I saw another Australian road safety commercials last night on Tarrant on TV, and unfortunately haven’t been able to track it down online to link to it. The Australians have a no-holds-barred attitude when it comes to making harrowing adverts - just watching this one had me on the verge of tears, even though I knew perfectly well that it was just actors. Anything that you think is harrowing on British TV just doesn’t measure up to the Australians. Instead of the usual shakey cam, quick cut away from an impending accident or a fade to the take-home message, this advert showed a car slamming into a flat-bed truck, killing the drivers fiancé and leaving him screaming in agony; cutting to girl’s father talking about never forgetting about picking his daughters coffin, and then back to paramedics dragging the dead woman out of the car while the driver was screaming in physical and emotional agony - but I can’t do the advert justice by describing it here. This was the second Australian road safety advert I’ve seen, the first showed five people being burnt alive in an overturned car, again pretty harrowing.

I saw on the news last week that there are actors in cinemas in London involved in a new campain. During the adverts at the start of the film, an ‘usher’ comes in and tells a ‘member of the audience’ (both actors) that her husband has been killed in a car crash - the audience only find out afterwards that it is staged. One member of the public’s reaction was that they shouldn’t do this kind of thing - she was upset since this was every person’s nightmare to hear that a loved one has died in a road accident. Yet there are still too many people speeding on the roads and drink driving (one of my friends is currently banned for being twice the limit), and neither threats of taking away your license or going to jail seem to deter enough people to prevent the thousands of deaths per year on the roads. So I’m definitely in favour of the hard-hitting style; make these adverts as harrowing as you like, and maybe some more people will take notice.