She was as impulsive as Don Quixote, tilting at windmills. She wielded a lethal handbag long before a certain prime minister discovered the trick.

But though she was as courageous as David taking on Goliath, she had no deadly slingshot in her armoury.

For nearly 40 years, Mary Whitehouse battled with broadcasters. She took on the might of the media at a time when its influence was burgeoning.

She never admitted defeat and was still monitoring radio and TV for bad language, sex and violence until a short while before she died last week.

She saw the BBC as her main enemy during the Sixties and Seventies and the BBC certainly regarded her as 'that dreadful woman, mad, a total pain'.

There was a huge arrogance in the corporation at the time, which meant they had little real regard for the public response to programming.

The liberal agenda was paramount. Mary Whitehouse's prescience in recognising that those liberal attitudes would eventually become today's libertarian attitudes was disregarded.

I will tell you a story against myself from 1974 when I was a reporter on Radio 4's 'World This Weekend'.

I had reported on a wacky religious meeting in Westminster Hall, chaired by that batty peer Lord Longford. Then, horror of horrors, the sky fell in.

My editor received a letter from Mary Whitehouse, copied to BBC chairman Sir Michael Swann.

She had had several phone calls from members of her National Listeners' and Viewers' Association praising my report and she agreed the meeting was 'very fairly covered indeed'.

The shame was almost too much to bear! The strength of feeling against Mary Whitehouse meant that a compliment from the woman the BBC considered to be public enemy number one was humiliating.

The letter was filed away, never to be mentioned again. But, for whatever reasons, I kept it and I still have it!

Now, we can see how right she was to fear our culture would be coarsened by the use of sex, violence and foul language on radio and television. We live with it every day.

Mrs Whitehouse was particularly hated by militant homosexuals.

She won a libel action against Gay News in 1979 for publishing a blasphemous poem about Jesus Christ and activists burned an effigy of her in Trafalgar Square.

But she was a warm-hearted soul. My favourite story concerns a gay stalker who tried to assault her.

He wore only a thin shirt and shorts and she told him: "You poor thing. Go home and get some clothes on." It is not recorded whether she hit him with her handbag!

Mary Whitehouse lost her campaigns not because she was too aggressive or too self-righteous but because the momentum of the media juggernaut was simply unstoppable. That doesn't mean she was wrong.

Where is the big personality now who will stand up every day and shout: "Stop. We have come too far. It is time to think again."