SOME more recent pictures look far more dated that those from decades earlier.

This, for example, is only from 1987, when some poor chap is dressed up as “PC Payphone”. His job was to tour primary schools and convince youngsters that vandalising phone boxes was a bad thing.

Someone at BT thought this was a cracking idea and they went ahead with it, rather than sending the person who thought of it away for a drugs test.

Anyway here is PC Payphone at St Peter’s Primary School in Partick with pupils John McHugh and Linzie Boyle. His mission was to convince pupils of the senselessness of phone vandalism and the importance of payphones in an emergency.

Sam Grice of BT told the Evening Times: “He is certain to make a big hit with youngsters who are still at an impressionable age.”

It seems it was good cop, bad cop, as apart from PC Payphone, BT was also working with undercover police units to catch people vandalsing phone boxes.

Now of course you would have to explain to youngsters what a phone box was.

Still, perhaps they can claim that PC Payphone was a success as I imagine that phone box vandalism is probably at an all time low.

I kid you not, but the Evening Times reporter who wrote the story, left soon afterwards for a reporting job in Africa, and I wonder if she wandered the veld recalling the good old days interviewing chaps dressed as phones.