Oh man. "Apaches". One of my all-time favourites. "Building Sites Bite" is also on YouTube, but the memorably horrific "The Finishing Line" seems to have been taken down (although there is an edited version of it on there).

Building Sites Bite, Part One:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=WicqUUOTQec

A bit of The Finishing Line:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXGqwCbeFD8

E10 Rifle wrote:
But the "p" word was slung about with abandon back then though, wasn't it, even by people you wouldn't see as racist? Terry McCann from off of Minder could similarly be less than sound in his linguistics ("that's enough gunga-din" and the like), and if any TV character was the essence of late 70s/early80s earthy humane decency it was him.

Not that I'm defending it, like. It does shock.

It used to happen in Porridge - McLaren was occasionally told to stop giving black looks.

I saw an old episode of The Professionals the other week where the same actor (Tony Osoba) was involved in a bowling alley brawl. Mrs Beast and I found it amazing that he apparently played the part of "Handsome Negro". In the same episode a young Pamela Stephenson was billed as "Attractive Blond".

In defence of Auf Wiederschein Pet (although I don't think anybody is really having a go at it) -

I think it's probably a pretty accurate reflection of how guys such as those portrayed behave when working abroad or just away from home. From guys I know personally there is certainly a fair amount of the behaviour described and it pans out pretty much as shown (certain of them diving right into the whoring etc. while others draw back from it). Fact of the matter is if you don't shhow it you end up with the Grange Hill effect where you are attempting to accuractely depict a modern secondary which schools the only kids in Britain who don't swear like navvies with Tourettes.

If anything it's toned down for TV. Great show though.

This new movie The Human Caterpillar is meant to be pretty shocking but I think it's only doing it for the outrage value and deosn't contain anything remotely approaching any plot or morality. The Road (book)uses shock value in a completely different way - found it hugely impressive.

On the whoring, our dad had a spell working in Singapore around twenty years ago. Me & our mam went out to visit for a couple of weeks (which is when I had to cut off my beautiful long hair) and stayed in the apartment he was sharing with another guy from Middlesbrough who at that time would have been in his mid-50s. This chap had a wife & family back home, but a regular girlfriend over there, a Filipina maid (for the Rothmans family, IIRC) in her 20s. Many was the time I’d be up at two in the morning watching shite on the telly as I couldn’t sleep due to the humidity, and he’s come in with her pissed as a pudding and I’d have to hear them at it like knives.
So, after we’d gone back home, this guy’s wife came round to see our mam to try and find out what was going on with old Raffles, and apparently our mam kept her own counsel but her face gave away enough that the scorned woman felt it was time to act.
She flew out to Singapore to try and catch him in flagrante delicto and uncovered the awful truth – he’d married this young lass, confusing being the Big I Am with bigamy. I’m told that wife no. 1 made a pass at our dad which he recoiled from, which as my pops would be the Neville, I very much believe.

The women out there though, they know how to treat men properly. Give me one of them, rather than one who presumes to talk to me about cricket as an equal.

The scary bit and the ending of 'Watership Down' had a profound effect on me as a kid. Watched the repeat at Christmas and its still a very effecting film.

Central Rain wrote:
Once upon a time it was felt that British schoolchildren would only learn how to be careful if you scared the living shit out of them on a regular basis. Much of this is pretty nasty, especially when you consider it was designed to be shown to primary school kids.

Being too young to have ever seen that, I must admit that when it reached 4:50ish I just let out an audible 'bugger me!' and threw my hands to my face. Really wasn't expecting that!

Having now watched it all the way through (parts 2 & 3 as well), I can only agree with Central Rain. I'm not sure how I'll sleep tonight...

Thanks for brining up Apaches again - because I see that its follow up/sister production Building Sites Bite has finally made it onto YouTube. Initial signs are that it doesn't quite hit the high standards of Apaches (which was of course directed by John 'The Long Good Friday' Mackenzie), but there seems to be plenty to enjoy nevertheless.

Yes, 'Building Sites Bite' is not quite as disturbing as 'Apaches' but still much more graphic than most other films of its kind.

I didn't see either of those films at school and only saw them for the first time on YouTube though I had known of them by reputation for a while. Both of them were shown in schools for quite a long time, certainly well into the 80s. There is some anecdotal evidence of kids being shown 'Apaches' as late as the early 90s but I've no idea whether that was actually the case or just somebody's false memories being spread around the internet.

We did see a film called 'Robbie' which was the rail safety film that replaced 'The Finishing Line' when that was judged to be too graphic. 'Robbie' was itself pretty shocking (at least it was for a 7-year-old) but thankfully with less blood. Both of those are rather incongruously included on one of the British Transport Film DVDs.

I watched John Waters' Pink Flamingos the other day for the first time, and was genuinely shocked by the chicken scene. I'm a big John Waters fan, but I felt sick after that. 'Grossness' and 'political incorrectness' I can handle, seeing dogshit-eating and fictional Fritzl scenarios doesn't bother me, but real-life cruelty to animals is another matter.

And I dunno about 'shocked', but I was certainly surprised to learn (from this thread) that the guy who directed Quadrophenia and the guy behind Auf Wiedersehen Pet are one and the same...

Yeah, I don't think I've seen Pink Flamingos all the way through for that very reason.

we had a whole lot of John Waters films through work a few years ago, when they released the Hairspray remake. It was really interesting because we were also doing one of the Wire series at the same time, so it was like, these completely different views of Baltimore on all sides.

I remember seeing a public information film about road safety when I was at school which ended with the naked and mulilated bodies of two young children who had been killed in an accident lying on a mortuary slab. Just dreadful. I was about 15 when they showed me that!

A bit more recently, a scene in The Sopranos which showed some character mocking and then beating to death his pregnant girlfriend, was quite upsetting, to put it mildly.

That was Ralph Cifaretto, probably one of the most psychotic characters in the show, which, for the Sopranos, is saying something.