Bring Back the Terrifying Films — But It Won't Work
Published on HivePostify by @revisesociology · Mon Sep 07 2026
Sarah Ditum has a piece in The Times arguing that Britain should revive the public information film. Her prompt was telling off a young man for lighting a cigarette in a tinder-dry field during a summer of record wildfires, and the observation that he simply hadn't been frightened as a child in the way she had.
https://www.thetimes.com/comment/columnists/article/educate-numbskulls-charley-public-information-films-9cdcx382j
She has a point, and I say that as someone permanently scarred by those electrocution videos....
What the COI actually was
The Central Office of Information was founded in 1946 as the peacetime successor to the wartime Ministry of Information and produced something in the region of 23,000 films before it was wound up. Its output ranged from road safety to nuclear attack survival, and its best-known work is genuinely extraordinary: Donald Pleasence intoning over still water in Lonely Water, the child electrocuted in the substation, the Aids tombstone campaign of 1987. The COI was closed in 2012 as part of the coalition's efficiency reforms, taking several hundred jobs with it.
Ditum's list of candidate campaigns for a modern revival is good: littering on motorways, middle-lane hogging, cyclists with headphones and no helmet. I'd add pavement e-scooters and anyone who plays TikTok aloud on a train.
Why it would fail
Here is where I part company with her, at least partly. The COI films worked because of a media environment that no longer exists. Three channels. A captive national audience watching the same thing at the same time. Films supplied free to broadcasters as filler between programmes, which meant you encountered them without choosing to. Crucially, an audience that had not yet developed any immunity to being addressed by the state.
Reproduce Lonely Water today and it becomes a fifteen-second pre-roll you skip, or a piece of content that circulates as ironic nostalgia among people who were already going to wear a helmet. The state has no route to unavoidable attention any more. It has to bid for it, in an auction it is structurally terrible at winning, against creators whose entire professional competence is holding your eye.
There is also the question of whether the fear worked at all, or whether we simply remember it vividly. Being unforgettable is not the same as being effective. Drowning deaths did fall over the period, but so did a great deal else, including how many children were unsupervised near open water in the first place.
What we're actually nostalgic for
The real object of the longing here isn't the films. It's a state confident enough to tell people off. The COI operated on an unembarrassed assumption that government could identify correct behaviour and instruct citizens accordingly. What replaced it was nudge units, behavioural insights and the language of choice architecture — the same paternalism, wearing a lanyard and apologising.
Ditum's young man with the cigarette wasn't uninformed. He almost certainly knew that dry fields burn. He simply didn't think it applied to him, and no film has ever cured that.
Final thoughts
Bring them back anyway. They'd cost a rounding error, they'd be better than most advertising, and a country that can produce a hooded spectre haunting a gravel pit has a moral obligation to keep doing so....
Tags: #cine#uk#dave#flims#proofofbrain#neoxian#cent