In 1984, the Central Office of Information put out a public information film highlighting the omnipresent evil lurking in your neighbourhood and how the slightest instance of haphazard security could tip the balance from order into all-out devastation. Owing an obvious debt to Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds (clearly a very en vogue influence on advertising throughout the 80s), it depicts a mob of magpies launching what appears to be a coordinated attack on a suburban bedroom, having spied a window of opportunity. The human-level cognition with which they seemingly operate is eerily offset by the intense focus on their distinctly inhuman features - their pointed, elongated beaks, their chilly white eyelids, their ominous silhouettes slicing through the sky. We watch as they infiltrate the unsecured room and ransack its contents to a barrage of Psycho-esque strings, picking their way through a jewellery box and reducing a defenceless piggy bank to a pile of rubble - is it just me, however, or do they seem to making off with mostly lingerie? Pervy little bastards.
Still, the real horror of the PIF has less to do with what the birds take than the absolute chaos they leave in their wake, the bedroom being plunged into a state of upheaval that goes well beyond what a cluster of birds could conceivably do - a tip-off (before the narration confirms it) that this is not to be taken as a literal warning about the perils of letting wildlife get a little too close for comfort around your dwellings, but as a metaphor for something leagues more nefarious. The pillaging magpies are a stand-in for the threat of criminal intrusion, with its gleaming eyes forever fixed on your ostensible place of safety, looking to exploit whatever weaknesses can be picked out, however miniscule, and to hustle its way in. It isn't much of a mystery why the piebald corvids, of all birds, would be singled out - their reputation for thievery and alleged attraction to all that glitters (which might not be rooted in any kind of biological reality, mind) makes for straightforward enough symbolism, while historically they've been associated with a heap of superstitions, adding to their overall uncanny aura. There's also the implication that thieves, much like birds, have a particularly expansive perspective of the residences they're scoping; absolutely all angles will be considered, even the parts that you consider invisible to outsiders, so no aspect of your home security can be taken for granted.
The tactic of depicting the criminal intruders as animals, in addition to representing crime as something innately inhuman, conveys the implicit narrative that the war on crime is a war between the propriety within and the savagery beyond. To be complacent, or to turn a blind eye, is a matter of letting the wilderness in. The Hitchcock allusions mean that there is a ready-made familiarity in its images of avian marauders, a classic cinematic nightmare brought a little closer to home. Despite its foreboding nature, the PIF's message is ultimately one of empowerment - that, despite our vulnerability, we are not powerless against such devastation, so long as we're able to match those gleaming magpie eyes by being just as omnipresent, a force of surveillance every bit as formidably attuned. In the second half, the birds descend on another neighbourhood where the pickings are by no means as easy, due to the houses having locks and alarms fitted, their property being postcoded, and there being neighbourhood watch signs and stickers displayed prominently all over. Curiously, we see very little in the way of direct human presence throughout the PIF, the residents' only corporeality coming in faintest flicker of a hand as we see picking up a telephone to dial through to whoever it is you contact about the suspicious-looking birds hovering in the trees outside your home. It's an interesting approach that presents the forces of civility as the more stealthy and furtive of the two; it seems significant that they remain shielded in the shadows, while we get to hang out on intimate terms and in broad daylight with the thieving corvids. There's an unnerving duality in which the viewer experiences the sensation of being simultaneously the invader and the invaded, accompanying the magpies as they descend deep into an absent stranger's domain, and watching helplessly as a space nondescript enough to be their own gets ripped apart and turned upside down. Similarly, during the second sequence we're afforded the security of being indoors and on the right side of those correctly fastened windows, before finding ourselves cast outside with the birds, experiencing the intimidation of having met our match in such a watchful and prepared community. The voyeurism of the viewer becomes aligned with that of the magpies, and is ultimately thwarted by the impenetrability of the residents' privacy.
It gets a bit repetitive in its second act (the same shot of the magpies flying upwards, supposedly in retreat, is played four times), but "Magpies: Home" remains a punchy and well-assembled PIF that soars along on its genuinely menacing, moderately surreal edge - the culmination of which is the final sequence where the magpies, now in animated form, take to the skies as their silhouettes morph into the slogan, "Don't Let Them Get Away With It" (compared to the more neutral "Together We'll Crack It", this one emphasised civilian passivity and indifference as the biggest obstacle in combatting crime). And even though they're depicted as the villains of the piece, I can even detect a little earnest affection for the magpies themselves at its centre. It won't be doing anything to soothe the nerves of ornithophobes, but there is a certain level on which the viewer is invited to marvel at the splendour of its close-up bird photography, and at how well-trained these particular specimens are. At any rate, the magpies got off leniently. The COI would return to the criminals-are-animals well in the early 90s, with a somewhat more infamous campaign that focussed specifically on car crime and used a certain predatory scavenger as its pivotal symbol. The results there were nowhere near as doting.