Threads: The Film That Frightened Me at 18 and Still Scares Me Now

 

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, 23^rd 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

These Three Films.

 

Three films that helped shape my queer identity, but not at the same time or even in the same way.

Films and books have always been important to me, and growing up they provided me with so much information and many times shaped how I thought and saw myself. I grew up in the 1970s and 1980s and there was so little information or help about being gay, that I could find, so I turned to novels and films for my help and education.

So many times, films have given me an insight into how others see and view a subject. Also, films are immediate, I can watch them in ninety or a hundred minutes (occasionally longer). It takes me so much longer to read a book. I can lose myself, in a good film, for an hour or so, before returning to the world around me.

Growing up, three films marked important moments in my own queer life. They reflected how my life seemed at the time of viewing, or how I wanted my life to be. These are the three films.

[Spoiler alert, I discuss the plots of the three different films]

 

Victim (1961)

Barrett, a handsome young man, is on the run. He has stolen a large sum from his employer to pay off a blackmailer and to protect the man he loves, barrister Farr. But Farr is the first man to reject his plea for help, so do all the other men he turns to for help. Barrett ends up hanging himself in a police cell. Only after his death does Farr realise the young man was trying to protect him and reluctantly agrees to help catch the blackmailers.

Though it was produced as an argument for the legalisation of homosexuality, this film paints a grey portrait of gay life as lonely, bleak and loveless, and open to be the victims of heartless blackmailers.

It was 1982 and I was sixteen. My greatest possession was my tiny, black and white, portable television. I still lived with my parents, but that television meant I could watch it in my bedroom, away from my father’s control of the television’s remote control and my mother’s disapproval. That little television meant I could watch what I wanted, and I did.

That Friday night, BBC 2 broadcast the 1960’s film Victim, starring Dirk Bogarde. It started late at night, and I watched it in fascinated horror. Suddenly I was watching gay life being portrayed on the television screen. Then there was so little portrayal of queer life on television and what there was always portrayed gay in such a negative light. But I watched that film, intensely, following every scene of it. Was this the life I had to look forward to?

At sixteen, I could barely acknowledge to myself I was gay, I had told no one what I feared I was, and certainly not had my first boyfriend, that was still years away. But this film did nothing to change that. Victim was unrelentingly bleak. A young gay man, at the beginning, was in deep trouble and no one, none of the other gay men he approached, offered him any help, they all left him alone and ultimately killing himself in desperation. Was this the life I had to look forward to? Or was it the life of the film’s hero, married to a woman to pass as straight, but in the end losing it all when he’s exposed as gay.

I didn’t like what I saw but I feared that would be the life that lay ahead of me. I didn’t know any other way to be gay because that was the only life I was told there was. Why couldn’t I just be normal?

I found sleep difficult that night. I couldn’t shake the nightmare life of what that film told me would be mine.

The next day, sat on the backseat of my father’s car with my parents sat in the front, my mother asked me, “Did you watch that film, last night, with Dirk Bogarde?”

“No,” I hurriedly replied. How could I admit to watching a film like that to my parents? To do so was only one step away from admitting I was gay, and I couldn’t face doing that then.

My parents carried on discussing the film, in pitying tones, as I tried to sink down within myself, on the car’s backseat, and our pet dog slept away next to me.

[Dirk Bogarde, the star of this film, with his matinee idol good looks, was also a deeply closeted gay man, who never came out in his lifetime]

 

Parting Glances (1986)

Robert and Michael are a gay couple, living in 1980s New York. Robert is about to go and work in Africa, leaving Michael behind to wait for him. Set over Robert’s last 24 hours in New York, it follows the couple as they prepare for Robert’s departure, attend a farewell party and as Michael cares for his ex-boyfriend, Nick, who is living with AIDS.

ABC Piccadilly Circus was a subterranean cinema, just off Piccadilly Circus. I bought my ticket at the street level entrance, and then walked down two flights of stairs to reach the cinema’s single screen. This always felt so luxurious and different, actually walking downstairs to see a film, especially for a matinee showing.

It was 1988 and I was twenty-two years old. I had moved to London the year before, to live on my own and come out as gay. I’d had my first boyfriend, though it didn’t last long, and finally come out to my parents. I now worked in social care and was enjoying having days off during the week. It didn’t matter that I worked the weekend, I was so terminally single.

London offered me so much cultural life and I was eating it up as fast as I could. I saw plays, visited art galleries, heard authors read from their work, and saw a lot of films. Also this was the first wave of queer cinema and there were so many small and middle budget queer films for me to enjoy.

I’d read a couple of reviews of Parting Glances and it sounded interesting. So that midweek afternoon I went to see it, playing at this quirky cinema, off Piccadilly Circus.

I settled down in the rather tatty old cinema seat, as the lights dimmed, I started to watch Parting Glances, and it swept me along with its quirky and left-of-centre story and characters.

Here I was presented with a happy and handsome gay couple, but who faced a challenge, being apart for two years. Could I handle that? If I had a boyfriend then I wouldn’t want to give him up, I’d be broken if he left me for two years to work abroad. I was wrapped up in the story of this couple, struggling in the face of being parted for so long. This wasn’t a scenario I’d seen before. I’d already seen enough films, well several of them, were the gay couple were having problems and would eventually split-up, especially when one partner was being unfaithful. But here was a couple who loved each other but were facing a situational problem, a problem I’d seen straight couples facing in films and drama before. This film presented a different and refreshing portrait of a gay couple.

Around them were a collection of different characters, including a gay man married to a woman, and she knew he was gay, and a man living with AIDS. He was living with AIDS, facing the problems of his diagnosis, but not dying from it. There were no scenes of him lying in a hospital bed, looking like a living corpse.

The characters in this film were quirky and fun, and felt real. Real people with real problems.

But it was the ending that left the deepest impression on me. There was no gay tragedy. The gay couple didn’t split up and the man with AIDS didn’t die. The couple stayed together, the man with AIDS was alive as the film ended. This was the opposite of so many queer dramas I’d seen, up to that point.

At twenty-two, I still harboured that internalised homophobia that somehow my gay sexuality wasn’t as good as if I was straight. I expected my relationships to fail and AIDS was that danger lurking around the corner for me. But here I was being presented by the opposite. Here was a gay couple who stayed together and a man with AIDS who was living with it, not dying from it.

I left the cinema and returned to the bright spring afternoon. Could I make a film for myself were I managed to stay together with a boyfriend? I walked to the underground station. I wanted a relationship, I didn’t want to be single, but so many gay men I’d met, in London, were single too. Could I make a relationship work, if I could find someone?

That was my struggle, I wanted a relationship, but everything I’d experienced, growing up, told me being gay was wrong and gay relationships didn’t last. But I had just watched the portrayal of a gay relationship that did work and looked like it would last. I couldn’t shift the thought from my mind.

Parting Glances has become one of those films I return to, over and over again, and still enjoy. I have a tired, old video copy of it that I still watch, every year or so, and I still enjoy it and the gay couple still remain together at the end.

 

The Adventures of Priscilla Queen of the Desert (1994)

Three drag queens, two gay men and a trans woman, take a road trip to Alice Springs, in the heart of Australia, to take up a booking to perform as the cabaret at a resort there, managed by one of the gay men’s estranged lesbian wife. Like all great road movies, it’s the adventures they have and the friendships they make along their journey that makes this movie, plus the great one-liners.

It was 1994 and I was twenty-eight. I was in a room full of other gay men, on the last day of my holiday, we were watching a showing of The Adventures of Priscilla Queen of the Desert and we were laughing. But we were all laughing and at every joke. There wasn’t my odd laughter at the very gay jokes, suddenly outing myself in a cinema audience as one of the few, or only one, who understood those jokes. Here I didn’t have to worry, everyone else got those jokes too.

For the last week I had been on my first gay holiday, but it wasn’t a typical gay holiday, whatever that is. This was run by The Edward Carpenter Community and was dedicated to community-building, creativity, personal growth, friendship and fun for gay men. It might sound very lofty ideals but in reality it was a very relaxing holiday for me. Myself and about forty other gay men had spent the week in a holiday center, in the Scottish countryside. There were workshops, fun events, sports, a dress-up dinner, evening entertainment, a cabaret night and even drag volleyball. It was the opposite environment to the London gay bars and night clubs I’d been frequenting in my endless and depressingly negative search for a boyfriend. Suddenly I was holidaying in a very relaxed environment, were my sexuality wasn’t an issue and neither was my appearance, I didn’t have to comply with the latest ideals of fashion, which I rarely did.

I didn’t have to work at being liked, people there just liked me, and there was no pressure to couple-up and pair off, if I went to bed on my own then that wasn’t a failure. Suddenly being gay wasn’t the main thing about me, I could relax back into the other facets of my personality. I could explore my creativity without any embarrassment, without someone questioning who did I think I was doing that.

I even had a holiday romance with a Scottish man called Bill. A man I would not have normally met. But I also knew it was only for a handful of days, a holiday romance, and I wasn’t chasing after the impossible.

I’d had a relaxing week’s holiday, away from the stress and unnatural sites of my job, and for the first time in my life, being gay wasn’t an issue, wasn’t something I had to tell people, wasn’t the defining thing about me.

Now, on our last night, we were watching The Adventures of Priscilla Queen of the Desert together. We were watching it as one audience, all laughing at the same jokes, all enjoying the musical moments, all moving along with the story. Watching this film captured the feeling of community I had been enjoying all week, and Bill and I were curled together watching it. It also helped that this film was a joyous celebration of being queer and different, but it wasn’t angst laden, no one was sad-to-be-gay, no one died at the end, though the jokes were very gay and rude.

The next day, we would all leave and return to our ordinary lives, but that evening we were joined together in the enjoyment of this very gay film. I was enjoying myself.

[Unfortunately, some elements of this film haven’t aged as well as others. None of the three leads had any previous experience of performing drag, a trans woman character is played by a cis gendered man and this character is dead-named for a crude joke.]

 

Now.

Victim is deeply homophobic and negative, and deeply uncomfortable to watch. It was considered forward-thinking, in the early sixties, but it scared me, in the early eighties. I didn’t want to live that life. But it also reflected my own homophobia then, I wasn’t ready for a positive ending.

Parting Glances was a breath of fresh air, focusing on the characters’ stories and giving me a refreshing portrait of a gay couple and a man living with AIDS. I only saw it six years after seeing Victim, but my life and queer identity were already changing and growing, and Parting Glances inspired me to want more.

The Adventures of Priscilla Queen of the Desert is a glorious celebration of being queer and different. It caught that moment in my life where I was finally enjoying being gay and moving forward with my life.

I now live with my husband in East London. But a good film is more than just a film; it can mark an important point in my life, and it has done so many times.

 

Drew

  

The picture illustrating this blog is Red velvet cinema seats in row by Moinul Hassn, find more of their pictures here