In an urban society, everything connects.
Each person’s needs are fed by the skills of many others.
Our lives are woven together in a fabric, but the connections that make society strong also make it vulnerable.

On Sunday 23rd September 1984, the BBC broadcast a film called Threads. It opens with those words above. It’s possibly just about the grimmest film you’ll ever see in your life, and will potentially leave you pretty traumatised afterwards. It’s bleak, grim, depressing, realistic, meticulously researched, and unfortunately entirely possible.

It’s all about a nuclear war breaking out, and focuses on the horrific impacts on the city of Sheffield, with the plot driven through the lives of a young couple. The first part of the film covers the build up to the attack, through a deteriorating international situation, and then shows society unravelling completely after the attack. It’s left a lasting impression on everyone who saw it. Next month, the BBC will be showing it again for only the fourth time since it was made, and last night Radio 4 aired a really interesting documentary about the film and its legacy.

I was only ten years old when the film was aired, and I’m extremely grateful I didn’t see it at the time – I was a sensitive and deep-thinking kid, and I dread to think what effect it would have had on me. I saw it in the early 2000s, at the tail end of my twenties, when thankfully I was in a much better position to process what I was seeing. I got hold of a VHS recording of the BBC’s first airing of the film, with the introductory clip I’ve posted below. I actually watched it on a quiet night shift at work, back when I was a Duty Station Manager for London Underground. Perhaps appropriately, my office at the time was deep in the bowels of the earth, and had something of the atmosphere of a bunker about it.

The film was almost 20 years old by the time I saw it, although in some ways it looked older, as it was a classic example of low-budget BBC productions of the day – the whole thing was made in only 17 days on a tiny budget of £250k. However, what emerged was a docu-drama of astonishing power and impact, that will sear all sorts of powerful images into your brain forever, and really make you think about the macho posturing of international politics – and where it could all lead us.

The film was narrated extremely competently throughout by Paul Vaughan, who sounded incredibly familiar to viewers of the day as he featured very prominently in BBC documentaries and popular science programmes. Quite a few of the cast were familiar faces too – Reece Dinsdale has been very successful over the years, showing up in many BBC dramas, Rita May has been in a lot of successful shows including Children’s Ward, Trollied and Ackley Bridge, and Jane Hazlegrove, who played teenager Alison Kemp in the film, was in Casualty (and spinoff Holby City) for many years. Besides all of them, the city of Sheffield managed to pluck out hundreds of extras, all of whom contribute to such iconic moments as:

• Woman in the street urinates in shock as the mushroom cloud billows over a shopping centre in Sheffield;
• Shellshocked woman grimly rocks back and forth a very obviously dead and burnt-to-a-crisp baby;
• Nurses and doctors carry out surgery without any equipment or drugs, in absolutely horrific conditions, accompanied by agonised screaming;
• A group of children barely able to speak gather around an ancient VHS recording of an episode of Words and Pictures, as society desperately tries to keep functioning in the aftermath.

Featured in the film were extracts of the notorious Protect And Survive films, which would have been aired in the runup to a nuclear attack. They were made in 1975, and were technically an official secret at the time, but the BBC leaked parts of them in 1980 (brave move), and featured bits in Threads. Parts were played on the documentary last night, which sent a shiver down my spine as I realised I was listening to Protect And Survive, being broadcast live on the radio! I’d only previously ever seen or heard it via online sources on a modern device, but hearing it come out of the portable radio in my front room was a genuinely unnerving experience.

In case you’re feeling too cheerful, you can watch the whole lot on YouTube.

That voice will be instantly familiar to anyone of a certain age – it’s Patrick Allen, who narrated loads of stuff, and also featured in “Two Tribes” by Frankie Goes to Hollywood. Nuclear war inspired so many good songs and other forms of art.

Also note the utterly fucking terrifying synth jingle.

I can strongly recommend both the documentary, and – if you’ve got the stomach for it – the film. It’s extremely heavy going, but it’s an amazing piece of work that has stood the test of time, and had an astonishing impact on all who saw it, both at the time it was originally broadcast and in the years that followed. As someone who grew up with nuclear war being the extinction event du jour that we all feared, and as someone with a huge interest in Cold War history, it’s a film I love (if that’s an appropriate word). I’m glad it’s getting recognition for such a significant anniversary.

Here’s how Threads was introduced before it was aired.

Finally, here’s some iconic scenes from the film. Enjoy. Well, I say enjoy…