Threads – box set review
Easily one of the most harrowing things ever to air on television, Threads is an unremittingly bleak and entirely plausible account of nuclear war and its aftermath. The BBC docudrama, broadcast in 1984 when nuclear paranoia was at its peak, takes its title from the notion that society – the everyday world we take for granted – is held together by mere threads, not unbreakable bonds. And when they go, the result is total collapse.
Written by Barry Hines, whose A Kestrel for a Knave was turned into the 1969 Ken Loach film Kes, Threads is presented as a social-realist drama about a young Sheffield couple, Ruth and Jimmy, as they prepare for married life following an unplanned pregnancy. While they and their families go about their unremarkable business, background news bulletins provide glimpses of an escalating crisis.
Tensions between the US and the Soviet Union eventually reach boiling point. With US fighter jets stationed at a nearby Nato base, Sheffield becomes a nuclear target. Panic ensues as warnings are issued: excerpts from the government's ludicrously optimistic Protect and Survive public information films ("Wear rubber gloves while outside") enhance the documentary feel. And then 200 megatons of nuclear explosives go off over Britain, killing between 2.5 million and 9 million people instantly. Soon, the living are envying the dead.
Dialogue gradually recedes as the film progresses: the shattered survivors are simply too numb to communicate. Instead, we're left with a procession of unforgettable images: melting milk bottles; writhing cats; grilled corpses; a traumatised mother cradling her dead baby; Ruth devouring a raw, frozen sheep; a man offering her dead rats to eat in exchange for sexual favours; a leg being amputated without anaesthetic in a hospital awash with blood, vomit and screaming people; a new generation of feral, radiation-damaged children staring blankly at a crackly video of BBC educational programme Words and Pictures. On and on it goes: the most advanced weapons ever created have bombed Britain back to the middle ages.
Watching it on DVD today (yes, it's not technically a box set) is no less gut-wrenching, even if the threat of nuclear war has somewhat abated – or at least one between the US and Russia. Director Mick Jackson works wonders on a modest budget as he follows the heavily pregnant Ruth through this endless nuclear winter. Having carried out detailed research via such leading scientists as Carl Sagan, Hines and Jackson were the first to use drama to depict this scenario. Their goal was to confront viewers with the true scale of nuclear devastation. "It seemed that people weren't able to visualise the unthinkable, especially politicians," said Jackson. "So I thought that if I acted this out for them as a television drama – not as a spectacle or disaster movie – that would give them a workable visual vocabulary."
It seemed to succeed. Shaken viewers were largely supportive. Hines received a letter of praise from the then Labour leader Neil Kinnock – and Jackson claims that even President Ronald Reagan requested a private screening. By imagining its destruction, did Threads save the world?