Shocked by a BBC program about premarital sex — broadcast at teatime — Whitehouse rises from her quaint suburban life to do battle with the innovative, taboo-breaking head of the BBC, Sir Hugh Greene, played by Hugh Bonneville (Five Days, “Miss Austen Regrets”).
The program also stars Alun Armstrong (“Bleak House”) as Mary’s taciturn husband, Ernest, who toes his wife’s moral line, while secretly curious about the new sexual openness in British society.
But Mary will have none of it and finds sexual innuendo everywhere — in plays, soap operas and documentaries, not to mention the 44 “bloody”s in one episode of a popular sitcom. Her answer is Clean Up TV, a grassroots movement to combat the “tide of filth, violence and degradation … smoking, drinking, open mad kisses” and worse.
The object of her letter-writing campaign, BBC director general Sir Hugh Greene, responds that “provocation is healthy and socially imperative,” and he blithely refuses to respond to Mary’s criticisms. But he has met his match in “that demented housewife,” as he calls her.
See previews and find out more at pbs.org.
Watch it Sunday, November 16th at 8:00 p.m on KUAT6-HD.
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