Railway safety.

[davywavy]

One of my more unusual memories of childhood is of a nightmare that I had. Like most childhood memories, it's quite dim and distant now, but I distinctly remember having a dream in which a school held its sports day on some railway lines. The children would run up and down the lines, and periodically a train would come along and squash some of them. It was quite a graphic dream - there was lots of blood, and there were weeping children and doctors trying to find who owned which leg and so forth. It's rare I remember much about my dreams, but this one clearly made an impression as I can remember it pretty clearly even now.

Anyway, after decades of thinking this had just been a juvenile nightmare, I discover that it wasn't a dream at all - it was in fact a safety film which I had been shown at school warning me of the dangers of playing on the railway. This must have been when I was about seven, remember. I mean, if you showed seven-year-olds films like this at school now, I'm pretty confident that someone would be arrested. Certainly, there'd be some harsh words about it on Twitter.

Comments

[crocodilewings.livejournal.com]

A few minutes of Googling later:

Robbie is a 13-minute long film made by British Transport Films in 1979 and revised in 1986. Although it is not strictly a Public Information Film, it is often considered to be so by fans of the genre. The film, which was shown in schools all over Great Britain, is based around a young boy suffering a disfiguring and/or fatal accident when he trespasses on a railway line, with three different versions being made to demonstrate the dangers of both electrified and non - electrified lines. When it was first released, all three versions were narrated and introduced by Peter Purves, later replaced by Keith Chegwin when the films were revised. Robbie was written and directed by Ronald Dunkley and produced by James Ritchie. It was a replacement for the controversial and extremely graphic The Finishing Line, and was itself later replaced by a more modern film called Killing Time.

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

Right, so I was younger than seven when they showed me this film, if it was replaced in 1979.

Blimey.

[crocodilewings.livejournal.com]

I've just asked two nearby work colleagues (one a few years older than me, one six years younger) if they were shown these sorts of videos as kids. Neither were.

I feel properly victimised now.

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

It's possible that they have simply blotted it from their memory.

Safer that way.