Public Information Films (PIFs)

I reckon yesterdays PIFs are the most moving, as when I was wee, they always used to give me nightmares. This was back in the '80s, but even before then, there were a good number of extremely hard hitting and graphical ones which actually showed the way it was or what happenned as a result then and there.

Remember the one about playing with matches? There were several I know, but it's this one for me that stands out:

It would show someone entering a house after a serious house fire. It starts off in the hallway, where there's drips of water running off a rather blackened staircase, then rotates round to the kitchen, into the living room then heads on upstairs to one of the children's bedroom - which was the main "seat" of the fire - there's only the remains of the cot, and over by the window - there's only tiny remains of the clothes that used to hang in the wardrobe.

Know what I mean?

I'm not too sure there - the infamous "If you mix cross-ply with radial tyres on the same axle" instalment seems more a statement of "don't buy a BMC 1300 in any form as it always end up written off in government PIFs'" than anything else. Some of them (like the entire 'Protect and Survive' series really needed better planning.


Now that one *did* get me. One of the best PIFs ever made. They''d do well today by rerunning it, then featuring present day footage of the 'father' actor from the original PIF talking about how much of a loss he still feels over an incident which happened 30 years ago.

I believe PIFs are outdated these days. People are much better informed than they were before and it's now common knowledge not to e.g. fanny around with matches, twiddle live wires around carelessly when rewireing plugs, or a combination of those two examples. They were a valient attempt at preventing accidents, and while they experienced (limited) success, essentially they just served to attempt to spread common sense. This point explains why todays PIFs serve a fundamentally different purpose - so comparing the two is like comparing chalk and cheese.

The one with the hooded figure telling you about messing around in old lakes and rivers used to frighten the life out of me, mind you it worked!

www.everythingtv.co.uk

Agreed I reckon today's PIFs are too "clean", and if you want to get the message across - sometimes you have to really get down to the nitty gritty and get your hands dirty.