Ding A Lings Do Stupid Things: Australian Public Service Announcements

November 6, 2023 9:32 PM

Ding A Lings Do Stupid Things: Australian Public Service Announcements of the 1970s and 1980s with catchy songs created by a commercial TV station. Other Public Service Announcements in this series include Vitamins; Why We Eat; and Dirt and Germs.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries (13 comments total)

these are pretty fun, and the music is surprisingly good. (i can't get the Dirt and Germs to play.)

one thing though - it's unfortunate that the Ding A Ling has Aboriginal features - especially as the protagonist is blonde and White. at least they made her a female, which is unusually inclusive for the time. but still...
posted by lapolla at 10:25 PM on November 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

it's unfortunate that the Ding A Ling has Aboriginal features - especially as the protagonist is blonde and White

I was wondering about that, but I thought Aborigines/indigenous Australians generally don't have red hair?

(Also, I don't wanna "little ding-a-ling inside of me.")
posted by praemunire at 11:24 PM on November 6, 2023

I still remember this Melbourne public transit PSA from years ago called Dumb Ways to Die. Although when I went to YouTube to look for it, I found an entire channel called “Dumb Ways to Die,” making me think this PSA must have been a collaboration with someone inhabiting a very small musical niche.
posted by eirias at 3:15 AM on November 7, 2023 [1 favorite]

What? Please, point to the 'aboriginal features' in this line drawing of a dickhead.

I've never seen these. Born in 1979, Slip Slop Slap, Life Be In It, and All Creatures Great and Small are the PSAs will never leave me.
posted by adept256 at 4:33 AM on November 7, 2023 [1 favorite]

I can still sing the Vitamins one by heart, and most of the Why We Eat. Adept256 you're only a little bit younger than me, I wonder if there were regional? I was in Perth at the time, and know the three you linked.
posted by harriet vane at 5:10 AM on November 7, 2023 [2 favorites]

Please, point to the 'aboriginal features' in this line drawing of a dickhead.

Darker skin tone and curly hair.

I spotted that and I'm not even from Australia.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 5:28 AM on November 7, 2023 [5 favorites]

This may be a controversial opinion, but I kinda feel like these types of PSAs (updated, yes!), might help society a bit if we started showing them again. The US had this sort of thing as well - reminding kids (and adults) to eat well, to be kinder, to do the right thing. They've fallen out of favor since the 80s, but maybe ... ? Not sure how much television kids watch anymore, but they can be part of other programming kids watch.
posted by hydra77 at 6:57 AM on November 7, 2023

I spotted that and I'm not even from Australia.

That's why you could easily spot it.
posted by Your Childhood Pet Rock at 6:59 AM on November 7, 2023 [2 favorites]

Wow, that was a blast from the past! If you'd asked me whether I remembered childhood PSAs about ding-a-lings or vitamins, or dirt, I'd have said no. But once I saw and heard them, I totally remembered them, including a fair bit of the words and music.

There was a surprising amount of information presented, like it wasn't just "vitamins are good for you", it told you the role of all the vitamins, which is pretty detailed for something aimed at kids.
posted by pianissimo at 7:03 AM on November 7, 2023 [1 favorite]

FWIW, for all the Aussies saying they've never seen them, that's because they're not Australian PSAs per se. They were specifically made by Channel 9 (originally STW-9) in Perth, Western Australia. The media landscape of Western Australia was fiercely independent until the '80s. STW-9 wasn't even bought and consolidated into the Nine network until '84. TVW-7 didn't become a united part of Channel 7 proper until 1988 when Skase bought it.
posted by Your Childhood Pet Rock at 7:14 AM on November 7, 2023 [2 favorites]

I liked the Ding A Ling PSA, especially the way it asserted that the problem is you might hurt yourself and you might hurt others and that, while some kids might be more likely to do this sort of thing, it’s not a “bad kids” thing, it’s a universal trait. Which is pretty nuanced.
posted by GenjiandProust at 7:35 AM on November 7, 2023

I attended a presentation the other day in which the presenter showed a slide with the title "The Good Old Days" and asked people for their ideas about what TGOD were like.

This audience (me included) was 100% of the opinion that TGOD were "exclusionary", "old boys club", "racist", "sexist", etc. The presenter was floored -- that wasn't what they'd been going for, and they'd never gotten that response before. TGOD is a loaded phrase now.

In the 70s and 80s, you could just run an ad in which one person was terrible and that person had darker skin that everyone else. That was "OK", it was TGOD.

But modern viewers are going to immediately zero in on that fault. The ad hasn't changed, society has.
posted by gurple at 9:00 AM on November 7, 2023 [1 favorite]

The PSAs duplicated a lot of social norms of the era. It was still okay when these ads aired to identify the race of an alleged offender on the news [only if a black offender of course] and only use women actors in household labour-enabling products advertising. ‘Norm’ in Life Be In It was positioned as the automatic head of his family. The vitamins jingle also assumes mums are cooking dinner and mothers automatically know stuff about keeping kids healthy, even if they nod in the direction of her frazzled state as a household manager.

It’s weird now when I view the Ding-a-Lings PSA that the curly haired and brown skinned kid possibly be coded Aboriginal. WA had a lot of kids with olive skin and curly hair who may not have been Aboriginal. I was one, and I always thought it was supposed to be an ad about my sister and I - she with blond hair and me with my messy brown curls and olive skin. I broke my front tooth when I was seven climbing up the wrong way on a slide, so it kinda confirmed it in my little head at the time. I guess the gendered thing didn’t occur to me either as a kid, that the non-dingaling was a blonde girl and the dingaling was a boy. Since, as I already knew, I was a girl and a dingaling.

****
Oh god will someone here please post me any Sing Sing Sing books from our 1970s classrooms??
Or maybe I should try to make a FPP on such as they were also cheerful things in my childhood and I love remembering getting our new singing books so we could tune into the ABC Sing Sing Sing radio show each week and learn a new tune.

[My school only had 40 kids total so we all crammed in together to sing, but the nice thing was visiting the city relatives and they also could sing the same songs as us]
posted by honey-barbara at 4:05 PM on November 8, 2023 [2 favorites]