THINK! (Freedom! Freedom!)

1999 saw the genesis of "THINK!", the bold face of UK road safety designed to take us into the new millennium, by saying everything we needed to hear in just five letters (plus exclamation point). The elegance of the campaign (some would say the insipidity) was in the provision of an easy catch-all term under which you could plug all manner of traffic-related concerns, distilling them down to the most brutally basal of messages lurking at the heart of each and every PIF - namely, don't be a bonehead. Navigating your way along the road or across the road is definitely not something you can afford to do on autopilot. Come to your senses, dummy. Accidents will only stop happening when you people stop doing stupid things.

Despite the longevity of the slogan, it would be something of an understatement to say that the campaign's output has evoked a distinctly divisive reaction over the years. The "THINK!" logo may be one of the most universally dreaded in 21st century television, but the reasons for that dread vary from viewer to viewer. Some think they're a brilliantly hard-hitting range, filled with shocking twists and eye-grabbing tactics, while others think they're at best bewildering and at worst just kind of naff. Occasionally, they'll produce a film that everybody is united in assessing as just kind of naff ("Moment of Doubt" being the most notorious example). In my experience, the most outspoken "THINK!" detractors tend to be ardent connoisseurs of classic public information films; there seems to be a scarcity of "THINK!" enthusiasts among the same ranks who revere "Lonely Water" and "Joe and Petunia". I think I understand their sentiment. As PIFs go, "THINK!" just isn't very lovable. While certain individual films made under the banner are quite exemplary ("Slow Down", an early installment in the campaign charting the extended distance travelled by a speeding vehicle, with gut-wrenching consequences for the child unfortunate enough to be ducking out right in front of it, has all of the right ingredients for a memorable PIF), on the whole the campaign has a certain clinical coldness that leaves you feeling a bit distant. What the "THINK!" campaign really wants for, on the whole, is character. It lacks the bite (dare I say, the heart) of the "Drinking and Driving Wrecks Lives" campaign proliferated throughout the preceding decade by Safety on The Move. Still, I wouldn't deny that it got off to an auspicious enough start with "Signs", the PIF tailor-made to parade the slogan and not much else - which doesn't prevent it from being one of the most authentically hair-raising entries in the campaign's spotty canon.

The obvious disadvantage of naming your campaign "THINK!", in big, abrasive capitals, is that a sizeable portion of your viewership is going to be immediately primed to start belting out a certain Aretha Franklin number. I REFUSE to believe that this wasn't brought up as a potential issue at the campaign's pitch meetings. "Signs" sets out to counteract that urge, by re-conditioning you to perceive the slogan as something intensely ominous. We're shown a series of road-related scenarios in which things clearly have the potential to get incredibly ugly. Children sprint out obliviously across the street in pursuit of stray footballs, a mobile phone lights up tantalisingly as a vehicle is in motion, a hulking cement truck galumphs through a nondescript pedestrian crossing, a couple of roads with signs indicating sharp bends ahead hang with an eerie, deserted stillness (note: there were at least three variations of this PIF, offering a slightly different combination of baleful scenarios; there were alternate versions of the children at play sequence, and the mobile phone wasn't always present). "Signs" doesn't make its message totally explicit, but most of the scenarios seem to relate implicitly to the dangers of speeding, with bits and pieces in there about not giving the road your full attention (hence that horrible intrusive phone) and, thanks to the audio, not wearing a seatbelt. Mostly, it's an all-purpose PIF about the various dangers one might encounter on roads of all stripes - highways, city roads, country roads, roads in the absolute middle of nowhere. It emphasises the inescapablity of that potential for disaster, wherever you are, and it does so by sustaining an aura of apprehension that it never needs to see out to its logical conclusion in order to make its point.

The twist in the case of "Signs" is that nothing bad actually does happen. Viewers sensitive to graphic or emotionally upsetting imagery have little to worry about here. For this is an exceedingly genteel safety film, at least if you focus purely on the visuals. The audio, in which first responders are heard relaying a sampling of unpleasant detail from a variety of accidents, tells a different story (in this regard, "Signs" appears to have taken inspiration from a then-recent campaign about drinking and driving, which purported to show you footage of an actual car wreck, as first responders attempted to make sense of how the accident played out). The effectiveness of the film hinges on the narrative mismatch between what we see and what we hear - the calm before the prospective storm, coupled with murmurs of its grisly aftermath. Each scenario, while devoid of visual shocks, is a haunted one, littered with foretokens of the accidents waiting all too eagerly to unfold. The insinuation of what could happen lingers in that omnipresent slogan, which manifests in the roadside signage; ostensibly a call to individual empowerment, and to our ability to navigate through each of these problems by simply using our noggins, it reads more as a signifier of the ever-present calamity that threatens to happen anywhere that unwariness and vulnerability have scope to intersect. The accidents in "Signs" might exist only in suggestion, but their juxtaposition with such brutal audio implies that they already have happened, that there is a sense of uneasy fate about them. We should think in such situations, we all know full well that we should think, and yet bad things end up happening anyway, because somehow or other we allow that train of thought to go astray.