A charming look at a '60s crusader against 'Filth'

Crusaders, by their very nature, are difficult to portray dramatically. Lean a bit to one side and you've got satire, go the other and you have propaganda. "Filth," which debuts on Masterpiece Contemporary on Sunday night at 9, falls into that rare and wonderful Category C -- a lively, thought-provoking and often humorous quasi-biopic of a real-life crusader in which there are no angels, or devils either, just a nation in the midst of change for which not everyone is prepared.

Written by Amanda Coe, "Filth" tells the story of Mary Whitehouse, a British homemaker who, appalled by the increased sex, violence and profanity on television in the early 1960s, launched the Clean Up TV Campaign and became a national icon. By the time of her death in 2001, only Margaret Thatcher's name drew greater ire from Britain's liberal/creative community.

With her steel-framed specs, helmet hair and sensible shoes, Whitehouse seems the very model of social repression. But underneath her church-going hats roils a brisk and merry intelligence, because Whitehouse is played by the marvelous Julie Walters, who shatters any prim-and-proper prejudice with a glance.

Walters, last seen in "Mamma Mia!" and as Mrs. Weasley in the "Harry Potter" movies, is a genie's bottle of effervescence and lends Whitehouse such an air of good-natured common sense that her outrage over a documentary about premarital sex, being broadcast, if you can imagine, at tea time, seems perfectly reasonable. Why shouldn't a perfectly respectable suburban woman be able to sit down with her husband and three sons without hearing such shocking and revolutionary talk? And from the BBC!

It's not that Whitehouse is against sex -- she and her husband, Ernest (Alun Armstrong), are, as she would say, happily married; she just doesn't want to see it, or so much drinking, smoking, killing and swearing, on television.

Her efforts to reduce the "poison" pouring into British sitting rooms through "the box" are soon concentrated on Sir Hugh Greene, director general of the BBC, and, as played by Hugh Bonneville, a more supercilious member of the media elite you could not hope to find. As Whitehouse and her organization grow in size and visibility, Greene, with increasing personal agitation, refuses to acknowledge even her right to an opinion. Anyone attempting to stand in the way of television's mandate to be "with it" is, according to him, an ill-educated nutter.