It was a terrifying television film but I couldn’t stop watching. A bomb had exploded followed by a mushroom cloud rising above the city. That was shocking but the aftermath was terrifying, how quickly everything disintegrated and fell apart, and how no one came to rescue the survivors, they were just left alone in this burned world. I watched it all on my own.
It was Sunday evening, 23rd September 1984, and I was eighteen. I was sat watching my portable television in my bedroom. It was my most beloved possession because I could watch whatever television programs I wanted to without my father’s criticism or censorship. That evening neither of my parents would have wanted to watch or approve of the television film on BBC 2. But I wanted to watch it. I enjoyed the television films and plays on BBC 2, they were different and interesting, on subjects I knew so little about, but they were also such good television dramas.
I’d heard about Threads, it had been on the cover of that week’s Radio Times, it was about a nuclear attack on Britain. This was the height of the Cold War, many people were talking about nuclear war, and right-wing politicians were speaking loudly about a “survivable nuclear exchange.”
Threads scared me that night, it exposed the lie of the survivable nuclear war, in such a terrifying way, and it left lasting images in my memory. Images that I would draw upon whenever someone else would talk about a survivable nuclear war, that great lie. I was afraid of nuclear weapons before watching Threads, how could one weapon kill so many people, but after watching it, I was terrified of them.
But that was forty years ago and I was a very impressionable eighteen-year-old. Had Threads been so bad? Was it so terrifying? Did it still stand up now?
To mark the fortieth anniversary of its original broadcast, the BBC repeated it on 9th October 2024, on BBC Four and can still be viewed on BBC iPlayer.
I watched it again, the following Tuesday morning, via BBC iPlayer, as I did our weekly ironing. I’m forty years older now and not easily shocked. As a former healthcare professional, I know what radiation can do to the human body. This is a forty-year-old film, made on a shoestring budget (£400,000 at the time), so how scary could the special effects be?
Forty years later, Threads shocked and then terrified me, all over again, but also for different reasons.
Threads starts out as a kitchen-sink drama, it was written by Barry Hines. It follows a young Sheffield couple, Jimmy and Ruth, as they prepare for their wedding, she’s pregnant, and his working class family will meet her middle class one. Ruth has morning sickness, Jimmy argues with his workmates, and they go to the pub together in the evening. In the background, there are heightened international tensions between the West and Russia which are reaching boiling point, but this is only shown as newspaper and television headlines, hardly effecting the main characters.
Suddenly, the British government declares a national emergency, closing motorways, emptying hospitals and placing the army out on the streets. Then, mid-morning, a nuclear bomb hits Sheffield. An EMP pulse disables all electronics, including cars, a shockwave destroys buildings in a wide radius, which is followed by a firestorm which sets almost everything on fire. This kills thousands of people in Sheffield, killing most of the film’s characters. The only one left alive is a pregnant Ruth, who wonders, shell-shocked, through the ruins of the city. But no one comes to her rescue. The hospitals are overrun and falling to pieces, leaving Ruth to eventually give birth, alone in a barn, to a baby daughter, Jane.
A year later and the world is living under a Nuclear Winter, which has blocked out the sunlight, killing any attempt to plant crops and causing freezing temperatures all year round. This causes millions more people to die and the only currency now is food. If survivors can’t work, mostly tending to the land, then they starve. Britain is under harsh military rule, looters and other transgressors are shot on sight. In this world, Ruth and her baby daughter struggle to survive.
Ten years later, the Nuclear Winter has lifted but Britain is now a feudal society, with a population of four million, the same as during the medieval period. Ruth looks like an elderly woman, her hair white and her body broken by fatigue, not like a woman in her mid-thirties. She and Jane work on a farm, growing crops by hand. But Ruth dies in her sleep, leaving Jane alone. Jane scavenges and loots to stay alive but becomes pregnant when a boy, who acted as her friend, rapes her. Eventually, in a makeshift hospital with an elderly nurse, Jane gives birth but her baby is grossly deformed because of the radiation.
The film ends with Jane’s horrified expression, seeing her baby for the first time.
Threads strength is its storytelling, it takes known facts and presents them through the lives of its characters and what happens to them. It also takes its time to tell its story, at the beginning. The nuclear bomb doesn’t hit Sheffield until a quarter of the way into the film. This gives us the chance to become involved in the lives of Ruth and Jimmy, and their respective families. We know and care about these people. But this film isn’t about a plucky group of survivors.
The nuclear bomb and its aftermath kills nearly all of the characters, leaving only Ruth alive and its through her eyes we are shown most of the effects of the war.
This film is about how quickly a nuclear war doesn’t just destroy buildings and kills millions of people, but it destroys our very society, leaving behind a world that is nearly impossible to live in. Here, the nuclear bomb sweeps away all of the city’s infrastructure. There are no fire engines left to fight the fires, no relief workers to come and help the survivors, food and medical supplies run out and survivors have to cope on their own with their injuries and the radiation sickness.
Marshall law is soon imposed and never lifted. Here there is no fight for freedom, only a fight for survival. But this film, unlike other apocalyptic films, doesn’t end a week or so after the disaster, as the survivors start to rebuild their world. This film looks at the future that a nuclear war would give us. The nuclear winter that kills nearly as many as the war. But most shocking was its depiction of how our society would never recover from the war, devolving into a near feudal state. The most shocking part is its portrait of the first generation after the bomb, without a society to support and develop them, their speech has devolved to monosyllabic words. They don’t speak in sentences; they just shout their needs using one or two words.
Tonally, Threads adopts a very documentary approach, muted colours, a narrator informs the viewers of different events unfolding, only adding to its authenticity. The narration is voiced by Paul Vaughan, who narrated many documentaries at the time, and the newsreaders are played by Lesley Judd and Colin Ward-Lewis, already known as television presenters and announcers. This also adds to the authenticity.
What can Threads offer an audience now?
The special effects here are not up to modern standards but they used sparingly and Threads small budget made for much more imaginative direction. A lot of shots are close on the actors, showing the emotional effect of the drama. Threads strength is its emotional drama, showing the toll this war takes on the people here. It provides some horrifying images, that stick in the mind long after watching it. The woman wetting herself at the sight of the mushroom cloud. The burnt bodies in the rubble of the city. The food store being guarded by men in uniform, as starving survivors are held behind an iron fence. One of these guards is dressed in a traffic warden’s uniform, the most benign of jobs, his face covered and carrying a machine gun (the extra playing that part was a traffic warden in real life). The most shocking images came from the section ten years after the war, the images of a society almost completely destroyed.
Threads is still a disturbing film, but what its most disturbing is not its portrayal of the physical damage a nuclear war would cause, but how a nuclear war will destroy our society and we may never recover from it.
Watch Threads here on BBC iPlayer.
Drew