Charly sez…
Feb.14, 2006, filed under Miscellany
The BBC is running a series on old public information films. Today’s is about David Prowse, more famous for being the original Darth Vader, as the Green Cross Code man.
I remember these films. They were an integral part of my childhood, as they were for many of the Spaced generation. The one that gave me nightmares was Dark and Lonely Water, narrated by Donald Pleasance. I can still hear his voice even now and I haven’t even watched the film yet (you can see it on the website).
Whatever happened to those films? Now we have late night warnings about house fires; the odd THINK! advert about 30mph limits and motorbikes overtaking just as you’re about to turn right; and unending parades of sickly people telling us that they wish they’d quit smoking because now they’re going to die.
The old ones were great. Charlie, from the ‘Charlie Says’ campaigns (sampled and put to great use by the Prodigy) was almost as scary as clowns. To me they were like the fairy stories of their day – the original fairy stories weren’t prim and pretty and nice. The original ones were nasty and horrid. The original Cinderella doesn’t end with the finding of the glass slipper, you know, and Little Red Riding Hood wasn’t quite as straightforward as all that, either.
It’s funny how today we seem to be caught between mollycoddling our kids from the dangers and risks of real life, while being only too happy to expose them to the hyper-violence of TV and video games. Bring back the scary public information film and playground equipment you can fall off, that’s what I say.
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Singularity
~something that is singular as (a) a separate unit, or (b) unusual or distinctive manner or behavior; PECULIARITY;
~the quality or state of being singular;
~a point at which the derivative of a given function of a complex variable does not exist but every neighborhood of which contains points for which the derivative exists;
~a point or region of infinite mass density at which space and time are infinitely distorted by gravitational forces and which is held to be the final state of matter falling into a black hole. Sight
