Fireworks Safety: Parents

Ladies and gentlemen: Fireworks Safety: Parents.

I'm eschewing my normal practice of giving these videos dumb "comedy" names for this special Bonfire Night presentation, because this is a legendary work we have here. Lost until just a few months ago, when the good folks at the Lost Media Wiki had the bright idea of asking the BFI politely if they still had it, and if so could they put it on the Internet. Somehow that never occurred to anyone before. (Note: I'm being flippant, it was a whole big thing and we have Tony Dykes in particular to thank for finding the thing).

Interestingly enough, it doesn't seem to have anything to do with the Jean Boht/Patrick Troughton "Where's Your Child Tonight" thing. Maybe it was just me, but I always got the impression that THAT was Fireworks Safety: Parents, and the version we saw was a censored version. Seems like that was a replacement.

So what's the real thing like? Unsurprisingly, it doesn't live up to its Lucio Fulci reputation. Complaints about the graphic content got it first moved to strictly post-watershed and then dropped altogether. Naturally, over nearly forty years, this gave it the reputation of being some kind of gritty body-horror, with faces torn off and limbs scattered about the countryside. This doesn't happen. It is still pretty damn harrowing; the kid's face remains on the front of his head, but seared and scarred as he convulses in some random adult's arms. You only glimpse it, but it's unpleasant.

It would probably run uncensored these days, and in fact probably should. Post-COI it's near-impossible to tell what PIFs are running anymore - the Cabinet Office barely gives them any consideration beyond being filler material for late nights - but I'd hazard a guess it's the usual Sam Spark and Teen Injuries parade. The main barrier to this running today is that it's violently 1976. From the red-brick Safeway to the footballer's tache to the angular cars to the desaturated, grainy flickering film stock and/or pervading atmosphere in Britain at the time, it's a time capsule from an incredibly mundane world. And then there's the desolate, post-apocalyptic closing narration from Felicity Kendal of all people. Quite an interesting, if not confused attitude to children in this PIF. Your children are your responsibility and anything and everything they do to themselves is entirely on you, even when other people's children are partly to blame for exerting peer pressure. I wonder what Claudia Winkleman's opinion is?

All in all, even if it doesn't live up to its impossible reputation, it's orders of magnitude more powerful than what we get these days.

The Lost Media wiki entry:

https://is.gd/QnS5E1