Country Roads

I don't know what my position would be on posting the notorious Irish drink driving campaign, Shame. Most uploads of it have been removed from YouTube because of threats over the copyright, but I have found one or two that are still there because the uploader was clever enough not to label it. Anyway, if I posted it here, do you think they'd comment to my blog and force me to take it down? Would they go easy on me if I told them which YouTube user I got it from?

Until I work that one out, here's an equally memorable one from Australia, with thanks to Discogod who found it for me. It's produced by the Australian Transport Accident Commission (TAC), another of whose films I've profiled here. And it does not pull any punches. Until they went crap in recent years, when the TAC showed you an accident, they really showed you an accident. Bodies everywhere, wailing women, explosions, blood all over the shop, it was all there.

You know the kids in this film are doomed from the start, because the viewing audience would know the "Country people die on country roads" line by now. Or would they? I've found out from Google that this particular campaign started in 1994, and the related films "Country Kids" and "Morgue" were shown around 1996, so this one is presumably earlier than those. It might have been the first one, I don't know. Anyway, this lot are definitely from the country. They have exaggerated accents, their idea of a good time is "helping Granddad with the sheep" (don't ask) and one of them doesn't want to take a job in Melbourne because the city sucks. Had you noticed they are from the country? The driver, her boyfriend, leans over to kiss her and ...

Oh look, there's a truck! SMASH! CRASH! BANG! Over we go into a ditch, and then the car blows up. Hear the screams of the damned as they roast alive inside a blazing metal inferno! And just for laughs, we get a little extra scene where a poor old man, who is presumably the driver's sheep - loving grandfather, finds out that the car caught fire and everyone's dead. There. Wasn't that fun, boys and girls?

Actually, I don't know why a car would blow up unless someone had set fire to it. The oil in the engine, maybe?

According to a campaign evaluation thing I found as part of my Google search, the idea was to challenge the target audience's misconception that most people killed in accidents on country roads are city drivers who can't handle the local conditions. My only knowledge of backwoods Australian hicks comes from Neighbours, but I'm going to assume they watch a lot of low - budget horror movies (as does the great British chav) and showing them a bit of the old ultra - violence was the only way to get the message across.