Growing up in the 70s and 80s and watching children's TV puncuated by these horror films in the breaks was wild looking back


Public information films were something else
byu/NimrodPing inCasualUK



by NimrodPing

25 comments

  3. Yeah, “Play Safe”, I think it was… For someone who didn’t experience this kind of thing growing up, it SURE was fun reading through tons of people’s childhood trauma in the comments of the original video!

  5. I didn’t see these on TV but being in infant school and junior school in the early to mid 90s they were a popular classroom show.

    Probably the last hard hitting ad I saw was from around 2002, it was Childline’s “real children don’t bounce”. That one really struck a chord with me back then and still does now.

  6. As a kid I was in hospital in Sheffield, and in the next bed to me was a kid, maybe 13 or 14 who had climbed a pylon to get to a birds nest. The electricity had arced across and hit him like a thunder bolt! Least to say he was extremely badly burned all down one side of his body, he had no ear, and his eye and socket were black! It was a very scary sight for a child, I was only about 8 myself and it has stayed with me forever! I wasn’t in for long, a matter of days. My mum told me he died of his injuries not much later! Bad times …….

  7. I saw the one with the lathe on a health and safety course a little over ten years ago, still pretty grim.

  8. The electrical safety one was still played in school well into the mid 00s – I remember being shown it and it got quite a few laughs, I guess because it’s age was more of a novelty and compared with modern media it came across more absurd than disturbing 

  10. There was even one about putting rugs on slippy floors wasn’t there?

  11. We had *Play Safe* and *Robbie* back in the 80s at primary school.

  12. Milkman in the second clip is the guy who played Sgt Cryer in *The Bill*

  13. There’s a podcast called ‘Scarred for Life’ that
    asks famous guests about what terrified them as kids and these come up regularly!

    I always found the ‘Charley Says’ ones creepy

  15. I always hear Freddie singing “I’m adopted” at 1:58

  17. When I was a kid in the 70s it seemed a kid died climbing a pylon every couple of weeks, bloody good job we didn’t have tiktok back then

  20. The rabies and AIDS PIF still haunt me to this day .

  21. I remember one about crossing train tracks and the kid getting paralysed and being in a wheelchair or something

  24. The one I remember from primary school was where a kid is running late for a football match so takes a short cut over the railway tracks.

    Swinging his boots by the laces one gets stuck under the tracks and trying to free them he doesn’t see the intercity 125 sneaking up behind him. He jumps to the side at the last minute but too slow to avoid both his legs getting chopped off by the train wheels.

    Was probably about 8 when they showed us that one, still traumatised.

  25. My most well remembered/traumatising is probably a slightly later vintage to these ones.

    The wear your seat belt campaign where the unbelted young male passenger in the back seat fatally crushes their mum into the windscreen/dashboard followed his sister who was driving hysterically screaming at the mother’s pulverised remains 😳

Leave a Reply