Britain after the atomic bomb: 40 years on, why Threads is more terrifying than ever

The BBC’s TV film showed the appalling aftermath of atomic war. It traumatised a generation – but did it also change nuclear policy?

As a sensitive – OK, pretentious – 14-year-old, I became obsessed by the prospect of nuclear war. This adolescent preoccupation was fuelled by a school science project, Greenham Common’s ubiquitous presence on the TV news and plentiful anti-bomb songs in the pop charts – the surprisingly dark likes of Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s Two Tribes, Nik Kershaw’s I Won’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me, Culture Club’s War Song and Nena’s 99 Red Balloons. 
And then, in autumn 1984, my teacher wheeled a teak-effect Grundig into the classroom to show us a VHS recording of Threads. Don’t have nightmares, kids. 
This unflinching two-hour docudrama about a nuclear bomb landing on Sheffield first aired on BBC Two at 9.30pm on 23 September 1984. It attracted 7m viewers, the channel’s highest ratings all week, and went on to win four Baftas, including Best Single Drama. It also entered TV folklore because it so traumatised viewers, it’s only been shown twice by the broadcaster since. 
Now it’s getting a timely rerun, along with a radio documentary asking why it continues to haunt viewers, four decades later. This weekend’s Archive on 4: Reweaving Threads, 40 Years On rummaged in the vaults to explore the film’s legacy and influence. With BBC Four is planning a rare TV airing next month, I decided to revisit it. Has Threads stood the test of time? Is it still as scary? And how did such a harrowing film get made and shown on terrestrial TV in the first place?
The grimly fascinating story of Threads dates back to 1965, when the BBC commissioned another infamous docudrama, The War Game, which examined the effects of a nuclear attack on Britain. Made for “The Wednesday Play” slot, it was deemed so disturbing that it was never screened. At the time, there were rumours the decision was due to pressure from Harold Wilson’s government – though these were firmly denied at the time by the BBC.
In a statement, the BBC insisted it was their own decision to pull the plug, and for one reason only: The War Game was simply “too horrifying for the medium of broadcasting”. There were genuine fears among BBC top brass that it would have caused mass suicides if aired. It was shown abroad, though, and even won an Oscar.
A decade later came the equally notorious “Protect and Survive” series – a collection of quietly terrifying public information films, advising Brits on what to do in the event of a nuclear attack. 
Animated by the makers of the “Charley Says” child safety ads and narrated by Patrick Allen – who would later provide similar vocal samples for Frankie’s Two Tribes (”Mine is the last voice you will ever hear. Do not be alarmed”) – these short films were intended to air only if the government deemed that war was imminent, However, Panorama broadcast them in 1980, shortly after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, despite such a move breaching the Official Secrets Act.
This leak, in turn, inspired two groundbreaking British films: When The Wind Blows, Raymond Briggs’ heartbreaking 1986 animated feature about an elderly couple during a nuclear attack; and two years earlier, the remorselessly realistic Threads. These two modest home-grown productions remain among the most haunting depictions of annihilation ever committed to celluloid.
Threads was commissioned, under working title Beyond Armageddon, by boldly controversial BBC Director-General Alasdair Milne after he rewatched The War Game and decided that two decades later, the time was right to tap into nuclear anxiety again. 
Director Mick Jackson was hired to helm the new film, partly due to his science background but mainly because he’d already made a 1982 documentary for the QED strand called “A Guide to Armageddon” – considered a breakthrough at the corporation because it finally banished The War Game’s ghost. 
“There was a deep sense of shame and betrayal at the BBC about banning The War Game,” recalls Jackson. “They’d yielded to pressure and it had become a toxic subject inside the corporation – but QED had dipped a toe back in the water and nobody had gone straight to hell.”
Jackson travelled around the UK and US, consulting leading scientists, psychologists, doctors, defence specialists and strategists, all in order to create the most truthful portrayal possible. He estimates that he interviewed 50 experts and read 40 textbooks.
“Back in 1983,” recalls Jackson today, “the world seemed such a dangerous place, with Reagan calling the USSR an ‘evil empire’ for shooting down that Korean airliner. Everyone was on tenterhooks, fearing the world was going to end, yet nobody understood the reality of nuclear weapons. Even military strategists like Herman Kahn were talking talking wildly about how we would prevail in a war and survive. They had no idea. 
“A scientist who’d worked on the Manhattan Project told me that he wished he could take these people out to the Nevada desert, strip them down to their briefs and make them watch a nuclear test. If they could feel that searing heat blister their skin, feel their lungs rolling around when the blastwave hit their ribcage, that might sober them a little bit. I thought, well, maybe there’s another way to do that. I’d realised when making QED that the way to truly communicate the psychological and social effects of nuclear war was to turn it into human drama.”
Sheffield was chosen as the film’s location because it was bang in the middle of Britain and, ironically, because of the city’s “nuclear-free zone” policy. Its industrial base and the proximity of a NATO base at RAF Finningley also made Sheffield a potential nuclear target. 
Jackson hired Barry “Kes” Hines to write the script because of his Yorkshire roots and uncompromising politics. “The idea was to combine what I knew about nuclear war and what Barry knew about people,” says Jackson. “Together we could make something with real impact.”
He and Hines spent a week at the Civil Defence College at nearby Easingwold, home to the training centre for “official survivors”. According to Hines, it shocked them with just “how disorganised post-war reconstruction would be”. The pair renamed the film Threads in reference to the “inter-personal and socio-economic connections that hold civilisation together”, noting that these threads were strong yet vulnerable, like spiders’ webs, and worryingly prone to unravelling.
The documentary-style format of Threads was influenced by its American equivalent, The Day After – a glossy, star-studded ABC telemovie about a similar scenario in Kansas. It was watched by a record-breaking 100m people but Jackson was dismayed by its sanitised approach. 
“The Day After came out while we were in pre-production on Threads,” he says. “It was just another genre of disaster movie, like The Tower Inferno or The Poseidon Adventure for nuclear war. I thought it was bland. They’d blown their chance, missed an opportunity. The traditional TV movie is too insubstantial a form to hold the seriousness of the subject. It made me determined to shock people with the savagery and full horror. I felt it was my responsibility.”
In The Day After, Jason Robards’ dashing doctor treats victims in a well-lit, well-equipped hospital. “There’s no destruction anywhere,” says Jackson. “It gives the impression that everything’s under control – whereas in reality, it would be the opposite. So in Threads, Sheffield General Hospital is chaos. People are having their legs sawn off without anaesthetic, biting on rags. There’s no electricity and s–t on the floor. Nurses are trying to make antiseptic by tipping sacks of Saxa salt into buckets of water. That seemed the right way to go – make it hard to watch, not sugarcoat anything.”
Much to Hines’ chagrin, Jackson broke up the drama with factual captions, narration, stock footage and snippets of the Protect & Survive films, determined to emphasise the film’s scientific credentials and make it painstakingly accurate.
Shot in 17 days on 16mm film for just £250,000 (one-twentieth of The Day After’s budget), Threads took ingenuity and community spirit to make. Auditions for extras were advertised in the local press and held in the ballroom of Sheffield City Hall. Over a thousand hopefuls turned up, many of them CND supporters, having been told to “look miserable and wear ragged clothes”. 
“The council were extremely helpful,” recalls Jackson. “They had this estate of terraced, redbrick houses due for demolition and agreed to hold off for a few weeks so we could demolish it for them. We blew it up and set fire to it. That’s how we got lots of footage.”
Make-up for burns victims was a mix of Rice Krispies, Bran Flakes, gelatine and tomato ketchup. For a scene when a mother has to bite through her newborn baby’s umbilical cord, it was made out of liquorice. Each day on-set, a blowtorch was taken to washing lines hung with costumes, to give them a scorched, tattered look. Rural scenes were shot in the Peak District, with fake snow spread around to resemble a nuclear winter and filters on cameras to block out the sunlight. 
The resulting film has lost little of its devastating power. Sure, some of the trimmings have dated. Youngsters assemble Airfix models, listen to brick-size personal stereos and play with Rubik’s Cubes. Terry Wogan’s chat show is on TV and the News Of The World (remember that?) delivers doom-and-gloom headlines. Down the pub, it’s pints of bitter for the men, Babychams for the ladies. Housewives panic-buy groceries at Gateway. Woolworths gets blown to pieces.
Even so, it viscerally conveys the catastrophic impact that nuclear would have on humanity. Taglined “The end of the world as we know it” and “The closest you’ll ever want to come to nuclear war”, Threads is a no-holds-barred look at the long-term effects on civilisation. 
It begins like a kitchen sink drama, following the blossoming relationship between middle-class Ruth (Karen Meagher) and her builder boyfriend Jimmy (Reece Dinsdale). Discovering Ruth’s unplanned pregnancy, the couple plan their wedding and start doing up their first flat. In stark contrast to this everyday domesticity, destructive global events are bubbling away in the background, with glimpses of newspaper headlines (including the Telegraph) and TV bulletins revealing that a military confrontation in Iran is bringing American vs Soviet tensions to a head.
It takes 46 tense minutes for the bomb to fall. In all, 3000 megatons are exchanged, with 210 megatons falling on Britain, claiming immediate casualties of around 6m. Two of the warheads drop on Sheffield. There are air raid sirens and earth-shaking blasts, until a toxic mushroom cloud looms over the city. Windows implode. Flames engulf the streets. Volatile gases roll through the dust-filled sky. Jimmy is last seen running from his stalled car in a desperate attempt to reach Ruth. The fact that he’s never seen again is bleakly matter-of-fact. 
Happy THREADS day. pic.twitter.com/hb1tRFGqMV
The film made a virtue of its budgetary limitations by focusing on devastating details. “I wanted to leave a series of indelible images in people’s heads,” says Jackson. “We didn’t have the money for state-of-the-art special effects and big fireballs, so I went the opposite route.” 
The camera lingers on upturned prams, pets dying and severed limbs lying amid the rubble. Milk bottles melt in the heat. A urine puddle forms at the feet of a terrified woman. There’s a burned cyclist up a tree. Charred corpses litter the streets. Shellshocked mothers cradle their dead children. 
Perhaps most chillingly, then comes the silence. The rest of the film takes place in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, where frequently the only sound is whistling wind. Threads was the first film of its kind to depict the brutal reality of a nuclear winter, documenting the medical, economic, social and environmental consequences.
“Some of Threads looks old-fashioned now,” admits Jackson. “There are no cellphones, no CNN, no internet. Yet you feel the fear creeping up on you. And once the bomb drops, you forget you’re looking at the Eighties because nothing that happens after that would be any different today. If a nuclear warhead goes off anywhere near you, it won’t matter if it’s 1984 or 2024, whether you’re in Sheffield, Seoul or Seattle – what nuclear weapons do hasn’t changed. It’s just the laws of physics.”
Hence we watch in horror as radiation sickness engulfs the obliterated city. Survivors cough and vomit their way to a grim death. Martial law comes into operation. In a desperate bid to avoid starvation, there is widespread looting. Impromptu courts are set up to punish the perpetrators by shooting or hanging. There are lethal outbreaks of cholera, dysentery and typhoid. A lack of shelter leads to hypothermia. Cataracts result from the ultraviolet sunshine. Incidences of cancer rise. 
Heavily pregnant Ruth is forced to feast upon the raw, contaminated corpse of a sheep. She graphically gives birth to a daughter, Jane (Victoria O’Keefe), in an abandoned barn, then struggles to raise her in a world where harvests are blighted, technology is non-existent, money is useless and rats are the main source of protein. There’s virtually no dialogue by now, as language breaks down and scrabbling survivors communicate with primitive grunts.
Fallout is traced via on-screen statistics and the clipped tones of Paul Vaughan’s factual narration, calmly announcing that the UK population has fallen to “medieval levels” of less than 10m. Prematurely aged Ruth eventually keels over and dies while working in a field. Teenage Jane is raped and has her own baby. When she lets out a blood-curdling scream upon sight of the infant, the inference is that it’s dead and deformed from a generation of radioactivity.
It all confirms one CND activist’s speech at an earlier peace rally, arguing that nobody can win a nuclear war. “What exactly would Russia be winning?” she asks the crowd. “Well, I’ll tell you. All major centres of population and industry would have been destroyed. The soil would have been irradiated. Livestock would be dead, diseased or dying. The Russians would have conquered a corpse of a country.”
As the credits rolled, the nation was left in shock. Threads was unlike anything seen before or since. Jackson recalls that BBC productions would usually be followed by phonecalls of congratulations from friends and colleagues but no such calls came this time.  
“There was total silence,” he chuckles. “Absolutely nothing. I thought, ‘What the hell have I done?’ I later realised that people had just sat by their TVs, thinking about it, not being able to talk or go to bed. It was like a bucket of cold water in your face.”
He received a hand-written letter of praise from Labour leader Neil Kinnock the day after broadcast, reading: “I’d like to thank you and everyone involved in the making of Threads for your important and impressive work. The story must be told time and time again until the idea of using nuclear weapons is pushed into past history.” The letter still hangs framed on Jackson’s wall. 
Jackson also has it on good authority that President Reagan watched the film when it aired on US cable. “Secretary of State George Schultz and his senior aides definitely saw it,” says Jackson. “I don’t believe a TV movie can affect much on its own, but it can be part of a cumulative wave that changes the political climate. It’s likely to affect public support for mutually assured destruction and nuclear deterrents. People start thinking ‘Do we want to slip unwittingly down this road?’ Within a few years, Reagan and Gorbachev were signing the Arms Reduction Treaty.”
Apart from Dinsdale and Meagher, the largely unknown cast returned to obscurity. Hines died in 2016. Jackson, now 80, went onto make prescient political drama A Very British Coup for Channel 4, then relocated to Hollywood, where he still makes blockbuster movies and Emmy-winning dramas. It’s surprising to think that the same man directed Threads and cheesy Nineties romance The Bodyguard, starring Kevin Costner and Whitney Houston.
Threads was repeated in 1985, as part of a week of programming marking the 40th anniversary of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. It didn’t appear again on British screens until BBC Four broadcast it in 2003. A few years ago, a mass viewing – hashtagged #ThreadDread on Twitter – was organised by journalist and nuclear threat specialist Julie McDowall, who has long campaigned for the BBC to screen it again. Now she’s finally getting her wish.
 Is Threads still as terrifying now as it was back then? Undoubtedly yes. It also seems just as relevant, in a world where conflicts in Russia, China and the Middle East threaten to spiral out of control, and the Doomsday Clock edges closer to midnight. 
“I didn’t rewatch Threads for 30-odd years but occasionally checked in online to see if it had been forgotten,” says Jackson. “I was amazed how many people had watched it and left YouTube comments saying it was the most frightening thing they’d ever seen. I hope it was. That was the whole intention. And I think we’re back there now, living in a state of dread and denial. The world feels dangerous again.”
As long as nuclear weapons remain a reality and war casts a shadow of fear, Threads will lose none of its explosive power.
Reweaving Threads, 40 Years On is available on BBC Sounds; Threads will air on BBC Foiur on Wednesday 9 October at 10.15pm, preceded at 10pm by an introduction from director Mick Jackson