Gânduri Eclectice – Eclectic Thoughts

Ongoing events in supply-chain subversion involving high explosives, coupled with other world events, have awakened many Cold War memories for me.

And here’s another one that has bubbled up to the surface: the quotation that is the title of this article. It appeared on some of the (many) mixes & remixes of Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s “Two Tribes” from 1984 (the year, not the book). And it sounds creepy.

Two Tribes is an anti-war song from the Cold War era, and very much focussed on the potential for nuclear anihilation.

However, it was several years before I realised just how incredibly sinister & creepy it really was. And to understand that, you have to delve a little deeper into what was going on in the UK during the Cold War years.

The voice on the track reading out this line, and various other ghoulish lines (“the air attack warning sounds like: this is the sound”, “when you hear the air attack warning, you and your family must take cover”) is Patrick Allen.

If you were around in the UK in the 1980s you would have found it hard to avoid Blackadder, and Patrick Allen was the narrator for the first series – also playing “Philip of Burgundy” in the last episode of that series. A distinctive, well-spoken, clear, familiar-sounding, and authoritative voice.

And, it turned out, the voice that was used for a series of twenty short public information films made around 1975. The films were classified^[0], intended for transmission on all television channels if the government determined that nuclear attack was likely within 72 hours. These films^[1], and the associated leaflet^[2], were all under the “Protect and Survive” branding.

Thus when Patrick Allen said on Two Tribes “Mine is the last voice that you will ever hear” this was something that could have become literally true. The other lines were repeated from the script of the public information films.

I wonder how many of you had noticed or missed this particularly grim connection?

The “Protect and Survive” materials were, rightly I think, widely ridiculed. The advice they contain is not very practical, and did not really match the horror that could have been the reality. If you want that, read my article about Threads and other dramatisations in this area.

Hopefully I can find something less depressing to write about next, fascinating though this area is.

Footnotes

[0] At the time, the classification was liked to have been RESTRICTED. One might expect it to have been limited to UK Nationals only, but “UK EYES ONLY” was only really used with SECRET or TOP SECRET material. I’ve never found anyone able to authoritatively confirm or refute my guesswork here.

[1] The Imperial War Museum has the 20 separate films concatenated into a single video which you can view on their site. It’s about 53 minutes long in total, and can be found here. Full of useful practical advice about what to do to survive in the event of a nuclear holocaust.

[2] The original leaflet is hard to come by – they occasionally turn up on ebay but are not cheap. However, this PDF version of it has been around online since about 1999.

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