And the thing is she was often right. The lunacy of the Paedophile Information Exchange, something that could only have been dreamt up in the 1970s and which petitioned for the abolition of the age of consent, led to the Protection of Children Act 1978. In the following decade, her concern at the growing trend for “video nasties” (her phrase) meant that she lobbied for tighter restrictions on the video industry which had become a porny, ultraviolent Wild West. Indeed, her concern proved horribly prophetic as cases such as the murder of James Bulger highlighted the influence of certain films on dangerously disturbed young minds.

Yet Whitehouse was also a malign force, usually when her extreme Christianity could not concede to a more humane approach to society. Her views on gay sex make for uncomfortable reading, once giving advice on how mothers should inhibit homosexuality in their sons.

But most of all, I think she often got arts and TV wrong, taking everything at face value and unable to consider notions of nuance or irony. Mostly her ire was directed at the gogglebox, a burgeoning, democratising force in British society in the 1960s, and in Whitehouse’s mind, a corrupting influence within the home. One of her early victims was Till Death Us Do Part, Johnny Speight’s sitcom about working-class bigot Alf Garnett, played by Warren Mitchell. 

Whitehouse’s objections against the profanities uttered in each episode and which, in truth, were no more serious than a few uses of “bloody” or “bleedin’” per episode, rather overlooked the more serious points that Speight was making, such as the fact that Garnett was a racist and that we should be laughing AT him rather than with him.

Similarly, her objections to violence in Doctor Who during the Tom Baker era were overstated (the series was never THAT horrific) and ignored the fact that a bit of horror is healthy for kids who like to be scared, and whose imagination can be unleashed as a result.