Road Safety

One of the problems of moving back into town is that there is much more traffic. Having spent pretty much all of their lives in the countryside, I have discovered that all my children have the road sense of hedgehogs. I think they are improving - having an HGV whiz past one's nose probably does that. However, I don't think the message of crossing the road safely is being drilled into them at school. Certainly our eldest boy, at 9 and a half, should know better even if he hasn't quite had the practice.

When I was at school this was treated quite seriously. Apart from visits from the local policeman to give road safety advice in an amusing manner (he actually did a pretty good ventriloquist act) the one thing that really sticks in my mind were the public information films. These were aimed at a variety of ages, starting with Tufty the Squirrel (voiced by the ever brilliant Bernard Cribbins):



Tufty eventually disappeared from our screens for reasons never quite made public. I suspect that Willy the Weasel grew up to be a joyrider and Tufty fell in with a group of ne'er-do-well grey squirrels, serving time for petty theft. Nevertheless, these little films really got their message across much as the "Charley" adverts did with rather more difficult subject matter:



I took great notice of these films and always took all my advice from my cat. This probably wasn't the best of moves as my cat knew zilch about anything. However, back to the road safety and what would be better than to have an iconic childhood hero to get you across the road in one piece. For me that hero would be Doctor Who and the message was SPLINK. What does that stand for? Well I'm beggared if I can remember and I seem to recall I was nearly squashed a few times trying to work it out. Maybe Jon could explain:



I haven't seen that for years but I'm still none the wiser. Luckily the UK road safety committee were to come up with an iconic film that would stand me, and a good few other children from the 1970s, in good stead - the Green Cross Code man:



That's Dave Prowse - possibly better known as Darth Vader from the Star Wars films, although they used an asthmatic American for his voice - a pity really as I think his natural West Country accent would have been fantastic for the dark lord. The great advantage of the Green Cross Code campaign is that it was simple and effective: Stop, Look, Listen. I still subconsciously do this in my 40s. So why did they change it? There seems to be a tendency to change for change's sake but what they came up with was those most traffic aware of animals - hedgehogs:



They've actually changed this again and have gone back to the Stop, Look Listen message but instead of the friendly advice of the Green Cross Code Man we get this frankly disturbing 40 second horror flick:



Maybe times and children change but it's an important message to get across. I'm not entirely sure that this does.