Summary This article examines the 1987 British AIDS education leaflet Love Carefully: Use a condom, drawing on methodologies from both the history of emotion and literary analysis. The informative leaflet, produced collaboratively by the sexual health charities Brook and the Family Planning Association, was intended to prevent the spread of HIV among heterosexual adolescents, a group increasingly viewed as ‘at risk’ by adult producers of health education globally. Steeped in British teenage popular culture, it deployed an introduction from well-known teenage agony aunt Melanie McFadyean, a cartoon strip, and statements from celebrities. The cartoon offered a representation of the difficulties experienced by heterosexual teenagers negotiating the prospect of penetrative sex with a new partner, offering a successful example of condom negotiation, while sympathetically examining why some found condom use and AIDS difficult subjects to broach. The article argues the leaflet deployed emotions and authenticity to persuade teenagers to practise safer sex.

The article explores five key episodes of Grange Hill, which focused on HIV/AIDS and sex education in the context of the development of sex education policy under the Thatcher and Major governments and the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) children’s television provision. This addresses the BBC’s and the government’s conceptualization of childhood and specifically its intentions for, and assumptions about, the audience who watched Grange Hill in 1995. Having placed these key episodes in context, the article then reveals the didactic intent behind them, outlining their effects through a close textual analysis focused on the representation of sex education and HIV/AIDS stigma. The multiple narrative techniques deployed by Grange Hill’s creators receives particular scrutiny, allowing the article to expose how this storyline represented a culmination, response, and an intervention into the British politics of children’s AIDS education that preceded and surrounded it.

This article discusses the production and dissemination of the emotive and informative messages promoting polio vaccination registration in Britain from 1956-1962 through the lens of public health press advertisements and posters. It argues that as the press reported on the problems which beset the vaccine campaign, and the various publics who could register for the polio vaccination multiplied, the campaign's content changed. Material was adapted to target the presumed emotional and educational needs of newly eligible publics. The article contends that by attending to the emotional content of this campaign, the variety of publics envisioned by the producers may be examined. KEYWORDS Polio myelitis; British vaccination; public health campaigns; history of emotions 'Polio could strike your child'. 'Polio could strike you'. 'Polio can strike anyoneeven the fittest'; so declared three newspaper advertisements from the Ministry of Health's 1959 campaign to increase rates of polio vaccination in Britain [Figure 1]. 1 Provided to areas where vaccine uptake was low, these advertisements represent snapshots of an evolving vaccination campaign which adapted to persuade an ever broader and more fractured public to seek vaccination. Since the first British epidemic in 1947, polio, a viral disease, had affected thousands of children, sometimes causing muscle weakness, paralysis, or even death. Eye-catching and emotive, newspaper advertisements and posters were just one expression of the government's polio strategy; disseminating carefully constructed narratives about citizenship, motherhood, youth, and health. 2 While the campaign's engagement with these ideas was familiar from other efforts to improve public health, 3 it also relied on, and battled against, the specific narratives which existed around, and were created by, polio. 4 This article explores the government's polio vaccination campaign through its newspaper advertisements and posters, investigating their cultural, political, and emotional context. It argues that as the press reported on problems which inhibited the vaccine campaign, and the various publics who could register for the polio vaccination multiplied, the posters changed. They evolved to target the assumed emotional and educational needs of each newly eligible public through text and image. The British inactivated

In December 1980, the Health Education Council launched a campaign designed to discourage children from taking up smoking. Advertisements on TV and in comics and magazines featured a battle between Superman and the evil Nick O’Teen as he attempted to recruit children to his army of smokers. Children were also encouraged to join Superman in his fight by signing a pledge not to smoke, in return for which they received a poster and badges featuring the superhero. This article examines the design, production, delivery and reception of the Superman vs. Nick O’Teen campaign in order to probe the multi-faceted nature of the making of healthy publics in 1980s Britain. Children constituted a particularly problematic public. On the one hand, they were thought to be vulnerable and easily led towards unhealthy lifestyle choices. But on the other, children were also recognised as agents who might convince adults, as well as their peers not to smoke. This ambivalent conceptualisation of the child as a potential victim of malign influences, or potential rational agent and force for good, is typical of the 1980s, a time when the meanings of the child as consumer, agent, and citizen were undergoing increased ideological debate. This campaign also took place as ideas about health education, its place within public health policy and practice, and its relationship with the public, were in flux. The battle between Superman and Nick O’Teen was thus not just about smoking, but about particular ways of seeing and interacting with healthy (and unhealthy) publics.