The C.O.I. Collection

[MichaelB]

Actually, I'm the one who should be kicking myself - I should obviously have mentioned O'Sullivan's participation in the first paragraph!

[RossyG]

Well, second paragraph at a pinch...

Still, never too late to make amends. If everyone sends you their booklet, you can always jot it in for them in Biro.

[MichaelB]

The Guardian (Mark Simpson) on They Stand Ready.

[antnield]

Volume Four: Stop! Look! Listen! now available for pre-order at MovieMail. Release date 15th November 2010.

[antnield]

Bit more info:

The Central Office of Information (COI) was established in 1946 and has produced thousands of films that reflect the changing face of a nation, and world, in flux. The fourth Volume of the BFI's COI collection explores the government department's Health, safety and welfare films. Utilising some of the finest talents in British documentary film making, titles such as Thirty Miles an Hour (1946), Lonely Water (1973), Apaches (1977), Drive Carefully, Darling (1975) are amongst the most inventive, and fondly remembered, titles in the COI's distinguished oeuvre. Stop! Look! Listen! makes available on DVD for the first time some classic longer form films along with a selection short public information films and commercials. But please...don't have nightmares!

[RossyG]

Brilliant! This and Shadows of Progress will be my DVDs or the year. Roll on November!

[MichaelB]

Full specs announced for volume 4:

The COI Collection
Volume Four: Stop! Look! Listen!

Stop! Look! Listen!, the next volume in the BFI’s enlightening series of films made by the Central Office of Information (COI), takes a look at health, welfare and safety messages for the public.

Cautionary tales, motherly advice, celebrity appearances and shock tactics have all been utilised by the COI over the years to prevent us from being killed on the road, burnt to death, abducted by strangers, crushed by tractors, drowned at sea and more.

This DVD contains both longer form films and a selection of well-known short public information films and commercials. For today’s viewers, they offer a fascinating prism by which to survey changing government health & safety concerns and priorities across decades – with some now-famous faces when they were much younger!

Highlights include: Mind How You Go (1973), with green cross code advice courtesy of Valerie Singleton; Drive Carefully Darling (1975), starring Frank Bough and a stellar cast of ‘numskulls’; Apaches (1977), massacre on the farm from John MacKenzie, the director of The Long Good Friday; Betcher! (1971), in which a young Keith Chegwin takes on a cycling challenge; Never Go With Strangers (1971), sinister stranger danger advice for children and Twenty Times More Likely (1979), where Gillian Taylforth’s first love ends tragically.

Four of the titles including Drive Carefully Darling are directed by the highly esteemed documentary maker John Krish whose films are a major feature of the BFI’s forthcoming post-war documentary project Boom Britain and the DVD box set Shadows of Progress. A Day in the Life: Four Portraits of Post-War Britain by John Krish will be screened at BFI Southbank on Monday 8 November followed by a Q&A and will tour the country.

Special features

* I Stopped, I Looked and I Listened (John Krish, 1975), 16 mins. A trip down memory lane and some road safety advice for the older pedestrian
* Booklet with introductory essay and contextualising notes on each film

Release date: 15 November 2010
RRP: £19.99 / cat. no. BFIVD899 / E
UK / 1949 - 2006 / b&w, and colour / English, optional hard-of-hearing subtitles /
237mins / DVD-9 x 2 / original aspect ratio 1.33:1 / Dolby Digital mono audio (320 kbps)

Disc One

Thirty Miles An Hour (1949)
A Moment’s Reflection (1968)
Highway Code - Woodenhead (1949)
Too Close For Comfort (1971)
Ending It All (c1970)
Mind How You Go (1973)
Sewing Machine (1973)
Drive Carefully Darling (1975)
Accident in Park Road (1988)
Look Out For Trouble (c1980)
Joe & Petunia – Coastguard (2006 version)
No Short Cut (1964)
Betcher! (1971)
Magpies – House (1984)
Bonus on Disc 1:
I Stopped, I Looked and I Listened (1975)

Disc Two

20 Times More Likely (1979)
A Game of Chance (1961)
Apaches (1977)
Lonely Water (1973)
Building Sites Bite (1978)
Never Go With Strangers (1971)
Absent Parents (1982)
Searching (1974)
Every Five Minutes (1951)
Fire Routine (1979)
Andy Lights The Fire (1980)
Drink Drive Eyes (1992)

Searching, incidentally, is one of the most disturbing short films I've ever seen, and traumatised an entire generation of children. It goes without saying that the BFI version will have infinitely superior picture and sound quality compared with this YouTube upload, though of course whether that's a good thing is another question altogether...

[RossyG]

Cannot wait for this one. Apaches AND Building Sites Bite. Brilliant stuff!

Equally exciting for me is the inclusion of Never Go With Strangers, the first film I ever saw on the silver screen (set up in the school hall when I was five). It did a great job of scaring the hell out of me and I still remember chunks of it thirty-five years later.

[MichaelB]

Since someone raised it in an Amazon discussion, I'd better explain that the reason John Krish's notorious The Finishing Line doesn't feature on Stop! Look! Listen! (despite three other 1970s Krish films being included) is that it was made for British Transport Films, not the COI.

There was a brief discussion about including it as an extra, but it was felt that the space would be better filled by Krish's previously unreleased I Stopped, I Looked and I Listened - another non-COI film, but with many points in common. The Finishing Line is already available on The Age of the Train, volume 7 in the BFI's British Transport Films series.

[MichaelB]

The Digital Fix on Stop! Look! Listen! - "an outstanding collection".

[Jonathan S]

I haven't seen The Finishing Line but I was rather shocked today on viewing the final extra of Network's U-certificated DVD of the silent film The Wrecker. It's actuality footage of a 1952 train wreck in Korea containing several images not merely of corpses but of severed body parts! I presume the BBFC exempted it due to its documentary status, but it's one of the few occasions I think some sort of warning might be appropriate. Perhaps Network decided it was a necessary corrective after presenting a light entertainment about train wrecks...

[RossyG]

This really is a wonderful collection. It's brilliant to own old favourites like Apaches and Building Sites Bite, to be reunited with a very influential relic of my childhood, Never Go With Strangers, and to be introduced to great new stuff like 20 Times More Likely (which managed to remind me of both Psychomania and Yella for some reason) and Betcher!

The Finishing Line is an icon of my primary school days (although I never saw the whole thing until it appeared on The Age of the Train DVD) so I was interested in seeing more of John Krish's work. He certainly a master of the art. I can't wait to see more on Shadows of Progress.

I wouldn't mind if future COI discs duplicated contented from Charley Says. The picture quality is far superior on the BFI discs, as these screen caps demonstrate.


Charley says (Network)


The COI Collection: Stop! Look! Listen! (BFI)

I'd love to see the frisbeeing Timmy being zapped in this quality and be chilled to the bone again by Protect and Survive.

Anyway, keep this BFI releases coming. I love them.

[MichaelB]

I wouldn't mind if future COI discs duplicated contented from Charley Says. The picture quality is far superior on the BFI discs

It's a question of priorities rather than desires - a couple of years ago, the BFI took over the management of the entire 9,000-strong COI catalogue, and part of its brief was to make as much of the worthwhile material available as possible in high-quality, easily accessible formats.

Given the sheer volume of films and inevitable pressures from budgets and schedules (which are increasing all the time as a result of recent cuts), this means that outstanding stuff that hasn't been telecined at all is automatically going to be considered more urgent than stuff that has already been circulated widely, even if the source was a 1990s analogue videotape - and it was a deliberate editorial decision not to duplicate material from Charley Says for this reason. (That, and the fact that there's likely to be a very strong overlap between purchasers of Charley Says and Stop! Look! Listen!).

But I'm delighted to confirm that within the next 24 hours, the remastered version of John Krish's Searching will be published on YouTube in its 50-second entirety - and to say that it looks (and sounds) a bit better than this atrocity is the understatement of the century. (You know how much better it is already, of course, but it should be a spectacular revelation to everyone else!)

[MichaelB]

And, as promised... but do watch the earlier version first if you want to see just how much the remastering has improved it!

[ellipsis7]

A huge improvement, naturally, but notwithstanding it's still a film I find unbearable to watch!

[MichaelB]

John Krish in 2003: "I got the nickname of Dr Death. Yes, I did run over an awful lot of children. And burnt a few. I don't know, one gets type-cast."

[MichaelB]

The New Statesman's Ryan Gilbey compares Stop! Look! Listen! with the new Harry Potter, and declares a decisive winner:

I must have been more disappointed than I'd realised by the lack of chills in Deathly Hallows: Part 1, because as soon as I got home I started watching Stop! Look! Listen!, the BFI's new two-disc volume of archive films from the Central Office of Information. This is the fourth such volume and it contains some absolute blood-curdlers. Everyone knows there's nothing scarier than public information films, especially those made in the 1970s, when the gritty urgency of cinema and television seemed to licence in them a new toughness and daring.

[RossyG]

The spirit of dark and lonely water
The screams of the poisoned girl in Apaches
The ticking clock counting down to a young girl's death
The burnt-out house haunted by the cries of its victims
The man dragged behind a tractor
The nonce's face morphing into a demon's
The human shadow looming over the terrified girl...

All of these are more blood curdlingly chilling than The Exorcist and Dawn of the Dead, never mind Harry Potter. In fact, the roll of real life victims at the end of Building Sites Bite and Apaches literally sent a chill through me.

Thank goodness for Shadows of Progress. I needed three quarters of an hour in the lovely Queenie Watts' pub to relax after that lot.

[Duncan Hopper]

All of these are more blood curdlingly chilling than The Exorcist and Dawn of the Dead, never mind Harry Potter.

Not to mention the montage of 'strangers' in 'never go with strangers'!

[ellipsis7]

Substantial Guardian piece on the enduring influence of the films on 'Stop Look Listen' Vol 4...

It seems, that exempt from certification, that these public information films with their added freedom of creativity had a real role in probing and pushing back the barriers of what was acceptable for mainstream, certified, fictional fare...

[MichaelB]

Massive review of Stop! Look! Listen! by the Wilson Bros over at DVDActive, including detailed capsule pieces on every film - some of which take longer to read than it does to watch what they're reviewing!

[colinr0380]

The government is planning to scrap the COI.

[MichaelB]

COI Volume 5 has a title, Portrait of a People, and its out on 18 July.

I'll post the full specs when I get them myself, but in a nutshell it's a collection of films presenting assorted images of "Britishness", often commissioned specifically with foreign viewers in mind. (The Foreign Office was a major COI sponsor, especially in the 1960s).

[antnield]

[antnield]

COI Collection Vol 5: A Portrait of a People

The fifth volume in the COI Collection - Portrait of a People - reviews a patriotic strand of COI film making on the theme of Britain and, more importantly, its people. From encouraging immigration to re-defining the nation, the titles on these discs present, by turns, an affectionate, revealing and stirring depiction of what it means to be an inhabitant of This Sceptred Isle.

Highlights include: Oxford (1958), a look at the traditions and students of Oxford University; Dateline Britain: Look at London (1958), broadcaster Bernard Braden takes us on a tour of London; The Poet s Eye (1964), how Britain and its people inspired Shakespeare; Opus (1967), Don Levy s provocative look at contemporary British art, fashion and design.

Extra Features:

- All Films newly transferred to High-Definition from original film elements
- Comes with fully illustrated booklet containing contextualising essays.
- Dolby Digital mono audio