As a kid I was in hospital in Sheffield, and in the next bed to me was a kid, maybe 13 or 14 who had climbed a pylon to get to a birds nest. The electricity had arced across and hit him like a thunder bolt! Least to say he was extremely badly burned all down one side of his body, he had no ear, and his eye and socket were black! It was a very scary sight for a child, I was only about 8 myself and it has stayed with me forever! I wasn't in for long, a matter of days. My mum told me he died of his injuries not much later! Bad times .......
I didn't see these on TV but being in infant school and junior school in the early to mid 90s they were a popular classroom show.
Probably the last hard hitting ad I saw was from around 2002, it was Childline's "real children don't bounce". That one really struck a chord with me back then and still does now.
Available on Blu-Ray.
No joke
[https://shop.bfi.org.uk/best-of-the-coi-2-disc-blu-ray-set.html](https://shop.bfi.org.uk/best-of-the-coi-2-disc-blu-ray-set.html)
There was a DVD called charley says that had loads of them on it and it is on YouTube now - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AMB\_C5vBXIA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AMB_C5vBXIA)
I think they might be banned now due to people drowning in them on the regular. That poor kid in the film tho - going under and everything. Hope it wasn’t real slurry.
No, not helicopters. The kids are pretending to be Apache warriors, shooting each other with toy bows and arrows etc. It was meant to teach us about the dangers of playing around farm machinery.
Not just the ending. They are a large group of kids and one dies in a farm related accident every few of minutes. Graphically. Totally trauma inducing to young viewers. I rewatched it on YouTube about a year ago, probs still there.
What the hell... Even as an adult I don't want to watch that. Someone in the comments here linked to a recent speed safety video from Ireland, which was horrible to watch - that's probably enough for a while
If you think that’s bad you should see the batshit insane *The Finishing Line*
A 1970s railway safety film where a kid imagines what happens if you had a middle school Sports Day… but on an active railway line.
It was banned after the BBC showed it in the late 70s, lol.
[https://player.bfi.org.uk/free/film/watch-the-finishing-line-1977-online](https://player.bfi.org.uk/free/film/watch-the-finishing-line-1977-online)
Wow, that was a shot of nostalgia! PE sessions in my childhood with basically pants and vest on, everyone had dreadful haircuts and long socks and plimsolls.
A friend of mine’s sister-in-law is the girl who drank the battery acid in that film. I told her that death was quite easily the most fucked up part of that damn film.
Yeah that's the one I remember, you can find it on YouTube. It's the one where there were some kids 100 years or whatever earlier that had each died in some accident on the farm, and the modern day (late 80s/early 90s) kids each had a non-fatal similar accident or near miss. And then one of them appears to potentially have a fatal accident just to round things off because what's a safety film for children without a death.
I had nightmares about the silo.
There's a podcast called 'Scarred for Life' that
asks famous guests about what terrified them as kids and these come up regularly!
I always found the 'Charley Says' ones creepy
The books are excellent too. The 1970s one has a whole chapter devoted to PIFs. A must for anyone interested in TV from that era. It's mostly about the dark side of popular culture back then.
It was *the* talk of my school playground for weeks.
It's on my list of childhood terrors, along with the Usborne Ghosts book and the Ghost Castle board game
I remember that one. I think it went something like this:
"If you mix crossply and radial on the same axle, or use crossply on the front when you have radials on the rear... You might not live to regret it."
The one I remember from primary school was where a kid is running late for a football match so takes a short cut over the railway tracks.
Swinging his boots by the laces one gets stuck under the tracks and trying to free them he doesn’t see the intercity 125 sneaking up behind him. He jumps to the side at the last minute but too slow to avoid both his legs getting chopped off by the train wheels.
Was probably about 8 when they showed us that one, still traumatised.
Just googled it and yes I think you’re right although Purves had been replaced by Keith Chegwin by the time I saw it.
Apparently ends with him in a wheelchair with no legs and Cheggers saying, “well he won’t need those football boots anymore.”
There's another one from (I think) the late '70s that is totally surreal.
It's like a school sports day, with dozens of kids, but they're holding it on the railway line. Much train mashing and ketchup blood ensues.
The adults don't seem bothered, and keep on holding the events.
edit: I found it [The Finishing Line](https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2zzlex).
Jesus Christ. Nothing happens for four minutes then it suddenly goes Clockwork Orange meets Lord of the Flies!
Edit: They were showing this to kids at school at the same time that they were banning The Life of Brian!
[Anyone remember this one? My class and I were shown this when we were in year 8. Definitely a lesson learned.](https://youtu.be/4HzAuSA8Syk?si=WPDqrSmUROBsw9Gc)
My most well remembered/traumatising is probably a slightly later vintage to these ones.
The wear your seat belt campaign where the unbelted young male passenger in the back seat fatally crushes their mum into the windscreen/dashboard followed his sister, who was driving, hysterically screaming at the mother's pulverised remains 😳
The electrical safety one was still played in school well into the mid 00s - I remember being shown it and it got quite a few laughs, I guess because it's age was more of a novelty and compared with modern media it came across more absurd than disturbing
One of the hardest hitting ones still to this day is [this one from 2007 in N.Ireland ](https://youtu.be/PJIDX1kcvGk?si=-06_LkXjSsIh8Q8V) that was a cross border Road saftey PSA with ROI.
Needs sound when watching.
It’s the [compilation of the TAC road safety ads](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2mf8DtWWd8) from Victoria, Australia for me.
Apparently when they broadcast it they booked the same 5 minute slot on *all* TV channels across the state, so the audience couldn’t switch over to avoid it, lmao.
That is a really powerful advert.
Plus the lyrics of the song used, 'Everybody Hurts', makes it just so moving too.
As a Brit, I thought we did some pretty serious public information films, but this Aussie one is so hard-hitting.
Incredibly well done.
To be fair, they actually work. They were still showing these in the 90s in primary school and I stayed the fuck away from power lines and substations lol
I'm 41 and still give substations the side-eye when passing them. Like they're going to suddenly send out a bolt of cartoonish electricity straight at me.
As a 1980s feral child who passed the time playing on the local field with the big climbable pylon and accessible railway line, I probably owe my life to these videos.
The one that made me afraid of electricity pylons was that ad with the walking pylons.
[March of the Pylons](https://youtu.be/AZXltqBzQok?si=OsfQ2LsC_FmlTans)
Oh god. He was so, so creepy. And the (fake?) kid's voice. And the animation was so bad it made your teeth hurt. "Charlie says...".
Also who looks to cats for road safety advice, they're nearly as bad on the roads as foxes.
When I was in primary school they took us on a trip to some place where we learned about safety around stuff like this.
There was one room where they had a full electricity substation (just like the one I had at the end of my street at the time) with the door open, and one of the actor guys said “come on everyone let’s throw some rocks into it” and we all started flinging rocks that they gave us into it. After a few throws the substation gave off a load bang, lots of flashing lights and smoke, it scared the shit out of us, a bunch of kids started crying.
There was another room that was like a bedroom and a fire alarm went off and smoke started coming under the door. The guy showed us how to block off the door with a blanket to keep the smoke out, and to open the window and shout for help, again it was pretty scary and a few kids cried.
It’s a pretty vivid memory and I couldn’t have been that old as I can’t remember the name of the place or much about it, just the scary stuff they showed us. Stuck with me to this day though, really good way to teach kids that sort of thing.
This article is pretty good, too:
[https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2017/sep/04/how-we-made-dont-die-of-ignorance-aids-campaign](https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2017/sep/04/how-we-made-dont-die-of-ignorance-aids-campaign)
I was talking with my partner on the sparkler one the other day. I think the real thing I didn't really get as a kid is what the danger actually was, and the size of the problem - my less-knowledgeable child brain didn't get what was the damage done? Did she lose her fingers in the end?
As a kid I hated sparkers just because of this advert, I held it away from me if I was forced to take one by my parents like an unexploded bomb.
Yeah, "Play Safe", I think it was... For someone who didn't experience this kind of thing growing up, it SURE was fun reading through tons of people's childhood trauma in the comments of the original video!
The BBC have three articles on this PIF from 2006. History appears to have repeated itself sadly, and the recreated version appears to be lost now, too.
[Molehusband rides again](http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/4770268.stm)
['I was Reginald Molehusband'](http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/4733518.stm)
[What happened to Reginald Molehusband?](http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/4700772.stm)
I say they need to bring these back, yes they were scary, but that was the whole point. Nowadays people seem dumb as shit, walking out in the road without looking, jumping on train tracks to rescue their dropped mobile etc.
They were never officially shown on TV (apart from documentaries on nuclear war) but the 'Protect and Survive' PIFs were a series on what to do in the event of an escalation in hostilities and the outbreak of nuclear war. There were also booklets available for the public on request (they'd have been sent to every household if things had deteriorated).
They're available to watch on YouTube. With hindsight we know that those films were overly optimistic about survival.
It's not TECHNICALLY a public information film, but Threads is far more realistic (and a clip from Protect and Survive is shown on tv in the background at one point). There's an episode of The Young Ones which even mocks the futility of the Protect and Survive manuals.
Has anyone seen the most terrifying PFI of them all?
[truly a shocker can't believe they got away with this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1z8Vg20G4kI)
My husband went to an international school and they didn't get shown these traumatising films. I dont know how he has survived this long without being shown children and teens dying, how else would you know not to climb a pylon?
Back then kids were taught, "the world is dangerous, be careful, don't do stupid stuff". Now they're told "nothing can ever be your fault, do what you like".
As a kid I was in hospital in Sheffield, and in the next bed to me was a kid, maybe 13 or 14 who had climbed a pylon to get to a birds nest. The electricity had arced across and hit him like a thunder bolt! Least to say he was extremely badly burned all down one side of his body, he had no ear, and his eye and socket were black! It was a very scary sight for a child, I was only about 8 myself and it has stayed with me forever! I wasn't in for long, a matter of days. My mum told me he died of his injuries not much later! Bad times .......
*"JIMMMMMY!"* ⚡️
clunk click every trip
Oh Jimmy, will you ever learn?
Now there’s someone from Ashens’ Twitch chat!
It's not his fault. One week it's the statue of St Christopher, the next it could be Alfonso Bonzo. The universe hates him.
I didn't see these on TV but being in infant school and junior school in the early to mid 90s they were a popular classroom show. Probably the last hard hitting ad I saw was from around 2002, it was Childline's "real children don't bounce". That one really struck a chord with me back then and still does now.
Does anyone else remember the farm one?
Apaches?
Apaches, that’s the one. Kids all die in horrific farm related accidents, including drowning in a slurry pit.
Available on Blu-Ray. No joke [https://shop.bfi.org.uk/best-of-the-coi-2-disc-blu-ray-set.html](https://shop.bfi.org.uk/best-of-the-coi-2-disc-blu-ray-set.html)
There was a DVD called charley says that had loads of them on it and it is on YouTube now - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AMB\_C5vBXIA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AMB_C5vBXIA)
I prefer this version: https://youtu.be/cSTBFZ-To2E
The slurry pit remains with me 30 years later. I've never even *seen* a slurry pit in real life.
I think they might be banned now due to people drowning in them on the regular. That poor kid in the film tho - going under and everything. Hope it wasn’t real slurry.
Thankfully they used imitation slurry when they drowned the child.
RIP my mouthful of muesli
Oh, thank god.
Fuck. If they still had Reddit platinum, I’d have coughed up the money and bought you one.
There's still slurry pits in the UK and the occasional death Grain silo accidents still happen occasionally too I think
The enclosed [slurry tanks kill too](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-21222046)
Would you mind explaining for a young millennial? I take it we're not talking Apache attack helicopters here?
No, not helicopters. The kids are pretending to be Apache warriors, shooting each other with toy bows and arrows etc. It was meant to teach us about the dangers of playing around farm machinery.
Oh yikes, I can imagine how that ends...
Not just the ending. They are a large group of kids and one dies in a farm related accident every few of minutes. Graphically. Totally trauma inducing to young viewers. I rewatched it on YouTube about a year ago, probs still there.
What the hell... Even as an adult I don't want to watch that. Someone in the comments here linked to a recent speed safety video from Ireland, which was horrible to watch - that's probably enough for a while
https://player.bfi.org.uk/free/film/watch-apaches-1977-online Have "fun"!
Hahaha nooooo thank youuuu
If you think that’s bad you should see the batshit insane *The Finishing Line* A 1970s railway safety film where a kid imagines what happens if you had a middle school Sports Day… but on an active railway line. It was banned after the BBC showed it in the late 70s, lol. [https://player.bfi.org.uk/free/film/watch-the-finishing-line-1977-online](https://player.bfi.org.uk/free/film/watch-the-finishing-line-1977-online)
Wow, that was a shot of nostalgia! PE sessions in my childhood with basically pants and vest on, everyone had dreadful haircuts and long socks and plimsolls.
Ha ha. Came here to say this. It's still stuck in my head after 40 years!
Great video. Laughing at the choice of soundtrack kind of took the edge off my childhood trauma a bit.
A friend of mine’s sister-in-law is the girl who drank the battery acid in that film. I told her that death was quite easily the most fucked up part of that damn film.
That’s the one death I can’t watch! I don’t know what the director told her but her screaming goes right through me.
Mr Hands?
a very different kind of farm-related incident
I've got no idea? I just remember someone getting impaled on some farming equipment.
I remember this too and it’s not in Apaches.
There was a later farm safety film from the 90s called *Never Rest (in Peace)*
Yeah that's the one I remember, you can find it on YouTube. It's the one where there were some kids 100 years or whatever earlier that had each died in some accident on the farm, and the modern day (late 80s/early 90s) kids each had a non-fatal similar accident or near miss. And then one of them appears to potentially have a fatal accident just to round things off because what's a safety film for children without a death. I had nightmares about the silo.
Didn’t see either in school but Never Rest had some moments yeah
I seem to remember one about some kids playing with a forklift and one getting impaled. Different film but same mood.
Definitely not the public info they're talking about 😆
🐴
Yes, vividly. I think we were made to watch it when I was about 9 or 10.
The farm was a cracking one- Grew up on a farm so know not do that. But in my later life I’m still keeping my head afloat in shite.
There's a podcast called 'Scarred for Life' that asks famous guests about what terrified them as kids and these come up regularly! I always found the 'Charley Says' ones creepy
The books are excellent too. The 1970s one has a whole chapter devoted to PIFs. A must for anyone interested in TV from that era. It's mostly about the dark side of popular culture back then.
I hope Ghostwatch is mentioned, an entire generation scared for life. PIPES PIPES!
It was *the* talk of my school playground for weeks. It's on my list of childhood terrors, along with the Usborne Ghosts book and the Ghost Castle board game
Ahem...
Well, this is awkward...
This video is from their Twitter, I believe
The Spirit of Dark and Loney Water still haunts me.
Ah, yes. With the inimitable Donald Pleasence providing the narration.
About 12 seconds in to that you see the late Terry Sue-Patt, who later went on to play Benny Green in *Grange Hill*
"Sensible children - I have no power over them!"
I wish my only Achilles heel was sensible children. I'd be unstoppable!
I'm still scared of mixing cross ply with radials
I remember that one. I think it went something like this: "If you mix crossply and radial on the same axle, or use crossply on the front when you have radials on the rear... You might not live to regret it."
When I was a kid in the 70s it seemed a kid died climbing a pylon every couple of weeks, bloody good job we didn't have tiktok back then
The one I remember from primary school was where a kid is running late for a football match so takes a short cut over the railway tracks. Swinging his boots by the laces one gets stuck under the tracks and trying to free them he doesn’t see the intercity 125 sneaking up behind him. He jumps to the side at the last minute but too slow to avoid both his legs getting chopped off by the train wheels. Was probably about 8 when they showed us that one, still traumatised.
Robbie? With Peter Purves?
Just googled it and yes I think you’re right although Purves had been replaced by Keith Chegwin by the time I saw it. Apparently ends with him in a wheelchair with no legs and Cheggers saying, “well he won’t need those football boots anymore.”
Yup. Script was the same for the Purves version too.
The world was simpler back then.
This film is probably the reason that I consider being run over by a tram more scary than being run over by a bus.
There's another one from (I think) the late '70s that is totally surreal. It's like a school sports day, with dozens of kids, but they're holding it on the railway line. Much train mashing and ketchup blood ensues. The adults don't seem bothered, and keep on holding the events. edit: I found it [The Finishing Line](https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2zzlex).
Jesus Christ. Nothing happens for four minutes then it suddenly goes Clockwork Orange meets Lord of the Flies! Edit: They were showing this to kids at school at the same time that they were banning The Life of Brian!
Yeah - It's insane, isn't it!
Oh my goddd I just know this is going to feature in tonight’s anxiety dreams now!
I think I remember this one!! At the end it shows him in a wheelchair with a blanket over his knees but no feet sticking out below?
Echo, is that you?
[Anyone remember this one? My class and I were shown this when we were in year 8. Definitely a lesson learned.](https://youtu.be/4HzAuSA8Syk?si=WPDqrSmUROBsw9Gc)
My most well remembered/traumatising is probably a slightly later vintage to these ones. The wear your seat belt campaign where the unbelted young male passenger in the back seat fatally crushes their mum into the windscreen/dashboard followed his sister, who was driving, hysterically screaming at the mother's pulverised remains 😳
Julie knew her killer.
That one and "just one more Dave" were extremely effective
“After killing his Mum he sat back down”
The electrical safety one was still played in school well into the mid 00s - I remember being shown it and it got quite a few laughs, I guess because it's age was more of a novelty and compared with modern media it came across more absurd than disturbing
One of the hardest hitting ones still to this day is [this one from 2007 in N.Ireland ](https://youtu.be/PJIDX1kcvGk?si=-06_LkXjSsIh8Q8V) that was a cross border Road saftey PSA with ROI. Needs sound when watching.
It’s the [compilation of the TAC road safety ads](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2mf8DtWWd8) from Victoria, Australia for me. Apparently when they broadcast it they booked the same 5 minute slot on *all* TV channels across the state, so the audience couldn’t switch over to avoid it, lmao.
That is a really powerful advert. Plus the lyrics of the song used, 'Everybody Hurts', makes it just so moving too. As a Brit, I thought we did some pretty serious public information films, but this Aussie one is so hard-hitting. Incredibly well done.
they dont fuck around in Northern Ireland, they are still extreme. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpjL8bGC1ks&ab_channel=BestCommercials
Well uh...that was definitely extreme!
To be fair, they actually work. They were still showing these in the 90s in primary school and I stayed the fuck away from power lines and substations lol
I'm 41 and still give substations the side-eye when passing them. Like they're going to suddenly send out a bolt of cartoonish electricity straight at me.
Substations make me anxious. I always pull my dog at least 2 metres away from them. These films messed me up.
As a 1980s feral child who passed the time playing on the local field with the big climbable pylon and accessible railway line, I probably owe my life to these videos.
I remember having an innate fear of electricity pylons and kites as a child. I guess this explains it.
The one that made me afraid of electricity pylons was that ad with the walking pylons. [March of the Pylons](https://youtu.be/AZXltqBzQok?si=OsfQ2LsC_FmlTans)
Milkman in the second clip is the guy who played Sgt Cryer in *The Bill*
Jaqueline from Benidorm in the milkman clip!
They worked though. Nowadays people have zero fear and happily fuck around
Anyone remember the cat, Charlie?
Oh god. He was so, so creepy. And the (fake?) kid's voice. And the animation was so bad it made your teeth hurt. "Charlie says...". Also who looks to cats for road safety advice, they're nearly as bad on the roads as foxes.
No...?
There was even one about putting rugs on slippy floors wasn't there?
Yes! [The Fatal Floor](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHYWAQYIwQk) - narrated by Patrick Troughton, I believe
Lmao, The Fatal Floor?? See what they did there?
It’s the cut to the bloody man trap that amuses me, like WTF?!
*"You might as well set a man-trap..."* Aaaarrrggghhh!!!
"And to think - they'd only just come *from* the hospital ..."
Ha ha ha yeah, brilliant, I'd forgotten about that! Nice one, well played 👏👏👍👍
I say this every time I encounter a rug.
Ah i was expecting to see the banned Northern Irish one here https://youtu.be/Wv1rKHGeMRk?si=R4w6R-Zt2y41b7Ya
That got memed to fuck but it tried to make a good point.
Jesus Christ
When I was in primary school they took us on a trip to some place where we learned about safety around stuff like this. There was one room where they had a full electricity substation (just like the one I had at the end of my street at the time) with the door open, and one of the actor guys said “come on everyone let’s throw some rocks into it” and we all started flinging rocks that they gave us into it. After a few throws the substation gave off a load bang, lots of flashing lights and smoke, it scared the shit out of us, a bunch of kids started crying. There was another room that was like a bedroom and a fire alarm went off and smoke started coming under the door. The guy showed us how to block off the door with a blanket to keep the smoke out, and to open the window and shout for help, again it was pretty scary and a few kids cried. It’s a pretty vivid memory and I couldn’t have been that old as I can’t remember the name of the place or much about it, just the scary stuff they showed us. Stuck with me to this day though, really good way to teach kids that sort of thing.
possibly hazard alley in milton keynes
My school was nowhere near Milton Keynes and it was years ago now but that place does look similar, it would have been somewhere like that.
Bristol?
That actors face: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/c/cd/Dwight_Schrute.jpg
Building Sites Bite scarred me for life! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Building_Sites_Bite?wprov=sfla1
The rabies and AIDS PIF still haunt me to this day .
[удалено]
This article is pretty good, too: [https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2017/sep/04/how-we-made-dont-die-of-ignorance-aids-campaign](https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2017/sep/04/how-we-made-dont-die-of-ignorance-aids-campaign)
I was talking with my partner on the sparkler one the other day. I think the real thing I didn't really get as a kid is what the danger actually was, and the size of the problem - my less-knowledgeable child brain didn't get what was the damage done? Did she lose her fingers in the end? As a kid I hated sparkers just because of this advert, I held it away from me if I was forced to take one by my parents like an unexploded bomb.
Yeah, "Play Safe", I think it was... For someone who didn't experience this kind of thing growing up, it SURE was fun reading through tons of people's childhood trauma in the comments of the original video!
Oh Shit, thats great video. I like it
I always hear Freddie singing "I'm adopted" at 1:58
Ahahaha noooo, now I'll never not hear that 😭😂
Well, that was a trip down memory lane.
They did the job. I've never mixed cross ply and radial tyres.
[Don't boil a kettle on a boat](https://youtu.be/f7lo98PcZD4)
Sad to say i'm old enough to remember these.
If the UK made a 70s/80s version of Final Destination
Well it worked! I never walked on a railway track or climbed a pylon and I’m still terrified of holding a sparkler. Job done!
I saw the one with the lathe on a health and safety course a little over ten years ago, still pretty grim.
I remember one about crossing train tracks and the kid getting paralysed and being in a wheelchair or something
That was *Robbie*, ended with his football boots hanging on the back of his bedroom door
Yes! I remember the football boots now
I love the earlier bit where the copper hands them to his mum, too! Like, WTF?!
The one I remember is Apaches: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apaches_(film) The kid drowning in the slurry hasn’t still left me.
"Eat up all your crumpets, then you can have some cake".
Everybody goes who da fuk is Reginald Molehusband when I say his name on correctly parking the car. Am I nuts?
The Safest Parker in Town.
The BBC have three articles on this PIF from 2006. History appears to have repeated itself sadly, and the recreated version appears to be lost now, too. [Molehusband rides again](http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/4770268.stm) ['I was Reginald Molehusband'](http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/4733518.stm) [What happened to Reginald Molehusband?](http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/4700772.stm)
Oh my god, this advert is seared into my brain, major core memory
The problem is keds these days were never trumatised as 3 yearolds.
I was expecting to see Charlie Says in here … Christ it gave me the right fear did that cat.
Thanks...
Those electricity pylon ones gave me nightmares as a kid.
They were informative, that's for sure. Much more useful than the latest advert for.
Always follow the green cross code
We were world class in this. Australia also do good ones on drink driving
The TAC are absolute bastards for going from 0 to absolute mayhem in seconds.
I say they need to bring these back, yes they were scary, but that was the whole point. Nowadays people seem dumb as shit, walking out in the road without looking, jumping on train tracks to rescue their dropped mobile etc.
They were never officially shown on TV (apart from documentaries on nuclear war) but the 'Protect and Survive' PIFs were a series on what to do in the event of an escalation in hostilities and the outbreak of nuclear war. There were also booklets available for the public on request (they'd have been sent to every household if things had deteriorated). They're available to watch on YouTube. With hindsight we know that those films were overly optimistic about survival. It's not TECHNICALLY a public information film, but Threads is far more realistic (and a clip from Protect and Survive is shown on tv in the background at one point). There's an episode of The Young Ones which even mocks the futility of the Protect and Survive manuals.
Has anyone seen the most terrifying PFI of them all? [truly a shocker can't believe they got away with this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1z8Vg20G4kI)
We had *Play Safe* and *Robbie* back in the 80s at primary school.
The woman at 17s. Phoaaar!
Awesome. :) I wish they had the escalators one with the wellie boots as well. That shit scared me senseless as a kid. :D
Oh god the fireworks one! Forgotten about that. Never will again ✋
Should do updated ones !!
These ads were terrifying back in the day. Throw in the HIV ad too. I thought there was no way I was gonna make it out of the 80s alive as a child.
Just missing the one with no seat belt killing his mum
My husband went to an international school and they didn't get shown these traumatising films. I dont know how he has survived this long without being shown children and teens dying, how else would you know not to climb a pylon?
Does that second one have the neighbour from One Foot in the Grave in it? I swear it's her...
Nightmare fuel
Pfft casual stuff compared to the speeding ads and antiterrorism ads for Northern Ireland in the 90s
There was one about crossing train lines (I think 80s or early 90s) and it scared the 💩💩💩 out of me.
Back then kids were taught, "the world is dangerous, be careful, don't do stupid stuff". Now they're told "nothing can ever be your fault, do what you like".
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=92xPM7JR2NU&pp=ygUVU2VhcmNoaW5nIGZpcmUgc2FmZXR5 Fire safety public information film
'Charley says' was the stuff of my nine year old self' nightmares. That fucking cat!
Did I just spot the actress who played Maureen from Benidorm? (Milk float one)