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.
Needless to say, she copied the Nana letter to the director general, but not the Middlemarch one.
David Conroy
London
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