I can offer a little insight into how Mary Whitehouse operated (TV review, 29 March). In the 1960s I was in the enviable position of producer of BBC Two classic serials. We produced a wide range of dramatisations of international novels including Émile Zola’s Nana. Its content was without doubt controversial, but it was nonetheless regarded as a great work and worthy of dramatising. It certainly involved sexual attitudes and included bare breasts. Mrs Whitehouse reacted with a furious letter of condemnation, describing me with the words to the effect that I was a foul, depraved wretch who should be banned from television.
She, of course, was entitled to her opinion. However, she seemed to have forgotten that the immediately preceding novel I had produced was George Eliot’s Middlemarch, after which she had written to me wishing there were more producers like me working at the BBC.
