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BOB FISCHER ROUNDS UP THE LATEST NEWS FROM THE PARALLEL WORLDS OF POPULAR HAUNTOLOGY...
"I am the Spirit of Dark and Lonely Water. Ready to trap the unwary, the show-off, the fool..."
A merciless instigator of childhood drownings, drifting silently through building sites and beauty spots alike, this sinister spectre made a profound impact on 1970s childhood. The central character of a 90-second Public Information Film produced to deter cagoul-clad tearaways from high-jinks around stagnant pools and dystopian duckponds, he now weaves his dark magic on a new Blu-ray collection from the British Film Institute.
There have been collections of Public Information Films before, of course - some released by the BFI themselves, and others by Network, whose comprehensive Charley Says DVDs gathered together almost 300 of the unsettling, minute-long shorts that peppered our TV schedules for decades. Lonely Water aside, this new set - The Best Of COL. Five Decades of Public Information Films -largely eschews these short, sharp shocks for longer, more ambitious productions: 23 films produced by the Orwellian-sounding Central Office of Information between the 1940s and 1980s. It's an immersive, languorous insight into a long-vanished Britain.
Predictably, it is the 1970s films that provide the real trauma....