Scarred for Life: British Public Information Films
Several years ago, my fascination with folk horror took me to Scarfolk, Richard Littler’s satirical website set in a fictional English town forever stuck in the 1970s. It’s a place where “pagan rituals blend seamlessly with science; hauntology is a compulsory subject at school and everyone must be in bed by 8 pm because they are perpetually running a slight fever.” If you haven’t checked it out already, I highly recommend it – it’s one of those sites where you can easily spend a few hours browsing.
Richard Littler's 'Don't Campaign' from Scarfolk
The highlight is Littler’s faux public information posters and Penguin guides. Littler is a graphic designer and he nails the fonts, the dour colour schemes and the dark undertones of the messages to a tee. On my first visit, I got a pleasurable shock of recognition – growing up in the 1980s, those stuffy old books were still on library shelves and many of the most harrowing Public Information Films from the previous decade were still doing the rounds at school and on telly.
Although some PIFs were produced in the decades previously, the format really took off after World War II when the Conservative government established the Orwellian-sounding Central Office of Information (COI) in 1946. The goal of this body was to instruct and guide the nation through its public service messages, distributed through an array of media including film, radio and newspaper adverts. In short, the COI was a propaganda machine covering a vast range of topics from the mundane – such as encouraging people to use a litter bin (I am a Litter Basket, 1959) and showing them how to use the metric system (Simply Metric, 1973) – to preparing for a nuclear attack (Protect and Survive, 1975).
The ones that live longest in the memory are the mini horror movies that warned the general public about all manner of hazards they might encounter in day-to-day life, not to mention quite a few that had never even crossed their minds. The films aimed at children were deliberately shocking and perhaps necessarily so. In the days before helicopter parenting and mobile phones, latchkey kids like myself were off roaming the estates and the countryside miles from home and getting into all manner of adventures, exploring woodland and mucking about on building sites.
If you are of a similar age and grew up in the UK, you’ll probably have a peculiar fondness for those PIFs that scarred us for life at an early age. If you’re from a younger generation, you’ll no doubt think, WTF? I showed my kids a compilation and they thought it was all fake because they couldn’t believe that children were really subjected to this stuff! Let’s take a look at some of the best…
Lonely Water (1973)
This eerie clip is probably the most well-known of all the classic PIFs from the ‘70s, even for people who weren’t around to catch it first-hand. Alternatively known as Dark and Lonely Water, it is narrated from the perspective of a sinister cowled figure who stalks the nation’s waterways, preying on the “show-offs” and “fools” who don’t take the danger seriously enough.
Splendidly voiced by Donald Pleasence, I also love the snapshot of the period that Lonely Water gives us. Britain in the 1970s was experiencing economic hardship and social unrest, notorious for the three-day week, strikes and rubbish piled high in the streets. We get a little taste of that here with kids in flares playing in an almost post-apocalyptic landscape littered with rusted bedsteads, bathtubs and derelict cars. It’s bleak alright, but thankfully the Grim Reaper-like spirit has no power over sensible children (“Oi, look! There’s someone in the waw-’ah!”). Yet it signs off on a chilling note, saying he will be back. Sadly, he didn’t return for a sequel.
Charley Says (1973)
This series of animated shorts about everyday hazards for children was still doing the rounds on telly when I was a kid in the ‘80s and they are perhaps the most beloved of all public information films. They helped my view of the surrounding world when I was little, particularly the chilling episode when our unnamed protagonist is almost lured away from the lonely playground by a stranger’s offer to see some puppies. I’m not alone – the Prodigy even used the cartoons as the backbone of their #3 debut hit “Charly” in 1992 and the series was voted Britain’s favourite PIF in a 2006 poll conducted by the BBC.
The very lo-fi cardboard cutout animation is both charming and stark, with blank backgrounds and a muted colour scheme that reflect the threadbare nature of Britain at the time. But whether it is stray matches or boiling pans on the stove, Charley is there to prevent us from coming to harm and the cat’s growls and miaows were wonderfully voiced by maverick radio DJ and comedian Kenny Everett.
The Fatal Floor (1974)
Perhaps the most comically overdramatic of the bunch, The Fatal Floor warns of the seemingly innocuous peril of putting a rug down on a freshly polished floor. This clip emerged from the newly passed Health & Safety at Work etc Act of 1974, which sought to reduce the number of accidents caused by people blundering lemming-like into all manner of avoidable disasters. With jaunty music and Patrick Troughton on voice-over duty, the PIF starts on a jovial note as a housewife busies herself getting the house ready for two young parents bringing their baby home from the maternity ward. But the woman unwittingly sets the stage for a painful accident – literalised as the rug by the front door morphs into a giant rusty mantrap.
"Polish a floor and put a rug on it,” Troughton intones menacingly, “you might as well set a man-trap.” We don’t get to see the turtle-necked husband’s inevitable nasty spill, but we do get a blackly comic kiss-off line: “To think, he’d only just come from the hospital!” It begs the question, how much of a problem were rug incidents in the ‘70s? This might seem like a nanny state at its most finger-wagging, but, as the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (RoSPA) points out today, around 16,000 people die from accidents every year in the UK.
Protect and Survive (1975)
I remember having The Talk with my parents as a child in the mid-’80s. No, not the one about the birds and the bees – the one about what to do if a barrage of nukes was heading our way. The plan was that if we heard the four-minute warning to indicate missiles were inbound from the Soviet Union, we should instantly drop whatever we were doing and hurry home as quickly as we could. Never mind that it took 15 minutes to get to my house from school on my bike… It wasn’t much of a plan, but it was something, at least.
The threat was deemed significant enough for the British government to commission a major campaign called Protect and Survive between 1974 and 1980. Material produced included posters, pamphlets, recordings for radio and, most infamously of all, a chilling series of Public Information Films that were marked classified and only intended for broadcast if a nuclear attack was imminent within 72 hours. Reportedly, these films (made by the cartoonist behind Charley Says) were held in a vault from around 1975, but they caused controversy and alarm when they were leaked to the BBC and the CND (Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament) in 1980.
After snippets of the PIFs were shown on an episode of the BBC’s Panorama, Protect and Survive was roundly criticised for pushing the idea of a survivable nuclear war and the CND redoubled its efforts to discredit the government’s policies and seek disarmament. It also partly provided inspiration for Mick Jackson’s unbelievably harrowing Threads (1984).
If these informational clips were designed to comfort and reassure, the gloomy two-tone animation and the snooty and impersonal tones of narrator Patrick Allen have the opposite effect – the primitive sound cues and musical motif still make my blood run cold! Throughout the films, we get handy tips about how to build lean-to shelters in the home and seek shelter if we’re caught out in the open, plus advice on how to bag and tag deceased loved ones for burial at a later date. Taken together with a pinch of gallows humour, they are almost unintentionally funny in their utter desolation.
The Finishing Line (1977)
Squid Game is for wimps compared to The Finishing Line. While not strictly a PIF (it was produced by British Transport Films), it certainly fits into the genre and is surely the most hardcore example ever made.
A kid sitting on a railway bridge conjures up the most dangerous sports day you can imagine and it turns into a surrealist survival horror from there. Just to whet the appetite, one fallen competitor is killed during a race across the tracks. Then it just gets wilder and gorier. Next up is the Stone Throw, with teams chalking up points for causing as much damage and injury as possible by lobbing rocks at a passenger train, then Last Across, a mad dash in front of a speeding locomotive. Finally, we get the Great Tunnel Walk, which ends up with predictably disastrous results.
With its roving camerawork and starring regular half-feral school children who look like they're having a blast, The Finishing Line is gruelling, nasty and darkly comic. Unbelievably, it got regular airtime on TV before public outrage got it pulled and replaced by a less stomach-churning film called Robbie (1979).
Apaches (1977)
Three years before he helmed Bob Hoskins’s cockney mobster busting heads in The Long Good Friday, John Mackenzie directed this still-shocking PIF. Playing like a rural version of Final Destination by way of (appropriately) Agatha Christie’s Ten Little Indians, the story follows six children playing Apaches on a working farm ahead of a family get-together. There’s plenty of filler, but the set pieces are worth the wait as the kids perish one by one in a series of grisly agricultural mishaps. The most haunting death happens off-screen, but the horror fan in me loves the lad who slips on a railing above a slurry pit and drowns in liquid cow s**t.
Just to hammer home the point, the film concludes with a list of real-life fatalities and their causes. Apaches never fail to remind me of some of the close shaves I had growing up!
Although it was only broadcast in rural areas, Apaches (according to the BFI) broke all booking records for a COI film. It’s not hard to see why; not only is it an epic by the usual standards of PIFs, it is also a very well-made mini-masterpiece of the genre.
Play Safe (1978)
Incidents of free-range kids cooking themselves on power lines provoked this triptych of PIFs covering the topic commissioned by the Electricity Council. The 10-minute full version starts off friendly enough by introducing us to two loveable animated birds, a robin (voiced by Bernard Cribbins) and an owl (Brian Wilde, best known as Foggy from Last of the Summer Wine).
That’s just to offset the terror of what is to come – after a few narrow scrapes involving errant kites and boat masts, we get the pièce de résistance. The Frisbee segment is the stuff of nightmares as a boy breaks into a substation to retrieve his flying disc with predictably electrifying results.
The money shot of the lad’s bell-bottom jeans going up in flames is the image that lodged itself so vividly in my mind when I was growing up, even though Jimmy’s burning legs were trimmed from the version that appeared on telly. Notoriously, Play Safe was designed specifically to scare the crap out of kids and was regularly shown during school holidays and on commercial breaks between children’s programmes.
AIDS - Monolith (1987)
This notoriously doom-laden PIF had a huge impact when it first dropped. The first cases of AIDS in the UK had been diagnosed in 1981, with the first death in the following year, emerging mainly in the country’s gay community (alluded to as narrator John Hurt intones “So far, it’s been confined to small groups”). This was a powerful message: There was a deadly new virus out there and, if we weren’t careful, it was coming for everyone we knew and loved!
With an Oscar-nominated actor like Hurt involved and Hans Zimmer providing the ominous music, Monolith was a glossy and hard-hitting affair that looked like a Hollywood blockbuster compared to the sticky-backed plastic efforts from the 1970s and early ‘80s. In some ways, it marked the end of the classic era of PIFs. The films became steadily more graphic and elaborate before the COI was finally shuttered in 2011, but the better production value meant they looked more like entertainment than the insidiously simple warnings of the format’s heyday.
Green Cross Code (1970 - Present)
With all these terrifying PIFs doing the rounds, it’s almost a wonder that any of us ventured out of the house at all back in the day. Luckily, it wasn’t all doom and gloom and at least we had the friendly Green Cross Code Man to guide us when it came to crossing the road.
The character was played by British bodybuilder David Prowse, who first appeared as the teleporting superhero in the same year he landed the Darth Vader gig in Star Wars. Much like the heavy-breathing Sith Lord (voiced by James Earl Jones), Prowse’s gentle Bristol accent was dubbed for his first few outings.
After the phenomenal success of George Lucas’s space opera and its sequels, Prowse was later joined in the adverts by a very R2-D2-like robot called Droid. The actor was very proud of the commercials and the impact they had on reducing road traffic accidents. He was reunited with Droid in 2014, the same year he also returned for a charming Green Cross Code revival aimed at young adults.
While Prowse and the Green Cross Code Man are the most well-known faces of the campaign, several other British celebrities fronted the commercial during the ‘70s and ‘80s. My personal favourite is a very patronising Alvin Stardust (“You must be out of your tiny minds!”), and you also had Kevin Keegan, Les Gray of Mud, and, later in the 1980s, puppeteer Bob Carolgees with Charlie the Monkey. Perhaps the most bizarre variation came in 1983, taking advantage of the new hip-hop trend by repurposing Grandmaster Flash’s “The Message” – “Don’t step out when you're close to the edge.”
So there you have it, some of our favourite British Public Information Films which left a serious impression on us when we were kids. You can check out these and many others on the BFI Player archive.
