"Never buy a used condom. Even if he said he washed it." I will always remember this

I still remember the "if you hit me at 40mph, there's an 80% chance I'll die" - utterly, utterly terrifying.

It's a win win to be honest. Employing film graduates to produce horror safety films to scare the crap of every British so they would never forget the safety instructions.

"The Helvetica Scenario" A Swiss man in lederhosen crawls out of your screen and force feeds you cheese

Personally, I'm kind of proud of our horrific PSAs. Always found them much more effective as a deterrent or a warning to pay attention when I was growing up (in the 90s by the way) than anything 'softly-softly' could have achieved. 'Scare the living crap out of children and they will be too scared to get into trouble' worked just fine with me. Hardwire the lesson in.

I think the apaches one was actually quite sensible and still rings true to this day. My friend lives next to a farm where a kid fell out of a moving combine harvester and was torn apart by it. One of the people my mum works with was a first responder to it and he said it was the most gruesome thing he’s ever seen. Everyone involved was arrested and after interrogation it was deemed an accident. This was last year. Farms are dangerous places and the machinery commands respect.

I was born in 1955, and my parents - especially Dad - taught us kids the dangers of electricity, gas, portable heating stoves, stranger danger, what to do if we ever got lost anywhere and playing on building sites, around railway lines and busy roads. It was what parents taught kids back then but seemed to have stopped in the 1990’s because there was this false belief these dangers had gone away. Unfortunately, kids are still kids. They don’t see a ‘Keep Out’ sign as a deterrent but a challenge. Luckily, many parents today are now teaching their kids essential life skills. So if you’re a teacher, relative or youth worker, tell kids that real life isn’t as per the ads on TV!

As an Ecuadorian I would like to thank the British taxpayer for funding the only horror films I have ever found actually scary. But really, I love them! "Protect and Survive" didn't let me sleep for almost an entire night and had me bummed out for a while! 10/10

I've just finished year 13, but when I was in year 11, they were doing work on rail in the local area so some people came in to talk about rail safety. They showed us this video of a guy holding his dead friend after he died from eletrocution. There were also more disturbing videos, but I remember that one vividly. One way to scare us to stay away from rail tracks lol

fuckin hell Older generations are quick to tell us "tv makes you violent" "Umm grandma, your tv WAS violent."

How is this channel so small? The quality of your content easily beats other KZfaqrs 100x your size. Keep it up bro? 👍🏿

3:30 My ideal afternoon, is listening to grandad talk about killing 3 germans at the Somme? Why do so many people think those stories are so boring? They're actually super interesting.

You missed some of the scariest one. I recall one of a boy hiding under a car who then gets squished and you see this mashed up fake body. And then there’’s poor George who has a heart attack after being given too much food and beer. I always felt so sorry for poor old George.

I remember once at my old primary school, they sat us down in an assembly of all students, and made us watch one of COI's horror flicks about the dangers of electricity. Needless to say, I never touch a light switch with wet hands.

I was subjected to this particular brand of psychological abuse back in junior school. We all knew that when the big CRT TV came trundling down the corridor we were either going to be watching The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, or we were about to be scarred for life. Either way we got out of lessons for the rest of the day, so it was all gravy as far as we were concerned.

Im from ireland, britains next door neighbour, and i remember our primary school showing us Apaches. I had completely forgotten about it till now. Thank u for bringing back my trauma

Ahh yes, make horror films too educate people

When I was in primary school they still did videos but they left the endings for the children ambiguous. They did however show images of various injuries caused by fireworks, car accidents and train safety.

I'm still haunted by the screams of the little girl who accidentally drank poison in Apaches. Absolutely chilling.

I remember the controversy around "The Finishing Line": the popular current affairs programme "Nationwide" showed it to a group of school-children in a BBC studio. Afterwards, one little boy was led away feeling sick, and I remember a teacher who was an absolute caricature of a 70s school-teacher, with long hair and a brown corduroy jacket with patches on the sleeves calling it "a Fascist film"...

"and BAM, murdered children" sounds like a friday to me!

The darned things worked. I'm 54 - was 10 in 1977. We were shown one or several (I can't remember) films about railways (including the Finishing Line) - although I think we also saw something involving what happens when children touch the [third] electric rail. Even now, I've hesitated about crossing tram tracks in several of the European cities I've lived in and visited, and in Austria, I regularlyhad alight from trains at rural and *walk* across tracks to reach the nearest platform.Sweaty palms and a stiff upper lip were all that got me through it - because of the "programming" I'd had in the 70s and 80s. (And don't get me started on the Russian Roulette that was S.E.X. in the mid to late 80s in the UK...)

Just old enough to have seen some of the ones about trains, roads, strangers, and farm dangers. Considering how hands-off my parenting was, they probably did keep me from drowning in an open cesspit that was on our property. Also the aesthetic and sound design of these videos is amazing.

now i can understand fear tactics. if a kid gets trauma from watching a scary thing about being ran over by a train they're less likely to ignore the warning, but jesus christ.

I wrote my bachelor thesis about shock advertisment and used the Bernados and Think! ads as examples. Wish I knew there were more of trhem. So thank you for bringing these masterworks to my attention!

I mean they did succeed in their goal of scary the living crap out of some people as to stay far away from crime.

The one that freaked me out was a more modern one where there's this family hiking through the woods and through a little village with their bikes, all laughing, joking, having a good time. Then they come to this wooden fence and one of the kids begins taking his bike over and half way across, the screen cuts to black with a loud train noise. I think it was one of those 'stop, look and listen' PSAs. The abruptness of it just traumatised me when I was 10.

If you remember "The Snowman" by Raymond Briggs, (very sweet, and on every Christmas), he also did a cartoon book called "When the Wind Blows". This follows an old couple applying the government's post nuclear attack advice in "Protect and Survive". Worth digging out a copy and reading it. Was also made into a film.

You're focussing on the England ones which are absolutely nothing compared to what we have on TV in Northern Ireland. The rest of the UK is always appalled by the adverts we have on ITV and Channel 4. Very very graphic drink driving PSAs, some of which would be rated 18 if it was in a film. And they play AS SOON AS the watershed is reached (9pm), so kids see it. It's a part of growing up in Northern Ireland that 96% of British people (i.e non Northern Irish people) would never see or know about. It's been going on for decades.

And to be honest I would rather stick with Yorkshire tea adverts

Protect and survive terrifies me. I was born at the tail end of the cold War, and I asked my mum how she coped with this hanging over her head while pregnant. She told me more than once I was almost born early.

I can’t believe the number of people thinking that the ‘Used condom’ One is real and not a spoof, even though this is stated in the video.

I remember being shown a road safety film in year 4 of primary school, we were what... 8-9 year old. It was horrifying, and the crappy sound design made it even more sombre. There as always this droning low pitched bass rumble in these videos, same with some of the educational science videos for some reason. This was 2009, might have actually been a 'Think!' road safety film, either way, still horrifying. 5:53 this is partly what I mean, was that sound necessary? You can tell the Moog synthesizers were popular lol

2:20 i love the kid that goes "aye look thers sumone in the wotar"

The scores for these films are a sampling gold mine. They're incredibly well made.

Is this where Canada got their creepy psa films?

I remember watching these in junior school, in the 00s. Oh and once in a French lesson in 2015 because posters telling people not to swim in old quarries were being put up and out teacher remembered the PIFs.

I bought a copy of the Protect and Survive manual a few years ago, it's definitely an interesting book. Also there exists a terrifying programme called "Threads", a made-for-TV film that aired only once in 1984. It was based in Sheffield and depicted the UK coming under nuclear attack, a nearby air base taking a direct hit and the town being utterly destroyed by the blast. The film was partly intended to show how the techniques in Protect and Survive could be used in a real-time situation. Even for a 21st Century viewer it is hard to watch, no wonder they only aired it once- it's horrifying and gruesome, absolutely bone-chilling.

Thanks for shedding light on this. When I started working in hotels in the US, we had to watch a hilariously bad safety film in this style, where housekeepers forgetting to store chemicals led to the hotel burning down and the poor housekeeper being trapped for all eternity in a broom closet with a man with an absurdly strong British accent who rambled on about "baaahhhthroooom Cleeeenuh". Now I finally understand where this comes from :)

It’s called pragmatism; if you make an advertisement/public information broadcast weird or brutal enough, more people will watch it, thus spreading the information to a larger audience. It’s pretty smart really.

binging all your old videos because you deserve it and i cant believe that you are still a small youtuber with content quality this high

Wow. This is real nostalgia! I remember the boy drowning in the slurry pit. I think of it every time I see a slurry tank. ..No kidding, I warned my daughter about 6 weeks ago about never walking on the crust of a tank of cow shit even though they don't have the open tanks anymore. I also remember the kids in the train tunnel. If it was banned, it must have been after they played it at my primary school. They may be shocking, but they stay with you. And you have to remember, childhood in the 70s was very different from today. These films certainly did save lives. In the 70s, parents used to let their kids go out to play on their own. The attitude was "when they're hungry, they'll come home and if they don't come home, they've gone to someone else's for tea". So, we did play on building sites, and railways and derelict buildings. It was fun and I only knew 2 kids who were killed. They were tunnelling in giant sand heaps...the tunnels collapsed. We were all told not to do that again. To this day I have never gone tunnelling in sand. And I never leave glass bottles on the beach, fly a kite near high tension cables, or throw frisbees into electricity substations. But the most shocking of all was the nuclear war films in the 80s..."Threads" and the American one that they all watched on "the Americans". They were truly horrifying because we all knew that nuclear annihilation was a real possibility. One day in 1983, I think, we were in a history class and the teacher was droning on about something or other when a siren went off at a nearby building site. We'd never heard it before and for a moment we all stopped cold....Everybody...kids and teacher had exactly the same thought flash across their minds..."Oh shit...it's happened" Then we realised where it was coming from...People were white as sheets and shaking...but the interesting thing is NOBODY ever spoke of it to anyone. Too scary! Too real! Yeah...nostalgia.

This was fascinating, thank you! Reminds me of the War Amps Planet Danger ad breaks .. the robot dodging everything sharp and whirring and the iconic “I can put my arm back on, you can’t” always stuck with me

"don't leave your children alone..." 2 seconds after the entire bed and the children are burned out and the room is burning

I was a kid in the 80s. We didn’t see “The Finishing Line” in my school but we did see the replacement “Robbie” which you showed a few seconds of. That one was pretty terrifying. It was part of an entire presentation on railway line safety with a loud-voiced host who told scary stories, showed scary pictures and kept suddenly loudly hitting the board with the pictures on as a jump scare.

These films didn't even work, we got showed some of these and some others not presented here but two kids I loosely knew of when I was a child died in accidents like this. One happened when the council were digging out large pits when turning a crossroads into a traffic island with underpasses beneath, they were waiting for spring and for a water main to be removed and it filled with water. The local kids would run across the pipe, one day a poor boy fell and couldn't get out of the freezing cold water and drowned. Some years later an A road was being bypassed into a large dual carriageway, a huge building site and a natural magnet for the children and when they were climbing around an unsupported trench caved in and crushed a child.

I remember when I was little (late 90's), PSA about AIDS were everywhere in Malaysia. One of them depicted a man parted with his wife and children at the airport, then it cut to a woman knocking on his hotel door, and back to him being greeted by his wife and children at the airport again. I had no idea what that was about and it was so subtle that it faded from the collective mind of Malaysians. That's how ineffective our PSA was. Today, the government stopped making PSA altogether, and a whole new generation without the concept of safety was born.

I thought the water safety films with the hooded figure of Death himself to be particularly scary. The 'Protect & Survive' films were actually meant to be serious information in the event that the Cold War heated up. They are actually quite laughable. I thought that the best idea would have been to venture as close to where it was understood Ground Zero might be to remove the possibility of any suffering whatsoever.

The used condom was hilarious

8:40 So should I not be using the Helvetica Font?

I remember being shown one of these in primary school about some kids playing on a construction site, they all died and I remember thinking at the time it was a bit brutal to show kids. I'm not from the 70s or anything, this was the early-mid 2010s.

We were shown 'Protect & Survive' in the forces as part of our basic training!! I remember as a chikd a film about a little boy trying to get his ball back from a transformer compound, as we had one across the road it was very vivid. The litte boy ended up falling into high voltage wires and became a 'crispy thing' very graphic and scary. Years later i had to worked in ultra high voltage industry with reactors and that film STILL haunted me!

We need this sort of information more than ever - the horror depicted in Central Office of Information films was actually real for some of those who fell foul of whatever dangers the films were warning against, and attempting to prevent from happening. I had forgotten about that railway safety film which looks to have been the first Battle Royale, (or Hunger Games), but now I recall having seen it. As you can see I grew up on this stuff. A shame to see the COI was disbanded, though I had no idea this happened so recently.

You guys should check out Threads, a 1984 British documentary/drama movie about what would happen if a city in northern England got nuked. It was made to educate people on the dangers of nuclear war and is one of the most terrifying things you'll ever see. Fun fact, I grew up in and have lived in all the locations featured in the movie and it's terrifying and trippy watching your home town be portrayed as utterly destroyed by nuclear fire while literally being there in real life.

Absolutely brilliant and brilliantly made. Thank you. If the government decided that properly educating people was not the preferred option, and simply scaring people was better, then if that went away, it surely came back with a vengeance from 2020!

the one that has stayed with me the most is a kid who got electrocuted on the train tracks. you see his friends crying out in horror and calling the ambulance. then it cuts to a policeman peeling off his charred flesh from the train track and his mother screaming. then videos of irl people getting hit by trains and electrucoted and railway workers telling you about all the dead kids they have had to deal with and their parents. i was eleven and it still scares the shit out of me so it worked ig. we also had a school trip to a warehouse (it was called the risk factory) where it was interactive risks, with models of dead charred bodies, and videos of people getting hit by trains, and how to deal w unconcious people and all that. terrifying.

The best one I saw was in about 1973/74 when I was 5 or 6. I grew up in a town in Wiltshire next to the Salisbury Plain Training Area. One day we all got called into the school hall and were shown a film by some soldiers about not going up onto the Army Ranges to play. There were various children getting blown up in numerous gory ways as they played with unexploded ordinance they had found. We definitely got the message from that one.

As a Canadian, I remember some pretty crazy CBC shorts from the 70's and 80's, but these look way worse. I love them! LoL

"The British Advisory Department presents: B.A.D. Advice" Somebody show this to 4chan

Even some of the Public Safety Films of today can be quite sinister. You'll also notice in these 70's PSFs that they style it out like a Horror film with a posh guys voice in the background like some 50's monster film.

They need to bring them back. From people texting and cycling at the same time to walking into the path of on coming cars at night in black clothing. We need some new advice films.

It took 'til 7:30 before the Look Around You music caught my ear. You've really recontextualized the whole series for me.

Living by a river and a railway line as a child in the 60's and 70's and being here to tell the tale is to a great extent down to these COI films.

COI turning into a pub is the most British thing i've heard

It's so British that it was shut down to budget cuts

"Never buy a used condom" Uhm.. if you're the kind of person who would even consider that, getting an STD or whatever is like the least of your issues. But I guess that was a big enough issue for Britain to have an entire association dedicated to unused condoms. Smh...

Kid: * dies * Britain: I can milk you!

I remember seeing the one of the kid climbing a power station insulator in school. It must've worked, as I've never felt a desire to do that to this day!

So, 70's Britain used the "German Fairy Tale" doctrine of pedagogy. I now understand Brexit implicitly

This feels Like local 58

In all fairness, after being shown The Finishing Line in year 7, I was scared so badly I never went near a traintrack. Says so much about this country that they used/use fear to control instead of the cost to make them completely inaccessible.

5:26 this is peak gen z humor

When I was in year 4 my school took us on a trip to a place called DangerPoint and it absolutely traumatized me. They showed a video of a girl's bedroom being burned down and proceeded to show us a teen getting ran over by a train. Never stepping foot in that place again.

"DON'T BOIL A KETTLE ON A BOAT!"

I believe the film “Threads” was meant to be an educational film. It is by far the scariest and most disturbing (unintentional) horror film ever as it follows the story of Sheffield after being nuked and explains a timeline of the effects of nukes.

Stopped making Public Safety Films and before you know it, kids were eating Tide Pods.

And I thought that the driving safety ads that we had in my country during the 90's were a bit much because they implied horrific death scenes, meanwhile the British were straight up doing horror films.

7:39 I don't know why but this makes me laugh so hard.

part of the audio for frankie goes to hollywood song "Two Tribes" came from the Protect and Survive documatary/public infomation film voiced by the great Patrick Allen

I only just recently discovered your channel but I'm really hooked. Your videos are super interesting and very unique!

I remember watching the video at 6:35. Bare in mind, I was born in 1996. I was shown it in school in maybe 2002-2004, something around that age

At 8:14 the far right poster is actually funny and made me laugh hard. Monty Python was right, we Czechs are laughing beasts :D

2:22 “Oi look there’s someone in the wAhTaH”

I spend my early childhood in 1980s and early 90s UK before my family moved to Melbourne, Australia. There, I would be subjected to gory ads from the Transport Accident Commission warning of the various causes of road trauma. No wonder I’m such a messed up safety freak.

can't even share condoms with the bois without being judged. literally 1984

Maybe uts because I grew up with them but I quite like the notion that the little Isle of Britain, so often seen as being very proper and controlled, has this long history of public information horror films. Personally I think the surreal and shocking content is what makes them so interesting, and the notion that it's also genuinely useful information (most of the time) makes it better than normal horror, like the moral of the story is actually relevant to something that could happen to you and not ghosts or some other supernatural stuff. I wouldn't be disappointed to see more of these, but I also found Don't Hug Me I'm Scared terrifically entertaining so perhaps these educational films have just instilled a strong sense of dark humour.

I remember watching a TV show about some in the 70s with my dad. And one of them was about a child at night who went into the basements drank some chemicals in a jar and screamed in pain waking the whole house up. I cant find the video at all however so I dont know anymore

We played in old quarries,brickworks and on old barges in the river,oh, and scrumping. I think the main fear was getting collared by the local copper on his Velocette!

Having watched both, 1983's "The Day After" is downright comfy viewing compared to "Threads" (1984).

Music artist Boards of Canada basically took this aesthetic and ran with it.

I remember them in the 70's at primary school. Local police officers brought the films in on projection reels. Can still hear the crackle spit from the dodgy audio. Needless to say they worked!

I watched the original "Finishing line" at school, all gathered in assembly to "Watch a film". Old school, an actual film, curtains drawn, projector buzzing. The irony was it didn't stop me playing on the railway, my local one had been closed since 1972.

Ah, Play Safe. One of the most terrifying british Electrical PSAs. I ended up seeing the uncut version, where you see the child actually on fire.

7:14 The central office of information is now a pub says the caption on the bottom left. I would most certainly hope it is called the Central Office of Intoxication.

The Finishing Line... Fond memories of school sports day. The PE master shouting "If the trains don't get you, I bloody will!"

The woman in the thumbnail and briefly at 10:27 is from one of my absolute favourite 70s PIFs - "polish a floor and set a rug on it, and you might as well set a mantrap." So dramatic and unnecessary

I remember the finishing line and it scared the life out of me. I cried for days after.

This video reminded me of the films: The War Game and Threads. An interesting look at the cold war in Britain. They are pretty retro, but a good watch nonetheless.

I vividly remember seeing the replacement for 'the finishing line'. It was called 'Robbie', I had to watch it in junior school around 1998, I'll never forget him being wheeled into shot at the end with the orange/ red blanket covering his recently severed legs.

I don't remember any of these other than the "Don't die of ignorance". But the one that has stuck in my mind is about the dangers of mixing radial and cross-ply tyres. I've no idea what either of these are, but I'm sure as shit not going to mix those buggers and die horribly, thanks.