padlock House when I caught sight of a reflector in my headlamp. I remained stationary for some ten minutes or so in the belief that a cyclist ahead of me was waiting to turn, when it was in fact a child waiting at a bus stop wearing one of these reflectors. During this time, my darling wife’s Beef Bourguignon was boiling away to nothing in our Baby Belling and I was in for it when I got home, I can tell you! Please use your influence with the BBC to ensure that our little red friend the reflector is only used for the purpose for which it was intended. Yours obsessively Harold Gere-Cheyne Chief Handlebar, BAPS |
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