Mary Whitehouse film for TV

Crusading TV clean-up campaigner and former Shropshire teacher Mary Whitehouse is to get the star treatment when actress Julie Walters plays her in a new film by her nemesis - the BBC.Filth: The Mary Whitehouse Story will chronicle the battle for TV morals that raged in the 1960s, the BBC said.

The 90-minute film, reliving the drama of Mrs Whitehouse's famous clashes with broadcasters, will star Hugh Bonneville as BBC director-general Sir Hugh Carleton Greene.

Walters said she relished playing the role of Mrs Whitehouse, who was a senior mistress at Telford's Madeley Modern School - now Abraham Darby - and fought tirelessly to curb bad language, graphic sex and violence in broadcasting.

One of Britain's best-loved actresses, Walters has won a Bafta for her role in Billy Elliot and was nominated for an Oscar for Educating Rita.

She said: "I am very excited to be playing Mary Whitehouse and to be looking at the time when she attacked the BBC and started to make her name."

Mrs Whitehouse formed a "Clean Up TV" petition in 1963, signed by 500,000 people. The BBC rejected her clean-up manifesto and but she remained a thorn in the side of TV supremos.

A year later she founded the National Viewers and Listeners Association to raise awareness of the influence of "bad television".

A screening of the drama for members of cast and crew took place in Soho last night. Filth: The Mary Whitehouse Story will be broadcast on BBC2 on May 28 at 9pm.

Mrs Whitehouse, who had lived in Claverley, died in Essex in 2001, aged 91.