Advertisement, Irish Culture, Entertainment N/A N/A 1980s 30 sec English

Back in the 1980s, long before smart phones were dreamt of and when many houses didn’t have a landline, phone boxes containing payphones were a feature of the rural and urban landscape. In this public information film a youth is in the act of vandalizing a payphone before he is confronted by a gang of teenagers, who urge him to ‘leave that phone alone’.

Singing the vandal into submission to the tune of Pink Floyd’s Another Brick in the Wall, the advert ends with Sir Bob Geldof telling us ‘phone wreckers are idiots’. Made in the mid-1980s, it was shot in the style of an MTV music video designed to appeal to a teenage audience and featuring Geldof who was riding high on a crest of publicity following his work with Live Aid.

With kind permission from Paul Bradley, Eir.

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