The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Good jokes save lives
A history of disaster advice campaigns since 1910 – from nuclear fallouts to TB to earthquakes – is a masterclass in avoiding panic
Human beings really can get used to just about anything. A 2015 pamphlet on disaster preparedness for the quake-weary denizens of Tokyo contains this fantastically lugubrious bit of advice: “While protecting yourself from falling objects and debris, and watching out for collapsing buildings, move to a safe place such as a park.” This is about as panic-inducing as a Sunday promenade. Which is, of course, the point, for as the pamphlet goes on to advise: “One of the scariest things that can happen in a crowd is the eruption of panic.”
We’ll have none of that sort of thing here! “Sit back and relax,” as Yogi Bear – the “be-prepared bear”, who shows you what to do in the event of a cartoon earthquake – puts it. Yogi is one of a cast of thousands featured in Apocalypse Ready: A Century of Panic Prevention by Taras Young, a huge new pictorial history of public campaigns advising us what to do in emergencies (think pandemics), disasters (think wind and water) and cataclysms (think nuclear armageddon). Yogi and his fellows – comic, patriotic, human, animal, deadly serious and downright whimsical – have spent the past century bringing their various publics (Chinese farmers, Soviet schoolchildren, American servicemen, London commuters) face to face with the unthinkable. Apocalypse Ready will convince you that a cartoon, a sketch, even a joke or a simple visual pun, saves lives.
The trick to this business is to jolt people out of their “normalcy bias”. That’s the bit of you that assumes tomorrow will be like yesterday. You wouldn’t want to be without it – but once the world stops following the rules, it’s the bit of you that gets you killed: that has you chance crossing that swollen river, or standing wrapt as the sea pulls back from the shore during a tsunami.
Facts are good, but convey values first of all. Never mind how tuberculosis works: depict it as Goliath, taking a swing at a plucky little kid, and give it the caption “the Foe of Youth”. No need for great seriousness, either. No one will forget the time you turned Covid-19 into a fag packet and gave it a health warning: “Get the f--- inside”.
In 1963 a UK Home Office guide offered “practical advice on constructing a shelter to protect yourself from nuclear threat, providing you have plenty of sandbags and heavy furniture”. Alas, some disasters are so much bigger than we are and the attempt to personalise them rings horribly hollow. But why mock? The effort is always admirable and the advice in Apocalypse Ready, even at its silliest, reminds us that, in trying to save each other, we become worth saving.
No-one will forget the Covid-19 fag packet with the health warning: ‘Get the f--- inside’