Following the Second World War, Britain faced the task of rebuilding the countless
bombed-out houses and city slums that had defined cities since the Victorian Era.
Their solution was hi-rise cities in the sky, which housed families just fine but had the
unintended side-effect of leaving residents with a sense of isolation and loneliness.
Meanwhile on the television, the children growing up in the post-war era saw a world
of conflict and disarray, political turmoil and divisions over the future.
What the public needed was reassurance and security in this new frontier of British life.
Starting in the 1950s, the Central Office for Information – COI - began producing public service
films about a wide array of issues, ranging from polio, farm safety, depression, fire hazards,
drink driving, railroad safety, and speeding. The longer of these films would be shown in schools,
and the shorter ones sent to television stations to play during ad breaks whenever they pleased.
However, while the goal was originally to educate and reassure the public,
specifically young people, some uptight old-school bureaucrat at Whitehall probably took this to mean
“scare the living crap out of children and they’ll be too terrified to get into trouble”. And so,
with this distorted goal in mind, the gears of the COI were put into motion.
[Silence]
[This Christmas, Don’t leave your children alone in the house]
Using camera and editing styles picked up from American horror and gangster films,
the COI employed recently graduated film students who wanted to make horror
movies to produce hundreds of these ad break fillers, on a budget of several
million per year. BBFC guidelines were strict in the use of violence in movies
but because the programming was technically educational, these restrictions didn’t apply.
The shorts were always set in some kind of bleak, industrial moor in the underdeveloped
North of England using child actors who a lot of the time didn’t know what kind of
film they were making. Inevitably, at least one child would die at the end of the film.
[Ghostly Voice: It's the
perfect place for an accident…]
Sensible children. I have no power over them]
And they’re all like this. Very slow. Very dry. Lots of visual
space and audio silence. It draws you in And then suddenly...Bam! Murdered children.
One of the most famous of these films was 1977’s Apaches,
a film about farm safety. A group of children play around a farm, and slowly,
one by one, each of these children is killed in a horrific way by farm
machinery. These include things like drowning in horse manure, getting run over by a tractor,
and being hit by falling metal bars. At the end, the viewer is silently
presented with a list of all the children who died in farm-related
accidents in the prior year. [Family eats in silence]
Great job boys, really reassuring. It seems quite ridiculous to spend hundreds of
thousands of pounds in taxpayer money to produce a 30 minute film about not playing near a farm but
this was the 1970s where there were only three TV channels and there was no internet, so unless you
wanted to hear Granddad talk about killing three Germans in the Somme, you had to play outside.
Another of these films is called The Finishing Line which seems like it takes
place in a dystopian world where children being forced to run across railway tracks is a sport.
[Screams] Oh sorry,
that wasn’t the right film, that was the replacement film they made because
The Finishing Line was so gruesome that even the British Government government themselves
admitted they went too far and banned the film from public showing for 20 years. Anyway The
Finishing Line ends with hundreds of murdered children being laid down on a railway line.
[Sad Music] But it wasn’t just children
who were the target of this onslaught of surreal horror. In the 1980s amid fears of an AIDS crisis,
the government produced a series of television spots for adults on how to avoid contracting HIV.
[Smooth Jazz plays while the couple flirt] That one’s a bit more surreal but there’s this
one voiced by none other than John Hurt that’s a bit spooky.
[John Hurt: It is a deadly disease and there is no known cure.
The virus can be passed during sexual intercourse with an infected person.
Anyone can get it so protect yourself and read this leaflet when it arrives.]
and I’d be doing a dishonor to not mention Protect and Survive which was the film
intended to be played on television in the days leading up to an anticipated nuclear war.
Originally top-secret, the film was leaked to the BBC and shown to the public in 1980.
[Voiceover: You are better off in your own home. Stay there.]
There was just something grim about watching instructions on
how to properly dispose of your dead family members.
[Voiceover: If anyone dies while you are kept in your fallout room move the body
to another room in the house label the body with name and address and
cover it as tightly as possible in polythene paper sheets or blankets.]
And the music as well, it was always this slow repetitive electronic keyboard sound.
[Synth Music]
From a jumpscare ad about firework safety
[Somewhere there are other children whose lives
are going to be changed will one of them be your child?]
to an unsettling ad about road safety featuring a crying child
[Crying woman: How am I supposed to explain to her that YOU KILLED a LITTLE BOY?]
There was seemingly no end in sight to the British Government’s weird desire to terrify the public.
Alas, all things must come to an end. In 2011, the Central Office for Information
was shut down as part of wider budget cuts to government departments. At the time of
it’s closure, the COI had a budget of over 500 million pounds per year.
Today, the UK government no longer produces general public information films,
but private organisations and charities are still known to make them. In true British
public information film tradition, these are still creepy as hell.
[Snapping of bones back into place]
But the horror isn’t just limited to your television screens;
the children’s charity Barnardos released this full-page ad campaign in newspapers in 2005,
which the public found so disgusting that they lobbied regulators to ban the campaign entirely.
And parodies of the era are still common in British media today.
Artist Richard Littler has created the art project Scarfolk, where he produces disturbing posters
and media satirizing both today’s politics and the world of the 1970s. He calls it the
“next logical step” in the evolution of the public information films he saw in his youth.
The 2002 series Look Around You parodies the outdated educational films shown in
schools and on TV in the 70s and 80s, which is sometimes humourous and sometimes terrifying.
[THIS IS KNOWN AS THE HELVETICA SCENARIO] [CREEPY MUSIC PLAYS]
The influence of the public information era is just everywhere.
[You’re buying a used condom. After all, it was cheaper. The man did say he’d washed it. But how
do you know? Just think of where it’s been. Even if you know the man, NEVER buy a used condom.]
[The British Advisory Department Presents. B. A. D. Advice.]
[You’re watching the British Emergency
Broadcasting Service. The Date is June or April 2013]
Critics call this “Hauntology”; references to a bygone era made using aesthetics taken
from the past rather than creating something new. This past may or may not have existed,
but Hauntology certainly makes you think it did. This is common in other
retro-futuristic subgenres like Vaporwave. Whatever it is, the public information films
of the post-war era are still watched and enjoyed today because they represent a lost future;
Britain looked confidently towards the future, and was optimistic their best days were ahead of them.
Yet they were met with a world of danger, paranoia, and foreign enemies. And they’re
creepy because successive governments decided that simply scaring the public was easier than
educating them properly and responsibly. So what’s the take home message?
I don’t know, they’re creepy and this is why. Thanks for watching.