Ellen Gray: 'Filth' chronicles BBC watchdog

RICKY GERVAIS: OUT OF ENGLAND.

9 p.m. Saturday, HBO.

MASTERPIECE: FILTH. 9 p.m. Sunday, Channel 12.

THEY'RE FILING it under "Masterpiece Contemporary," but from the opening moments of "Filth" on PBS Sunday, you might be forgiven for thinking you'd tuned into an episode of "Mystery!"

There's a dowdily dressed woman on a bicycle, riding through one of those idyllic-looking English villages, and if it weren't for the close-up of her tire cutting through a bit of dog poop, and the warning that "the story you are about to see really took place - only with less swearing and more nudity," you'd be on the lookout for Miss Marple.

Or at the very least, a tidily arranged corpse.

But the dog poop won't be hitting the fan until teatime, when Mary Whitehouse (Julie Walters), 1960s churchgoing wife, mother and schoolteacher, hears the words "premarital sex" on the BBC and promptly drops the pot.

It's a moment, most likely an apocryphal one, that leads Whitehouse to spend the next few decades trying to "clean up" television, a campaign that changes her life, and not always for the better.

History, they say, is written by the winners, and British broadcasters, who have long enjoyed a license that seems to come and go in the United States, would seem to have long ago defeated Whitehouse, who died in 2001. And there's no better proof than "Filth" itself, which seems to have aired on BBC2 without the bleeping added by an understandably skittish PBS.

Yet for all the gentle ridicule heaped on Walters' character in "Filth," her Mary is closer to a three-dimensional figure than Whitehouse's nemesis, BBC head Sir Hugh Greene (Hugh Bonneville). Here the former journalist and brother of novelist Graham Greene is depicted as a smug twit whose interest in broadening the BBC's horizons - something the real Greene is generally credited with having done - is rooted in a childlike need to offend.

Whitehouse, too, may seem childlike at times, as her campaign leads her to knowledge that her own marriage and child-rearing hadn't required of her, including, according to "Filth," the horrified discovery that there existed such a thing as "oral sex."

It's all a bit simplistic, and there being relatively few examples of unobjectionable programs that Whitehouse nevertheless objected to, it's hard not to sympathize - a little - with the Everywoman being treated with contempt by the people whose salaries her taxes helped pay.

For context, you might want to turn to HBO, which Saturday night is premiering a stand-up special by Britain's own Ricky Gervais, creator of "The Office" and possessor of a mouth that Whitehouse would no doubt happily have washed out with soap.

Gervais may just be one of the funniest men alive, but once you hear his ruminations on AIDS and monkeys, sex and public toilets, cows and stairs and a variety of other subjects that all seem to come back to penises, you'll have far more fun with "Filth," if only in imagining Whitehouse in the audience, furiously scribbling notes for the letters she'd soon be writing to the proper authorities.

Those proper authorities - expected to undergo some changes in an Obama administration - haven't yet had much luck in taming cable, and premium services like HBO, which don't rely on advertisers, have little to worry about, either, from watchdog groups and their threats of boycotts.

Still, there's a time and place for everything, and something to be said for Whitehouse's belief that words matter.

As Gervais himself tells his audience after a particularly graphic bit of sharing:

"I've had that in my head for 30 years - now you live with it."

I don't usually bother with the Parents Television Council, which wields parenthood like a club to try to keep even those of us whose kids go to bed at a decent hour from watching a lot of pretty good television.

But in honor of Mary Whitehouse, who might well have been the group's fairy godmother, I'll mention that the PTC has commended MSNBC's Joe Scarborough for quickly apologizing for dropping the f-bomb on "Morning Joe" on Monday and the cable network for deciding to institute a brief delay on the live show.

Now, though, noting that Jane Fonda and Tiki Barber both said a very different bad word on NBC during the past year, the group would like to see all live shows, including "Today," on a delay.

Of course, if you're genuinely offended by the prospect that live TV might, once every few months, prove a little too lively, you could always institute your own permanent delay and stop watching altogether. *

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