Girl joins Julie in Whitehouse film

A young Wolverhampton actress is appearing in a new drama about decency campaigner Mary Whitehouse alongside the Black Country's Julie Walters.

Jessica Harper, from Penn, shares a scene with Smethwick-born Walters, who plays the TV standards campaigner in the drama to be screened tonight.

The two share a brief scene set in the 1960s in which former Wolverhampton teacher Mrs Whitehouse is mocked by a group of schoolgirls at Madeley Modern School near Telford during an art class she was teaching.

And Jessica's grandmother has told how she helped the 17-year-old to learn about Mrs Whitehouse because she met the lady herself.

The scene was actually filmed in London in January last year but the project has spent a long time in editing and post-production.

Jessica, of Fancourt Avenue, is finishing her A-Levels at Newhampton Arts Centre in Whitmore Reans and is also a member of city-based South Staffs Musical Theatre Company.

She said: "My character starts asking Mary Whitehouse a lot of things that pupils wouldn't really talk to their teachers about. She's trying to wind her up. Julie Walters was lovely and she talked to us about how she used to hate Mary Whitehouse when she was younger but came to understand why she did it. The way that people treated her just made her more determined."

Jessica's grandmother Dorothy Harper, aged 80, used to take Jessica's aunt Heather to music lessons in Wolverhampton.

The teacher's husband was methodist preacher Jack Cotterill, a close friend of Mrs Whitehouse and the famous campaigner would sometimes be at the house talking about the state of the nation's TV.

Mrs Harper, of Brantley Avenue, Finchfield, said: "It would have been in the late 1960s that we met when I went to pick Heather up. Mrs Whitehouse lived in Claverley, near Wolverhampton.

The 90-minute film will dramatise the infamous feud between former Wolverhampton schoolteacher Mrs Whitehouse and BBC director general Sir Hugh Greene. She was banned from BBC premises from 1965 to 1976.

Filth, The Mary Whitehouse Story, is on BBC Two at 9pm. The drama was filmed in and around the London area and the Whitehouse home interiors were filmed in a house in Chertsey, which was decorated in 1960s style, while Claverley and house exteriors were filmed in a village in Surrey.