When most people get misty eyed and nostalgic about old cars, they usually end up rattling on about old Volvo estates and maroon Saab 900s. Smug car dweebs might regard these as ‘design classics’ (and they probably are), but surely it’s a bit of a cop-out to buzz off such obvious stuff?
Meanwhile, a completely overlooked box-shaped wonder with a strange badge that hardly anyone recognises can still be spotted in damp towns around the north of England—the Proton Saga.
I’ve got no knowledge of whether these things are actually good or not—but I’ve always been into these mysterious Malaysian oddities—mainly because they always remind me of a great afternoon back in the late ‘90s…
Due to the fact that my primary school was dead small (there were only 16 pupils by the time I left), hiring a coach for a school trip would have been overkill, so every time we went out somewhere we’d just be driven around by whichever parents happened to around that day. This led to loads of slightly sketchy stuff going on, like my mate’s drongo dad treating us to handbrake turns in the school car-park (in a Lada estate if I remember rightly), and ten of us being bundled into space in the back of a Land Rover usually reserved for barking sheepdogs.
Back to the original point, the chunky-necked grandad of two sisters who lived on a farm drove a Proton. This was the vehicle that was to take us to a dull college building in Kendal for an afternoon of what might be known as ‘hazard awareness’.
This basically consisted of us lot being shuttled from room to room to be told various potentially-lifesaving-yet-very-boring tips such as ‘don’t swim in reservoirs’ and ‘be sure not to overload plug sockets’. For the grand finale, they wheeled out a massive TV which was deeper than it was wide, and our attention was instantly grabbed—television reigns supreme over laminated fact-sheets and overhead projections onto walls covered in Blu-tac marks, so we knew we were in for a treat.
The treat in question was a particularly high-concept public information film themed around farm safety. Whereas most of these films follow a pretty basic plot usually involving grubby 1970s kids with flares getting their kites stuck in power lines, this one was a 20 minute opus telling the tale of a group of kids who’d recently relocated to a farm. After vandalising a gravestone they found in a bit of wasteland, a curse was placed on them and they each fell-foul of farm-based hazards.
Suffice to on the way back to school the sisters I was sharing a lift were too traumatised to talk, and in the months that followed the younger one repeatedly had nightmares relating to the harrowing public safety vid. Not ideal, but as far as I know she is still alive, and wasn’t involved in any farm-machinery-based disaster, so at least the film did its job.
Roman Candle Magazine 