evidence: The ideas had been planted that afternoon. We’d watched two short films together produced by the government’s now-defunct Central Office of Information: Never Go With Strangers and Building Sites Bite. Both were originally screened in British classrooms in the Seventies, and I was keen to see if they still had the power to shock and instruct today’s YouTube-addled youth. [...] Public information films can be an incredibly efficient way to convey important messages to vast swathes of the population in ways they won’t quickly forget. Just ask anyone who saw either of the hair-raisers above at school – or the many other macabre classics of the time, such as Lonely Water, in which a hooded spectre looks on with satisfaction as youngsters drown in ditches and ponds. [...] Given the Prime Minister’s fondness for drawing parallels between Covid and wartime hardships, this failure seems doubly bizarre. The popular image of plucky Brits coping stoically with whatever Hitler threw at them was forged in no small part in the public information films produced by the Ministry of Information, the COI’s wartime predecessor. And arguably the most memorable strand of their output was devoted to keeping the population fit and virus-free, and therefore able to contribute to the war effort.