Nuclear apocalypse never goes out of style. This year has seen the release of Fallout, the TV adaptation of the popular video game series. HBO’s Chernobyl was a huge hit in 2019. But, understandably, during the Cold War there was a bigger glut of programmes exploring the possible outcomes of nuclear war. There was Dr Strangelove, of course; 1966’s The War Game, which was considered so horrifying it was banned from airwaves until 1985; the 1986 Raymond Briggs animation When the Wind Blows; and there was Threads, in 1984.
I’d known about Threads for a while. It’s a TV film the BBC made about the events leading up to and following a nuclear bomb being dropped on Sheffield, written by Barry Hines, who also wrote the book on which the film Kes was based. It’s reputed to be one of the most unsettling television programmes ever broadcast.
The programme’s director, Mick Jackson, said in September that he still suffers from a form of PTSD from making Threads. “I would still have moments where that alternative reality would suddenly flash into my consciousness, as if I were actually there,” he said. Many of the extras who feature in the film, lots of them Sheffield locals rather than professional actors, have since spoken of the trauma of watching it when it was finished.
It had considerable cultural impact, both when it first aired and in the years since. The Labour leader at the time, Neil Kinnock, wrote to Hines to congratulate him for shining a light on the horrors of nuclear war. Charlie Brooker, who watched the programme at the tender age of 13, has cited it as a key influence on Black Mirror, and the film remains a cult classic.
For years, it was a little difficult to find. Threads was shown once on its original broadcast date, once a year later in 1985, and once in 2003. It has not been on streaming platforms, although is available on DVD, and you could also find grainy versions of it with large subtitles in eastern European languages by rooting through dodgy and broken links in Reddit threads. Even so, I’d never quite been motivated to go to this effort. Last month, however, for the first time in more than 20 years, the BBC aired Threads. That means it’s available on iPlayer for the next 11 months, too. As such, it’s come to the attention of a new generation of viewers. As I sat down to watch it, I braced myself for an unpleasant evening.
Last month, for the first time in more than 20 years, the BBC aired Threads
Part of the genius of Threads is that, for the first half-hour at least, it looks like a kitchen-sink drama. Ruth and Jimmy are unexpectedly having a baby and must break the news to their families. Their parents do the gardening, go to the shops, run their errands. The couple prepare for the baby’s arrival.
But all the while, in the background, the news is charting an escalating war. We see a woman working in a newsagent, a headline stating “Red Army tanks go on” ignored as she conducts her transactions. Vague news about the Soviet Union is heard on a radio as Jimmy feeds his pet birds. Gradually, it becomes clearer to the characters that something is coming. Emergency supplies are delivered to Jimmy’s little brother’s school and people begin to pay a little more attention to the news on the pub television. Still, though, nobody is taking the threat seriously. “There’s something going on, I’m telling you,” says Jimmy’s dad. “There’ll be something going on tonight, when I’ve had a few pints,” his son replies.
As the government issues warnings of a coming attack, what started slowly begins to happen very fast. People are stranded at airports as the country requisitions planes to get troops to Europe. Panic-buying starts. Some get in their cars to evacuate the urban area, others shake their heads at the overreaction. Public information films advise on what to do if somebody in your fallout shelter dies: move the body to another room for a maximum of five days, after which time you must venture outside to bury the body as quickly as you can.
It is 46 minutes into the film when the sirens announce an approaching bomb. Even government officials in an underground war room are taken off guard, not quite believing it is real. People run in panic on a high street, grabbing children, screaming. An explosion creates a mushroom cloud and a huge flash of light. People crash their cars. A woman pisses herself outside a department store in fear. A title card appears on the screen: “80 megatons fall on the UK. Blast casualties between 2.5 and 9 million.”
Then the blast reaches Sheffield. The sound cuts. Milk bottles melt. People are burning alive. A British Home Stores shop explodes. Entire tower blocks come down. Then the sound comes back: the howling of wind, crackling of charred corpses. Cats writhing in the rubble.
What follows in the second half of the film is difficult to get through. Surviving the initial attack proves to be a fate worse than death. There is no food distribution, no medical assistance, no communications, no water. Ruth sobs, thinking about what the radiation might be doing to her baby. She delivers her in a barn, alone and afraid, Jimmy having died in the attack. Nuclear winter begins. Typhoid, dysentery and radiation sickness run wild. People try, desperately, to keep going, however they can. It is so human, so lacking in melodrama.
At this point, some way into the attack’s aftermath, Threads goes in a different direction to so many other fictional representations of apocalypse. It is unflinchingly hopeless. A year after the attack, hungry, half-mad and broken people huddle under an old billboard. Rats are the only food available to them. People die in their millions from the cold.
Her baby is born, but something is wrong...
Then we skip forward to 10 years after the attack, when Ruth and her daughter are tilling barren land. Ruth collapses and dies. Ruth’s daughter is, it seems, raped by someone she had been stealing food with. Nine months later, she runs to a sort of makeshift medical centre. Ruth can’t speak as a child of her age should be able to, managing only to say, “Babby coming.” The woman there tells her, “We’ve no time for babbies.” Her baby is born, but something is wrong. The final shot is her holding her infant, and she takes a breath, but we don’t hear the scream. Then credits.
In Jenny Offill’s 2020 book Weather, a character who writes and speaks professionally about climate collapse feels she has to include an “obligatory note of hope” at the end of her work, or else lose her audience. Much fiction about disaster seems to operate similarly. Even something as sombre and devastating as HBO’s Chernobyl had its own small glimmer: the chemist Valery Legasov’s memoirs, recorded before his suicide, receive enough publicity to force the Soviet government to admit that there were fatal design flaws at Chernobyl and to retrofit other nuclear reactors.
There is truly nothing in Threads to spark hope. No groups of people banding together to make life on the wasteland of Britain a little easier for each other, no love stories that flourish in the wreckage, no tentative signs of life returning to the way it once was, even after many years.
Though I’m glad I’ve finally seen it, I will be glad never to see it again. It’s horrible. But I think there should be a place for hopelessness in fiction. Some scenarios are terrible, almost beyond human imagination. And though it feels bad, it’s probably good for us to at least try to imagine them in all their horror, if only for a couple of hours.
