Colm O'Regan: Let’s bring the horror back to safety ads
Columnist, broadcaster, comedian and author Colm O'Regan pictured in the Maryborough Hotel. Picture Chani Anderson
Whenever I want a good scare I watch the old public safety ads. They have a level of banal horror that stays with you.
If I say “Bonzo wants to go out, dear”, anyone over 40 immediately thinks of sheep-killing. We all knew what Bonzo wanted to go out for.
Soon he is running with delinquent dogs. Bonzo morphs from cuddly family dog into killer canine with slavering jaws.
The aftermath is howling wind and bloody carcasses. Quite the thing to be watching for a six year old waiting for to start.
There were the ads that very much fell into the category of “You won’t see that now”.
A nun in a habit shouting BAH! BAH! into the ear of a deaf child. I think might have been an ad for MMR vaccinations. Or a convent education. Or both.
Wilhemina the Whirligig Witch from (that phrase needs a separate column alone) warned about flammable nighties.
Check the label of your little daughter's nightie to see if it was made of safe material or if it was made of something else — asbestos or pond sediment or some other substance that was considered perfectly safe before the nanny-state took over.
No one else I speak to can remember this but there was an ad for seatbelt-wearing.
It’s so old, there’s only one seatbelt in the car, the other seatbelts were presumably woke nonsense.
All I can remember is the man in it had a nightmarish struggle to try and get the seatbelt unstuck from under the car seat.
Road safety ads are still fairly hard-hitting but don’t compare to Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Man of the World’ which soundtracked the downfall of a man from Sunday League goal-scorer to culpable homicide.
Fats Domino’s ‘I Want to Walk You Home’ haunts road texters everywhere.
They didn’t all hit the mark. Bob Geldof foreshadowed his later Punk-turned-establishment personal with his anti-vandalism ads.
Due to an epidemic of phone vandalising because phoneboxes were essentially Boxes Of Money Left In the Middle of Nowhere, they got Sir Bob in to say “Phone Wreckers are Idiots” with punk attitude.
The worst or best of them all is one known colloquially as the “Where’s Grandad?”
Three people slain in three separate water–based incidents. The most harrowing was the one on the farm which looked a lot like our farm, where a child that looked a bit like me wandered off to fall into a barrel.
His father who liked like mine was distracted with talk just like Dada loved to do.
We need these horror shows back to deal with the ills of now. For a start, the dog-poo campaign needs a shakeup.
The signs are too nicey-nicey. “Pick up your poo, Scooby-Doo”. “Has your doggywoggy done his bizzy-wizzy?”
ENOUGH! We need the Pan’s Labyrinth director Guillermo Del Toro make a gothic horror where the shite gets from a buggy-wheel into a child’s eye and they develop Poo-Eyes like the child on the poster.
And every time the dog-owner closes his eyes he sees the poo-eye child and eventually he runs screaming into a milling machine.
Of course to work we need to back it up by giving out more than four dog poo fines per century.
Martin McDonagh could do a blood-soaked Banshees of Inisherin style ad to stop people leaving random pint glasses on the street on their way home from the pub.
Let’s bring back Bonzo but this time Bonzo is a cat and he’s viscerally mauling a cute robin.
“DO YOU KNOW WHERE YOUR CAT IS NOW?”
Let’s bring the horror back to public safety ads and scar a whole new generation.
