Set up in 1946 as the peacetime equivalent of the Ministry of Information
(MOI), the Central Office of Information (COI) was formed to ensure that the
public were "adequately informed about the many matters in which government
action directly impinges on their daily lives". Of the many hundreds of films it
has produced to date, from feature length documentaries to cinemagazines, it is
the short public information filler (the popular term 'public information film'
applies more generally to all of the COI's output, including much longer works)
that remains foremost in our collective nostalgia.
The pithy filler, so-termed because of its original role in filling gaps in
cinema programmes and subsequently TV schedules, has its roots in the MOI's
wartime information trailers. The succinct format was well suited to the
dissemination of essential civil defence information, from instructions on
fitting a gas mask to the importance of 'blacking out' at night. After WWII, the
filler was reassigned to the task of serving the urgent needs of a war-torn
nation and communicating information about the newly elected government's
progressive policies. Doctors' Dilemma (1948) and What's in a Number (1948)
relayed precise facts about the new National Health Service and National
Insurance Scheme respectively, and regular campaigns soliciting support for the
production drive, including Women Must Work (1947), were punched out between
studio confections and newsreels.
The filler emerged as the dominant format in the COI's output mainly because
of reduced production budgets for government-sponsored filmmaking in the postwar
period and a reduction in cinema screen time allocated for this kind of
distribution. Its rise was further propelled by the growth of television
ownership in the 1960s and early 1970s, which meant that the public information
filler had to become snappier and more direct to compete for audience attention
with household distractions as well as increasingly sophisticated commercial
advertising in an era when audiences were evolving from citizens into consumers.
In vying for audiences, new techniques and styles started to be incorporated.
Children could now be targeted directly and, borrowing from popular television,
such memorable cartoon characters such as Tufty the squirrel and Charley the cat
were conceived to warn young audiences about the ever-pervasive threats to their
safety.
The filler rapidly became a familiar sight on the small screen, and by the
late 1960s health and safety was the dominant theme. Contemporary celebrities
popular with children - among them pop star Alvin Stardust, Doctor Who star John
Pertwee, footballer Kevin Keegan and artist/entertainer Rolf Harris - were enlisted to endorse government safety messages. And whether it was crossing the
road, talking to strangers, playing near electricity pylons, or running barefoot
on a beach, the implication was that the world was one big death trap. Indoors
was just as perilous - a domestic minefield of tea-pots, matches and scalding
hot pans lay in wait for the next foolhardy young victim. For older people, the
diverse threats of pushy door-to-door salesmen, faulty electric cabling and
leaking hot water bottles demanded constant alertness. But with the help of the
government, the ingenuity of filmmakers and a line-up of celebrities, survival
was just about possible.
With the relaxation of censorship laws in the early 1970s, more explicit
images reached our screens. In this vein, the polite remonstration and cuddly
animation of previous decades gave way to harder-hitting safety warnings. A
succession of blood-curdling mini-horrors were transmitted as COI safety
campaigns attempted to shock increasingly jaded audiences out of their
complacency. During peak-time family viewing, TV sets offered up images of
eviscerated car passengers (invariably the girlfriend of an inebriated male
driver) or of children fried alive while playing frisbee near electricity
substations. Fireworks Safety - Parents (1976), with its disturbing close-up
shots of firework-damaged limbs, was deemed so gruesome that it was quickly
withdrawn from distribution and replaced with a less offensive, edited version.
For their critics, the omnipresence of government warnings is symptomatic of
a finger-wagging 'nanny state'. Conversely, fans of the genre either applaud the
demonstrable concern for public wellbeing on the part of government, or derive
amusement (usually retrospectively) from what, in some cases, amounts to the
over-simplification of complex social problems. There was little attempt to
disguise the propagandist remit of the films. On the contrary, in the 1960s and
70s the continuity announcer's closing clarification over the final freeze
frame, 'That was a public information film', clearly signposted the government's
involvement.
With its roots in WWII civil defence, the filler has been the official source
of information during times of national crises. It's worth remembering that
during the 1960s and 70s many citizens would remember having spent many an hour
glued to their wirelesses on standby for the latest civil defence instruction
during the war. The need for state intervention into the everyday routines of
citizens during wartime nurtured a greater acceptance of state propaganda in the
postwar era, lasting into the 1970s and early 80s. This was compounded as the
Cold War gradually took hold of the nation in the 1960s and 70s (a period now
considered the golden age of the public information). An anxious public might,
though, have been more anxious still had Protect and Survive (1979) been
transmitted in the run up to a nuclear attack.
In the 1980s, growing concern over the AIDS epidemic prompted the Department
of Health to commit huge sums to increasing public awareness about the virus
with its Don't Die of Ignorance (1985) campaign. The glossy production value of
AIDS fillers such as Monolith and Iceberg (both 1985), directed by Nicolas Roeg,
elevated the genre to the level of state-of-the-art advertising, and the COI's
work began to sit unobtrusively within the advertising breaks. These days,
perhaps in response to increased public scepticism towards government, public
information fillers are increasingly difficult to distinguish from their
commercial counterparts.
These concise gems of official wisdom offer an invaluable record of changing government concerns across the
decades, and have proven a launchpad for many an emerging or well-established
talent behind and in front of the camera. Certain issues have been perennial,
such as petitions for blood donation and road safety, while others reflect the
particular concerns of the day, for example, Richard Massingham's memorable
appeals for fuel and water economy in the immediate postwar period in such
delightful films as Read Any Good Meters Lately? (1947), through instructions on
decimalisation in Decimal Coinage (1968) and Granny Gets the Point (1971), to
more recent guidance on the problem of bullying in Tell Someone (2003).
Alongside their clear historic significance, they hold strong nostalgic
value, and many examples have been granted cult status by a community of public
information film fans. Today, the ever-ubiquitous public information filler
reaches us via screens in supermarkets, schools and colleges, GPs' surgeries,
football stadiums, pubs, trains, buses and motorway service stations, and, of
course, public and commercial broadcasting channels.
Katy McGahan
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