(Image: Crown Copywright)
KIDS were crying and dogs were howling, apparently, when the Government’s ‘severe alert’ appeared on our mobile phones last Friday evening.
The message, not to use disposable barbecues, fireworks and anything else that could start a fire, was the most extensive use of the UK’s emergency alert system in reaction to an incident.
Debate continues as to whether it was appropriate to send out a national alert for wildfires, with no warning. Some folk got two warnings, some got theirs in Welsh, even though they weren’t in Wales.
The Prime Minister said the warning was triggered at the request of fire crews after he visited Stourbridge, where a wildfire destroyed 19 homes on the hottest day of the year. And it seems the surprise alert got the message across. The head of the National Fire Chiefs Council told Radio 4’s Today programme that in the 72 hours following the warning there had been a decrease in wildfires that emergency services had responded to.
Such alarms can be useful, particularly for things like flood risks and earthquake alerts (although a friend of mine whose daughter recently spent a month in Japan says these are so regular no-one seems to take much notice). With a tinderbox summer of heatwaves putting national safety at risk, severe alerts are something we may have to get used to.
For those of us who grow up in the creepy shadow of Public Information Films, such cautionary messages are nothing new. Thanks to the Central Office of Information, we were scarred for life by eerie films warning us of the perils of playing on railway lines and near open water, climbing pylons, chucking fireworks and talking to strangers in the park. From the 1950s to the early 2000s, Government-commissioned public safety films covered everything from crossing the road to surviving a nuclear attack.
The ones I remember, from the 1970s and 80s, were designed to scare us witless. Shown in the ad breaks of children’s programmes, they were basically mini horror films. Danger lurked everywhere, from the unattended chip pan to the garden pond.
In Play Safe a boy called Jimmy breaks into an electricity sub station to retrieve a frisbee; tension rises as he climbs up to reach it... “A 66,000 volt shock killed a boy today when he broke into a sub station,” says the man on the radio at Jimmy’s house, where his school blazer hangs at the bottom of the stairs.
Apaches is a particularly gruesome warning of the dangers of playing on farms. A bunch of kids meet a variety of grisly ends, including drowning in a slurry pit and drinking rat poison, and at the end a creepy song called The Dead Are Watching Me accompanies a list of various ways children have lost their lives on farms. This was shown in primary schools.
Menace is about the dangers of not locking your house - “Someone watching this is going to be burgled tonight” says a sinister Peter Sallis. Children and Disused Fridges warns: “To a child, a worn out old fridge is a caravan, a ship, a castle - and a death trap!” Joe and Petunia were the dim-witted cartoon couple sat on the beach waving to a drowning man. And Robbie, a British Transport Film, is the heartbreaking tale of a boy who loses his legs after being hit by a train.
Then there is the mother of all Public Information Films - the Spirit of Dark and Lonely Water. In the film that gave a generation of children nightmares, a menacing figure in a black robe hovers in misty ponds and lakes, waiting to claim foolish youngsters larking about on slippery banks and overhanging trees. “The show offs are easy, the unwary ones are easier still,” says a chilling Donald Pleasence. “I’ll be back,” he warns.
These short films, exposing us to a world fraught with deadly danger, linger in our collective memory. They were brutal, some might say traumatic, but for those of us who managed to survive childhood without tumbling lifelessly from a pylon, getting trapped in a rusty bedstead beneath open water, or sinking into a slurry pit, I guess they did the job.