The Desiree Carthorse Experience

In their second season episode called Gender Education, The Goodies meet a character called Mrs Desiree Carthorse (played by Beryl "Connie" Reid) who is obviously based upon the real-life person of Mrs Mary Whitehouse, only with the character traits for which she was famous being very slightly exaggerated for comic effect.

Mary Whitehouse, and her organisation the National Viewers' and Listeners' Association (or NVLA for short, which isn't a very good acronym really, if you were going to do it properly it should have been called something like the Clean Up National Television Society) had been a thorn in the BBC's side since the mid-1960s, attempting to impose her views on what was and was not suitable for broadcast upon the corporation.

Unfortunately, Mary Whitehouse's views were founded in her extremely old-fashioned, conservative, reactionary religious beliefs, and if they had gone unchallenged could have held up or even reversed the progress that the BBC was making in depicting the liberalising culture of the 1960s, '70s and '80s. For example, as hard as it is to believe now, it was still illegal for mannys to be gay in Scotland until 1981, largely because of bigoted, intolerant people like Mary Whitehouse, and that is why the gayness we see in Blakes 7 is limited to covert, subversive acts such as manly handshakes and meaningful looks, in order to fly under the gaydar of the NVLA censors.

Mary Whitehouse did not attack the Goodies directly - in fact the opposite is true, with her praising the "wholesome, family-orientated humour" of their first season, which the Goodies clearly didn't like because (1) they were actually trying to be subversive, especially with the number of "Lemon Sherbet Dip" style drug references, and (2) they didn't like Mary Whitehouse. This didn't stop them (in fact it probably encouraged them even more) from sending her up in 1971 - a year before Monty Python's Flying Circus would do the same in their 'War Against Pornography' sketch.

This was obviously the moment for the BBC's counterattack against the NVLA, exposing them for the out-of-touch busyboddys they were. Sadly a handful of satirical comedy programmes were not enough to break her power overnight, although it did begin to wane somewhat after about this point, and Mary Whitehouse continued to have political influence over British TV for the rest of her career - including getting one Doctor Who Producer, Phillip Hinchcliffe, sacked for making the series too violent.

Mind you, she's got a point about that cliffhanger at the end of Deadly Assassin part three...