Whitehouse was made to appear – perhaps not unfairly – the out-of-touch, comically repressed, bigoted caricature we think of today, tat-tattering on her typewriter with pursed lips, tutting at Alf Garnett’s blasphemy and despairing at I Am the Walrus. This first episode (it concludes next week) never got to the bottom of her claim that she spoke for the moral majority, but she certainly got the ears of powerful men – and she did for Sir Hugh Greene in the end, a man who was quite convinced she spoke for no one but a knitting group of cranks. This aloof member of the BBC’s metropolitan elite was sent packing. Ignore the housewives of Middle England at your peril, Director-General.

Towards the end, director Hannah Berryman (who made the excellent Rockfield: The Studio on the Farm) hinted at a thesis – that perhaps Whitehouse, among all the Old Testament doom-mongering, had a point. Or as the writer Ben Thompson put it: “Her smoke alarm was set very high, but that doesn’t mean that, on many occasions, there wasn’t a real fire.” However, the film itself didn’t seem convinced by those fires, offering up only the disgraceful suggestion by the director Bernardo Bertolucci that Maria Schneider was not consulted before filming the controversial rape scene in Last Tango in Paris. 

More convincing were Whitehouse’s comments, in front of the Cambridge Union, that pornography is “a male commodity, made by men, for men… we must consider the effects of porn on women and children.” Here, she did not sound the 1970s prude, but the modern-day feminist. Now that’s an angle worth pursuing, but it was not dwelt on long. In episode two, perhaps.