Really horrible public information films that gave you the fears

[Ambient Sheep]

I'm not sure if it's this one. The youthful protagonist certainly loses his feet, and that nice Mr Purves is terribly upset about it. Gotta love the incredibly jaunty theme music, too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WxXDw3WOGQs

Now that's the weird thing.  That key sequence (starting around the 5m55s mark, with the nasty bit around a minute later) is all very familiar to me BUT not only does it not have the actual (fake) severed ankle, it's years too late!  That was made in 1979, by which time I was 14 going on 15, in an all-boys' school, and this was definitely a mixed-sex primary school (1970-1976) thing.  I can write off the lack of gory severed ankle as just overactive youthful imagination filling in the gaps of what Robbie shows, but not the dating anomaly.

If the above had been in The Finishing Line (released 1977), I'd think that maybe our school just got a sneak preview of the latter, and we were a test audience (we did have a railway line running not far from the school).  But the latter doesn't - despite all its liberal use of tomato ketchup - have a kid specifically having their leg severed in the way that Robbie implies.

And if you read Wikipedia on it it specifically states that Robbie came between The Finishing Line and Killing Time.  And there doesn't seem to be one before The Finishing Line.  Which is why I've always been completely baffled by what I remember seeing.

I suspect memory trickery, although I'm still not quite sure how - because we were never shown these sorts of films in secondary school, in fact we were never shown films full stop, except in the after-school film club.  Films were very much a primary school only thing for me.

Thanks anyway!

[PowerButchi]

I remember a Keep Britain Tidy PIF the night the night Bobby Moore died after Sportsnight and before Weatherview on BBC. A dog (English Sheepdog) stood on glass. I've always loved dogs to the nth degree, so it upset me massively at the age of 8.

[Ambient Sheep]

Hey, Sheepy -

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EnC7AAHxRV0

Yayyy!!!  Thank you!  That's the one.  Wow, that's even crappier than I remember... definitely not "really horrible".  That was the 1960s style of information film, I suspect, rather than the more brutal 1970s ordeals!

How is anyone from the 70's still alive?

Well that's easy - it's because we watched public information films! :-p


_{We are, however, mentally fucked-up for life.}

[Catalogue Trousers]

Glebe mentions the one with the little girl face down in the garden pond. Well, here it is - and it stands up pretty well. Note also brief cameo by another adorable cat, the Carpenter-esque synthesiser music as peril beckons, and the use - also seen in the Prams And Pushchairs PIF - of the pattern THIS IS THE WORST THAT COULD HAPPEN/NOW DON'T PANIC, HERE'S HOW TO PREVENT IT/BUT DO IT NOW NOW NOW OR THE WORST WILL HAPPEN. Although I've also just noticed, after the really loud splash that heralds the poor sprog's end, her Mum is still placidly gardening away as the camera pulls out from the corpse. Maybe she's deaf.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YSKmMkQ7d0

Also, Sheepy - the comments on that Robbie clip I posted include somebody who mentions a severed foot shot very like your memory, apparently from a re-edit of the film. So maybe you're right after all...

[Ambient Sheep]

Also, Sheepy - the comments on that Robbie clip I posted include somebody who mentions a severed foot shot very like your memory, apparently from a re-edit of the film. So maybe you're right after all...

I did mean to say in my previous post, according to Wikipedia there's apparently three different versions of Robbie: one for non-electrified lines (which we've just seen), one for overhead electrification (which I suspect was the origin of the small clip in the OP), and one for third-rail electrification.

Which again gives the lie to me being shown it at school, because it would either have been overhead electrification (primary school) or third-rail electrification (secondary school)... unless they just showed the generic foot-chopping "this can happen with ANY railway" one.

The only comment I found on that video was someone saying that the third-rail one had a graphic shot of "his leg on the 3rd rail burning and smoking away", but maybe I missed something.  It was re-edited later on with Cheggers rather than Purves, but I was in my 20s and out to work by then!


In any case, I'm starting to wonder if it's a case of a sneak preview of The Finishing Line in top-class juniors, combined with seeing Robbie in my mid-teens (cinema or TV), and my memory conflating the two.

[Catalogue Trousers]

Mention was made of Northern Irish PIFs earlier in the thread, and yes some of them are punch-in-the-gut material. Here's a guide on how to inform on your local terrorists safely, wrapped in a two and a half minute narrative which uses Harry Chapin's Cat's In The Cradle to great effect, especially the obvious but sledgehammer bleak realisation that the guy's son 'had grown up just like me'...It's crushingly sad rather than terrifying, but fuck me it still packs a wallop.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NTWXDY1lJMY

[Attila]

An American one here-- this was shown to us at school in 1971 when I was around 6 years old. It absolutely terrified me, and the several hundred other children there.

It was made in 1964 and is called 'The Child Molester' -- it's a 'don't accept rides from men with candy/offers to show you a new puppy' -- and it is NSFW because it has about two minutes of actual footage of two little girls who were raped, mulitated, and murdered. (If you must watch it, be warned the quality is very poor, as for some reason this little film, 20 mins long, wasn't chosen for restoration to be made part of treasured films in the Library of Congress).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vileG-k1nWw

I never knew the name of it or anything else about it because 45 or so years later, I only remembered broken images and the terror associated with it -- but those images were burned on my brain. Only re-discovered what it was called and how notorious it was earlier this year on another website where a thread of posters got talking about traumatic PSAs from when they were kids.

I've seen some of the horrific films Mr Attila was traumatised by as a kid in the '70s (Apaches, and the one where they have athletic games in a railway tunnel), but this one, for me, takes the prize. And there's some steep competition there, as my mother forced me to go to an all-girls Catholic school where, several times a year, we saw graphic anti-abortion films.

So caveats if you decide to watch it, as it's brutal -- and if you do decide to watch it, imagine being about 6 years old.

[Serge]

This one shouldn't shit me up as much as it does, it's a  pretty silly (not to mention highly exaggerated) idea in the classic Reefer Madness tradition, but fucking hell, that face...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D3CuePztYV0

That just reminded me of the ever-changing face of Jez North in the Brass Eye Special.....

There's a few PIF's for the Samaritans that really defy description, you just have to kind of let them unfold:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3YlzBRdqT8

And that one feels like an outtake from 'Pink Floyd: The Wall'!

'Building Sites Bite' is the one that stayed in my mind, though I'd forgotten until I watched it again a few years ago that the actual framing device is two kids imagining their perfect goody-goody cousin being maimed and hurt to death in various ways, which I suppose is a true representation of what vicious little bastards kids can be.

One of the '70s 'Don't Go With Strangers' PIFs features a young Duncan Preston as 'lurking nonce in car', and one of the others has Timothy Spall as one of a crowd of wrong' uns.

'Drive Carefully, Darling' is one of my favourites, showing the dangers of careless driving, and featuring Colin Baker and John Challis as Numbskulls inside the head of a reckless driver. I'd go so far as to say it's Colin Baker's finest performance.

[Small Man Big Horse]

An American one here-- this was shown to us at school in 1971 when I was around 6 years old. It absolutely terrified me, and the several hundred other children there.

It was made in 1964 and is called 'The Child Molester' -- it's a 'don't accept rides from men with candy/offers to show you a new puppy' -- and it is NSFW because it has about two minutes of actual footage of two little girls who were raped, mulitated, and murdered.

There's no chance I'm watching that, it sounds bloody horrible. I can cope with PIF's when it's just actors and you know any misery is fake, but when they show footage of the kind you describe above there's no way my brain would cope with that.

'Drive Carefully, Darling' is one of my favourites, showing the dangers of careless driving, and featuring Colin Baker and John Challis as Numbskulls inside the head of a reckless driver. I'd go so far as to say it's Colin Baker's finest performance.

Heh, I enjoyed that, and like you say Baker is pretty good in it. Thought it would have been better if at the end we'd heard the phone ring, and a blood curdling scream from the wife, but other than that I've no complaints!

[Brundle-Fly]

These two American PSAs are very disturbing.

First one about Fire Safety is just plain weird.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tXcrbpMNvTs

These accidents in the workplace PSAs might require a strong stomach. Rather like a more gruesome versions of the set ups in early episodes of Casualty.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MwCyVku1HvI

[Sydward Lartle]

That 'Every Mother's Nightmare' PIF just reveals further layers of creepiness if you freeze-frame it. Look at the cock-eyed perspective on that car. The 'shops' that have entirely blank frontages, above which, just a loose collection of coloured blocks. The proto-yuppie toff on the left regarding the scene with obvious detached amusement, and the woman next to him who appears to be actually growing out of the top of the wonky car. On the right, Father Christmas taking a casual stroll, someone completely disinterested in the mother's plight, and Joyce Grenfell stiff-backed and affronted by the shocking noise. Yet the shonky art style actually adds to the disturbing ambience. Disney slick, or even Hanna-Barbera slick, wouldn't work with this PIF. Even using Terry Gilliam-style cut-outs would be pushing it. Whoever hit on the Roobarb-goes-clinical-minimalism style here absolutely nailed it.

Moving on...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vEv-wrRVl54
The seldom-seen FULL VERSION of a genuine seventies classic, complete with the rocking sounds of Joe Brown and the Bruvvers. The truncated version of this did the rounds for years, and consisted solely of the bored lad looking out of the window, seeing his mates calling for him, and leaving the flat - cue a sudden crash-frame on his face, the narrator's 'do you know where your lad's going tonight?' and the sound of breaking glass. Arguably punchier, but not so much fun.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ML8SiH6X8rA

Then there's this one, which was actually banned for being too gruesome. That's right, banned - not just shifted to a later timeslot, but actually physically BANNED. Before you dive in expecting it to scale Lucio Fulci / Umberto Lenzi / Ruggero Deodato heights of grisly cruelty, this one's very much a case of the horrors being more about what you don't see - so the firework-related carnage is kept to a sensible minimum, with very brief shots of the victim reeling backwards in horror (repeated twice), the poor kid shaking and convulsing in the arms of a stranger, and the lad being carted off to hospital under more bandages than the Invisible Man. Nonetheless, it's pretty jarring stuff, perhaps even moreso to modern sensibilities, since virtually everything here is so mid-seventies you can almost smell it - the kids playing on a patch of abandoned urban scrubland, James 'A Clockwork Orange' Marcus's clothes and moustache, the Sweeney-style Ford 'motor', the huge red-brick Safeway supermarket, Felicity 'treacle' Kendal's gently reprimanding closing voice-over, and the greasy, over-saturated quality of the 16mm film stock itself.

[Phoenix Lazarus]

This one, on the danger of strangers, which the whole of our primary school got shown on a projector screen in the school hall in the 1970s.  If watching from the start, the film starts at the 0.25 mark, after a bit of black screen and silence.  But the creepiest moments are from 8.30 to 8.40, and from 13.00 to 13.18.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EEjnmhBJA1w&t=37s

[Steven]

It was made in 1964 and is called 'The Child Molester' -- it's a 'don't accept rides from men with candy/offers to show you a new puppy' -- and it is NSFW because it has about two minutes of actual footage of two little girls who were raped, mulitated, and murdered. (If you must watch it, be warned the quality is very poor, as for some reason this little film, 20 mins long, wasn't chosen for restoration to be made part of treasured films in the Library of Congress).

There was an earlier one called Boys Beware connoting paedophiles with homosexuality, here's Opie & Anthony going over it.

[Dr Rock]

'Don't Muck About On Farms Or You'll Drown In Slurry Pits And That'

[Sydward Lartle]

This one, on the danger of strangers, which the whole of our primary school got shown on a projector screen in the school hall in the 1970s.  If watching from the start, the film starts at the 0.25 mark, after a bit of black screen and silence.  But the creepiest moments are from 8.30 to 8.40, and from 13.00 to 13.18.

I notice Aladdin's phony Uncle at 1:48 appears to be the Go Compare man.

[Sydward Lartle]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_TftkaCpoU

Even trying to save a child from drowning could result in your premature death. Something about the Vaseline-smeared lens, the ragged point-of-view shakycam, the absence of background music and (again) the grimy film stock gives this one a definite 'video nasty' quality. Not even the narration by Duty Free's Keith Barron can prevent it from being anything but bleak.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NO1lGaO-8aw

This one made me shit-scared of the fridge when I was about four.

[Gary Forum]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_TftkaCpoU

Even trying to save a child from drowning could result in your premature death.

"Or if there's a boat near, use that".
Fucking amazing stuff.

[Sydward Lartle]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nxNgHE0rXdI

A 2014(!) attempt at reviving the fondly-remembered Charley franchise, and one that pisses me off no end, especially as there are so many things they got right. The animation is appropriately crude (although it's obviously CGI rather than glam rock-themed bits of cardboard), and David Walliams doesn't do too bad of a job of impersonating Kenny Everett's demented wailing as Charley, but the whole thing falls down on Walliams also doing the voice of Tony. He doesn't even try to sound like a seven-year-old boy, and instead comes across as an extremely dim-witted adult. Then there's the look of the thing. They got the animation right, of course, but where are all the static crackles, the film grain, the artifacts, the scratches?

A sadly missed opportunity, all told. If I'd handed this one in as my homework at school, it would have been returned to me with 'could do better' in red ballpoint at the end.

[Phoenix Lazarus]

I never in my life heard a cat that sounded like Charley, though I imagine one being drowned might sound similar. 

Also never saw one whose head could turn through 90 degrees and be wholly perpendicular to its upright body.

[Dusty Gozongas]

You can watch it here

A very enjoyable watch, not least for reminding me of many a training film during my apprenticeship at ICI. There's loads of in-house films we're never likely to see in the public domain unfortunately - well I say "unfortunately"...  much of it was scary and/or gruesome stuff, so it's probably quite fortunate if that sort of thing isn't your bag.

A couple of thoughts occurred while I watched that one:

- The Castell lock system is a thing of beauty! If your workplace has them (and is constantly maintaining the system over time) then you know your employer does actually give a fuck about safety.  Sadly, many firms have moved to lock-out/tagging systems without a solid permit to work system in order to reduce down time. Fucking criminal![nb]I recall one place of employment that introduced such a system. The training video the clueless fuckers showed us actually reinforced the safety concerns we already had![/nb]

- Any qualified teacher will tell you that training films are pretty much the least effective way to teach a trainee, and I agree. But there's many of us who have seen some graphic depictions with well composed soundtracks who got the "safety first" message drummed into us - much to the annoyance of employers, and unfortunately bewhildered apprentices who think you're being an awkward old twat for refusing to jump into the unknown.

[NurseNugent]

This one, on the danger of strangers, which the whole of our primary school got shown on a projector screen in the school hall in the 1970s.  If watching from the start, the film starts at the 0.25 mark, after a bit of black screen and silence.  But the creepiest moments are from 8.30 to 8.40, and from 13.00 to 13.18.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EEjnmhBJA1w&t=37s

We got that one in our school in the early 1980s as well as the more up to date version below.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89TmSYj8PK4

I actually found the shouty Scottish policeman who introduced the video and who listed the names of missing children before and after the video much much scarier.

I don't remember being shown Apaches or Building sites or any of those but I think we saw the train one when we were in our mid teens. That  was sobering.

[Mr Eggs]

They should revive this. Slurry tanks/pits could be the ultimate in this medium.

[Attila]

There's no chance I'm watching that, it sounds bloody horrible. I can cope with PIF's when it's just actors and you know any misery is fake, but when they show footage of the kind you describe above there's no way my brain would cope with that.

Apparently it wasn't intended to be shown to children, but rather adults!

Now imagine seeing something like that when you're in the first grade. The final images were burned on my memory; I had shivers when I went chasing up the link after reading the description on the other message board, thinking, it can't be, can it? (I wasn't able to watch it; just scanned through it to confirm that it was the stuff of childhood nightmares).

steven Am curious about the one you linked, but that's something best for broad daylight rather than just before I turn in for the night -- and probably a Talking Kitty video queued up to cleanse the pallet afterwards...

[Steven]

steven Am curious about the one you linked, but that's something best for broad daylight rather than just before I turn in for the night -- and probably a Talking Kitty video queued up to cleanse the pallet afterwards...

There's a great line in there: "One never knows when the homosexual is about.."

[Sydward Lartle]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYPcfmmC2uU

This one works by stealth, really. There's nothing graphic or nasty or ominous about it whatsoever - it could almost be a jolly, upbeat trade test transmission about a long-distance lorry driver and his best friend, a sloppy old golden retriever who loves nothing more than a bite of his master's roadside café sausage sandwich. Then along comes the stentorian voice-over and the bleak message in the last five seconds, and... yeah, well done mate, you've just smuggled adorable death into England.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6nuyw6yMR2k

By way of a complete contrast, this is a memorable slice of gloomy, overcast, underlit zero-budget dystopia which dares to pose the question... what would Britain be like if there was a rabies epidemic? Pretty bloody depressing, since you ask, especially for the black labrador whose apparently innocent attempts at making friends are stone-walled at every turn, until he's dragged away to the euphemistic 'farm in Wales' [nb]Vet's for a lethal injection in the scruff of the neck[/nb] by a couple of faceless goons in protective clothing, armed with a metal pole. It's chilling stuff, like early Cronenberg relocated to Croydon.

Sidenote - I bought all three episodes of BBC Scotland's the Mad Death from the BBC Store and have yet to watch them. I'm a wuss.

[Catalogue Trousers]

Here's some more rabid fun for ya, and it's animated.

This one works because of a few things - firstly, the simplicity of its stylised art, with snapping dogs morphing into washing hands morphing into First Aid symbol morphing - inevitably - into gravestone. Secondly, for the flat and absolute authority of Rosalie Crutchley's voiceover, full of advice but devoid of sympathy, bluntly warning. Thirdly, for that death-knell of a synthesised drum-beat which immediately precedes the uncompromising final words. RABIES KILLS. They could almost be simply FUCKED MATE.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AWuLSkS2iiE

[Sydward Lartle]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8cbgDjB-aS8

Not rabies this time, but one of the other looming menaces of the eighties... AIDS. Imagine watching this at the age of fourteen, and being an awkward, shy, socially inept kid who wouldn't do proper sex for absolutely ages yet... only to be confronted by a public information film that says, in no uncertain terms, even if you do - by some fluke of chance - get lucky, there's a very strong possibility that the resultant night of passion would fucking KILL YOU TO DEATH. An unpalatable message in itself, but here it's hammered home with genuinely unsettling camera angles, a discordant free-jazz honking saxophone (reminiscent of the title music from BBC2's charmless crime reconstruction series Indelible Evidence), nasty-as-you-like synthesizer stings and the genuinely spine-chilling moment where the camera zooms up to an aerial shot of the doomed lover, accompanied by a piece of music that can only be described as horrible... fucking HORRIBLE.

Jesus Christ.

[Rocket Surgery]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUZM28sphPQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uG1K2M3ns_0

[Twed]

Glebe mentions the one with the little girl face down in the garden pond. Well, here it is - and it stands up pretty well. Note also brief cameo by another adorable cat, the Carpenter-esque synthesiser music as peril beckons, and the use - also seen in the Prams And Pushchairs PIF - of the pattern THIS IS THE WORST THAT COULD HAPPEN/NOW DON'T PANIC, HERE'S HOW TO PREVENT IT/BUT DO IT NOW NOW NOW OR THE WORST WILL HAPPEN. Although I've also just noticed, after the really loud splash that heralds the poor sprog's end, her Mum is still placidly gardening away as the camera pulls out from the corpse. Maybe she's deaf.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YSKmMkQ7d0

Wow, I bet Boards of Canada saw this one.

[Jockice]

Rabies was absolutely huge in the  mid-70s to early 80s. I once got bitten by a dog on the way to school and spent weeks convinced I was going to die of rabies. Did anyone in Britain actually ever get it?

Also, what about 'I am the spirit of dark and lonely water.? Surely someone has already posted that. Featuring the young Benny from Grange Hill fact fans.