The Moment I Feared

The Spirit of Dark and Lonely Water

(Central Office of Information Advertisement, 1973)

 

 

 

Had revered head-shrinks Freud and Jung been around today, there's a good chance they would have been working overtime with all the forty-somethings affected by the Central Office of Information's fear campaign. Masquerading as public information films, a liteny of short child safety videos were engineered by some of the most twisted minds ever to get behind a camera.

Perhaps the most notorious of these public information films is the The Spirit of Dark & Lonely Water, a cautionary tale of the perils of swimming in watey fly tips; featuring a ghostly robed figure and chillingly narrated by the late great Donald Pleasance. Worth noting there's an early appearance of class of '82, Grange Hill alumni Benny in that film.

These public information films would often be aired on TV during the school holidays for maximum traumatic effect on the kids. Everything from crossing a road, riding an escalator, holding a firework sparkler, to retrieving a frisbee by breaking into electrical substations was covered. 

A series of six crudely animated short films featuring a cat called Charley would have a major cultural influence on my generation in the nineties; as The Prodigy would incorporate vocal samples for their song Charly. This helped kickstart a wave of copycat rave songs which sampled kids shows of yesteryear to the self-medicating masses. If anything, people were far more likely to break into substations, or take a dip in raw sewage while trippin' off their nuts at that particular time, than they were as kids in the seventies and eighties.

Broken Glass

(Central Office of Information Advertisement, 1973)

 

 

The one that terrified me the most was Broken Glass. A short film about the potential dangers of running barefoot on the beach. Perfect ad, since it's much shorter than many of its peers, but gets its message across incredibly effectively; leaving the final scene to eternally play out in our minds. If Jaws had people scared of going into the sea, Broken Glass had me not wanting to go near any beach. This short film has remained stored in the old noggin ever since, but it still resurfaces everytime I'm at the beach.

 

When the Coalition government tookover the reins in 2010, the Central Office of Information was seen as an unnecessary marketing expense, and by the following year, it finally closed its doors. Seriously doubt my mind will ever close its doors on Broken Glass, however.