#42 The Horror and Resonance of Threads

Revisiting the BBC's nuclear war nightmare 41 years after its first broadcast

Fear eats the soul

In a classic episode of The Simpsons from the mid-Nineties, Bart gets into an argument about the soul with his friend Milhouse. Bart won’t be persuaded that the soul is real, and to show how serious he is, agrees to sell his to Milhouse. But soon, a series of strange happenings convince Bart that the soul is real after all, and he becomes desperate to get his back. Noticing his anxiety one night, Marge hugs him, then says, “Hmm, it’s not fear of nuclear war.”

By this time, 1995, World War Three had receded as a realistic prospect and the fear of it could be played for End-of-History laughs. But the joke only worked because many of those watching would’ve remembered those years, the early to mid-Eighties, when there’d been real reason to fear nuclear war. That had been a period of renewed Cold War hostilities, in Afghanistan, Europe, Central America and elsewhere. Back then the Reagan administration was very much on the offensive against “the evil empire”. In response to the Soviets replacing their older, less accurate and silo-based intermediate-range nuclear missiles with the new SS-20, a road-mobile missile which was much harder to target, the United States was in the process of deploying nuclear cruise missiles at several sites in Europe. Whatever the justice of the US move it was met with fierce protests, such as that at RAF Greenham Common: Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament protestors, almost exclusively women, established a “peace camp” at the base that would persist for years. The fears motivating the action were far from groundless. With their terrain-following flight, cruise missiles could, in theory, be used to launch a sneak attack (although this was also true, albeit to a lesser extent, with the ballistic SS-20s). The president’s Strategic Defense Initiative, which aimed at developing a futuristic space-based ICBM shield (and which, curiously, fringe political figure Lyndon LaRouche and his followers tried to claim credit for), was another threat to the delicate balance of terror.

In addition to all this, there were a number of dangerous international incidents. By far the most headline-grabbing was the 1983 shoot-down of Korean Air Lines Flight 007, of which there were no survivors. The Boeing 747, with 269 people on board (including 62 Americans), had strayed into a highly sensitive part of Soviet airspace, near a nuclear submarine base. And these were only the things the public knew about. Had it been privy to the information that Soviet forces were often at a high state of war readiness, had it known about the various near misses and false alarms of those years, then public concern would likely have reached panic levels.

I have a schoolboy memory from a little later, an afternoon in ‘86 or ‘87 — less fraught years, the period of Gorbachev and glasnost. I would’ve been ten years old. In my memory the classroom is bathed in autumn or spring sunshine. We’re calmly discussing nuclear war and underground nuclear bomb shelters with our class teacher. Somehow we kids know that, if the worst were to happen, the shelters would be for rich people and politicians, not for us.

Envisaging the end

Though by 1995 I think I’d still not seen it, some of those Simpsons fans might’ve remembered a shocking, politically charged movie that had captured the fearful zeitgeist of that earlier period. That was the made-for-TV war drama Threads, a film with decidedly fewer laughs than the average Simpsons episode. First broadcast on BBC Two on September 23rd, 1984, Threads was a serious attempt to imagine the unimaginable. The critical consensus is that it succeeded more fully than any other nuclear war drama before or since. But following the Cold War’s end the film, though well-regarded, came to be viewed as an historical curio, an exploration of now-obsolete fears. Few of us in 1995 suspected that within just a few decades Threads, and the handful of other films to tackle this subject (like Threads’ banned predecessor, The War Game, and ABC’s The Day After), would regain all their old relevance, as shock geopolitical developments in Eastern Europe gave the world every reason to fear nuclear war once again. Here in Poland, where a major Russian drone incursion occurred two months ago, ending with the shooting down of the unmanned aircraft by Polish and Dutch warplanes, many are resigned to the possibility of war with Russia in the coming years. Over 40 years after its first broadcast, then, Threads is once again essential viewing.

Though a British-Australian coproduction, Threads feels very much a British film, one in the country’s social realist tradition. There’s an element of kitchen-sink drama, at least early on, which makes the gradual transition to nightmare war movie all the more unsettling. The film is set in Sheffield, South Yorkshire’s biggest city. This county was the home turf of the film’s writer Barry Hines, known for the novel A Kestrel for a Knave as well as for the screenplay of its film adaptation Kes, considered one of the greatest contributions to the social realist genre. Hines, who died in 2016, was a native of mining village Hoyland, just outside Sheffield. Threads’ director Mick Jackson was hired on the strength of the BBC nuclear war documentary A Guide to Armageddon, produced by him for science series Q.E.D.

Although Sheffield was, by the mid-Eighties, well on its way to being a deindustrialised city, it was assumed such a large population centre would still be high on the Soviets’ list of targets, as it had been on the Luftwaffe’s during the Blitz — thus it was a plausible setting for Threads. The proximity of RAF Finningley made it doubly sure Sheffield and its environs would be hit in the event of a nuclear exchange, and most likely hit hard. Another factor recommended Sheffield to the filmmakers: the local Labour-run council was militantly anti-Thatcher and anti-nuclear, and so was happy to give the production every possible assistance.

Threads opens with a narrator — Paul Vaughan, then a familiar voice from many BBC arts and science programmes — delivering a very short monologue over a montage that intercuts shots of infrastructure (power lines, buses etc) with footage of a spider spinning its web:

“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.”

Hence the film’s title. Throughout the first half, Vaughan continues to chime in with quietly chilling facts about Britain’s real-life contingency plans for nuclear war, giving the production a docudrama feel. In the second half he eventually falls silent, as the imagery tells its own story.

Threads doesn’t really have a protagonist, rather it follows the fortunes of a number of characters. But the one we spend most time with is Ruth (Karen Meagher), a young working-class woman with much to look forward to at the outset. Having found out she’s pregnant, she’s relieved to learn her boyfriend Jimmy (Reece Dinsdale) is willing to do the decent thing. We see them preparing for married life with the blessing of their families. Here Hines delivers some barbed sociopolitical commentary: Jimmy and Ruth find it funny that Jimmy’s father’s redundancy money will have to go toward renovating a property for the young family-to-be. The elder man won’t be able to holiday in the Bermuda as he’d planned, but “will be glad for something to do”.

Interspersed with these domestic scenes are news reports on a major crisis beginning to unfold in the Middle East: a US-backed coup in Iran has prompted the Soviets to launch a full-scale invasion of that country. It seems significant that Hines has America precipitate events — an implicit condemnation of Reagan’s aggressive posture. As the crisis escalates towards an armed confrontation between the superpowers, the film shows war preparations ramping up at both national and local level. Sheffield’s head councillor is instructed to gather his team of wartime administrators: a handful of people who, if the balloon goes up, will be tasked with maintaining some semblance of a functioning society in whatever is left of the city. We’re told that many of these administrators will be learning of their roles for the first time, and that none of them will be entirely sure what their jobs are going to entail. As war looms, the team enter their nuclear bunker — which turns out to be the basement of city hall, hastily remade into a command post.

A further realistic touch is provided by the inclusion of the Protect and Survive public information films, the audio of which can sometimes be heard in the background. This series of PIFs was put together in the early Seventies by Richard Taylor Cartoons, who (somewhat surreally) also produced the Charley Says PIFs for children. Made as part of a wider government campaign that would also incorporate pamphlets, newspapers ads and radio broadcasts, Protect and Survive was only to be aired in the event the British government believed nuclear war likely in the next 72 hours. However, the series leaked in 1980 and extracts were broadcast on Panorama. The series instructs viewers on nuclear explosions, fallout, how to construct a shelter, ways to dispose of a body and so on. With their strange, stark visuals and eerie radiophonic sound effects it’s hard to imagine these very short films being at all reassuring, but maybe that was the point. They command attention, are disturbing and compelling. The ident and sound effects would’ve drawn distracted, worried Britons to their televisions. Like Charley Says and other everyday PIFs (all curiously unsettling these days), and, in a gentler register, Oliver Postgate’s various series, Protect and Survive was an example of what the late blogger Mark Fisher called “weird paternalism”, an aspect of late Sixties and Seventies social democracy that disappeared in the neoliberal era (unless Threads can be considered an unusual late example of it).

The Old Left eclipsed

Barry Hines’ work focused on left-wing, working-class and Northern concerns, and Threads touches upon these. As the Iran crisis escalates and widens we see protesters taking to the streets in a CND march (most of the film’s actors were in fact members). Days later there’s a moment of black humour as a speaker at a much more fraught protest calls for a general strike, as if that could have any effect whatsoever. It’s tempting to read the scene as a subtle comment on the eclipse of traditional Left-wing politics in an age dominated by the neoliberal Right.

Indeed, the whole film takes on added depth when viewed within that context. Now, Threads is by common consent one of the darkest films ever made. There’s a disturbing sense of logical inevitability about the way the world moves step-by-step toward the precipice. When, after progressively ratcheting up the tension, Threads shows us the actual attack, it is genuinely frightening. There are no heroics, only suffering and death, either instantaneous or slow. Later, the nuclear exchange having run its course, a stark computer readout informs us that 3000 megatons have been exploded globally, with 210 falling on Britain. Needless to say, the second half of Threads is not an easy watch. Many aspects of the grim postwar situation are explored: the hazards of radiation, the search for loved ones in the ruins, shortages of food and water, the collapse of law and order and the shooting of looters, the impossibility of treating the multitudes of sick and injured, the coming of nuclear winter. This last is somewhat controversial as there is no consensus on whether a sharp drop in temperature— caused by immense quantities of soot being injected into the stratosphere by firestorms — would actually occur.

The film also takes us some years into the future. Language is shown to have regressed to a primitive state, as in the post-apocalyptic world of Russell Hoban’s novel Riddley Walker. Almost everyone seems to be under eighteen, the clear implication being that no one lives very long anymore. Technology is at a near-medieval level.

However, I think the film’s darkness has its roots not only in the subject matter, but also in the dire situation all those opposed to Thatcherism found themselves in in 1983/84 (a situation analogous to the one dissidents contend with today). Labour had taken a hard-left turn under Michael Foot, a classic case of not reading the room — hard-left agitation was widely (and not unreasonably) blamed for the industrial strife Britain had been mired in for years. The centrist SDP-Liberal Alliance, newly formed as a compact between moderate ex-Labour Social Democrats and the Liberals, also stood against Thatcherism. Rather than the ”rolling back of socialism” the Thatcherites were enacting, the Alliance advocated a reform of British social democracy that would have brought it closer to the West German model (social market economy, proportional representation). Lastly, there were the Tory moderates, dismissed as “wets” by Thatcher and largely defeated by her in her first parliament.

By 1984 the Thatcherite revolution had been underway for five years; resistance to it had been largely ineffectual. The great dismantling of British social democracy was proceeding apace: disinvestment of industries, crushing of unions, rapid privatisations, selling off of social housing — all enacted according to the dogma that there was no such thing as society.

Thatcherism advanced the South’s interests at the expense of the North’s. Here is the late Ian Jack in his penetrating 1987 book Before the Oil Ran Out:

“Between December 1979 and September 1986 the number of people who worked in manufacturing industry declined by almost two million, from 7,053,000 to 5,128,000. Most of the jobs lost were in northern England, the West Midlands, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland; in fact ninety-four per cent of all jobs lost since 1979 were north of a line drawn between the Wash and the Bristol Channel. This is a new frontier, a successor to Hadrian’s Wall and the Highland Line. Above it, wealth and the population dwindle; beneath it, both expand. Of course the division isn’t absolute. Glasgow has Porsches and London poverty. Overall, however, it is difficult (I would say impossible) to avoid the conclusion that large parts of Britain and its population now serve no wider economic purpose than the service of themselves. For many people, their link with history - the functions and behaviour, morality and religion of their recent ancestors - has been snapped.”

The Conservatives were able to push this through because they dominated general elections throughout the Eighties. 1983’s ballot gave the Tories a colossal majority and Labour suffered its worst drubbing since 1931. The Alliance went from 9 to 23 seats — a promising result, but with potential coalition partner Labour in the wilderness both electorally and ideologically, it didn’t mean much. The Thatcherite wrecking ball was swinging and, for now, there was no one capable of stopping it. By the time the opposition got its act together it might well be too late. Many towns and cities throughout the country, but especially in the North, might have nothing to look forward to but terminal decline.

British and Brechtian

Revisited today, Threads startles with its stark modernist aesthetic and bleak, at times eerie mood. It completely lacks the music that mires so many of today’s docudramas in corniness. Barry Hines was reportedly at loggerheads with director Mick Jackson over the latter’s decision to include a narrator. Hines found Paul Vaughan’s narration to detract from the drama, but for me his contribution — delivering information on Britain’s lack of preparedness for nuclear war, the effects of radiation and so on — works superbly. Vaughan was a familiar voice from BBC arts and science programmes, so his lines lend additional authority to the film and, by tying it to a familiar and ”cosy” televisual world, makes it all the more disquieting.

Certain touches in Threads — the lack of heroism, the abrupt deaths of major characters, the wordless montages, the blunt facts delivered in cyan text on a black screen — add up to a Brechtian verfremdungseffekt (distancing or alienation effect). As in Brecht’s theatre, interpreting what is put before us in our usual clichéd, complacent ways is made impossible.

There’s a sense in which the film strikes even at the religious convictions then loudly professed by many in the radical conservative movement. Threads’ modernist vision of the universe is uncompromising: austere, matter-of-fact, devoid of metaphysical consolations. Even the Apocalypse, when it comes, appears to have no religious significance. The Rapture looked forward to by Evangelicals is nowhere to be seen. Life struggles on, but under massively worse conditions.

Docudramas (indeed films of any kind) as accomplished as Threads, so full of dark passion and righteous anger, are rare today. The gravity and urgency of the political situation inspired a superb late example of British cinematic modernism. The defenders of social democracy knew their world was disappearing, but faced an infinitely worse possibility besides: the destruction of the world, tour court. It’s clear this threat has in some measure returned — thanks to war or the threat of war in Eastern Europe, the Middle East and the Far East — but I have my doubts whether our governing or creative classes fully grasp what that means.

Able Archers

In 2022 I thought seriously about the possibility of nuclear war for the first time since my school days. For a few weeks that year some truly insane things were being proposed, such as a NATO-enforced no-fly zone in Ukraine. In September Putin declared his threat to use nuclear weapons if necessary was “not a bluff”. One of the messages of Threads is that any violent confrontation between nuclear-armed powers can very quickly spiral out of control.

That same year former US intelligence officer Brian J. Morra published The Able Archers, an account of the superpower confrontations of 1983 in the form of a novel. In the forward to that book Kevin Cattani, another intelligence professional and one who had personal involvement with those events, writes,

“It is my firm view that 1983 was the most dangerous year in human history.”

Morra recently noted worrying parallels between then and the present day:

“Today, as in 1983, open communication between Washington and Moscow is too rare. As of October 2022, Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin and his Russian counterpart, Minister of Defense Sergei Shoigu, have spoken only twice since the Feb. 24 invasion of Ukraine. History suggests more frequent contact would be prudent.”

Morra relates how President Reagan was shocked to learn, in 1984, that his by-then late Soviet counterpart, General Secretary Yuri Andropov, had strongly suspected Reagan of plotting his own Operation Barbarossa: a pre-emptive nuclear strike on the USSR. This alarming finding, uncovered by the CIA after the fact, contributed to Reagan’s decision to take a less belligerent approach to the Soviets.

No doubt the problem we face now is that the Cold War is distant enough that its lessons — well understood by the makers of Threads — are in the process of being forgotten. That threatens to make the future more dangerous even than that very tense four- or five-year period four decades ago.