Growing up in the late 1970s and early 1980s, various tangible risks were waiting to ambush my adolescent self. Fortunately, there were numerous public information films aimed specifically at children to warn us of these dangers (see FT354:30-37, 395:63). Many of the most memorable dated from the early 1970s, but were later shown as a precursor to the main feature at the cinema, or repeated regularly on television over the next decade, such as the series of six short (each a minute or under) Charley Says films made in 1973, the year of my birth. They featured a naively animated, unblinking child, Tony (his words spoken by a young boy), and his eponymous pet marmalade cat, Charley, whose rambling miaows – voiced, bizarrely, by the comedian Kenny Everett – could be understood and translated into didactic sentences only by Tony.
The Charley Says films warned a preschool audience of the dangers of running around tables and pulling off tablecloths, of getting too close to pans boiling on stoves, of messing around near rivers and of playing with matches. One cartoon from the series, however, left the most indelible impression on me.
STRANGER DANGER
In ‘Strangers’, Charley and Tony are playing on the swings in the park. We see a man walking past on the horizon, before the film cuts to a wide shot of a barren scene: a lone set of swings set in a flat brown field,looming over Tony (who has now finished on the swings) and asking him if he would like to see some puppies. Tony pictures a cute, lolling-tongued, fuzzy brown puppy in a thought-bubble and says “Yes”. He takes the man’s gloved hand and is about to go off when Charley drags him back, delivering a warning lecture in his esoteric cat tongue: “Charley’s reminded me my mum says I shouldn’t go off with people I don’t know.” Tony is safe, and is rewarded with an apple, while Charley receives a dead fish that he expertly strips to the bone.
