Threads (1984 film)

Threads
British DVD cover
Genre	Science fiction Drama War
Written by	Barry Hines
Directed by	Mick Jackson
Starring	Karen Meagher Reece Dinsdale
Country of origin	United Kingdom
Original language	English
Production
Executive producers	Graham Massey John Purdie
Producers	Mick Jackson Peter Wolfes
Cinematography	Andrew Dunn Paul Morris
Editors	Jim Latham Donna Bickerstaff
Running time	112 minutes
Production companies	British Broadcasting Corporation Nine Network Australia Western-World Television Inc
Budget	£400,000
Original release
Network	BBC
Release	23 September 1984 (1984-09-23)

Threads is a 1984 British apocalyptic war drama television film jointly produced by the BBC, Nine Network and Western-World Television Inc. Written by Barry Hines and directed and produced by Mick Jackson, it is a dramatic account of nuclear war and its effects in Britain, specifically on the city of Sheffield in Northern England. The plot centres on two families as a confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union erupts. As the nuclear exchange between NATO and the Warsaw Pact begins, the film depicts the medical, economic, social, and environmental consequences of nuclear war.

Shot on a budget of £400,000 (equivalent to £1,290,611 in 2023), the film was the first of its kind to depict a nuclear winter. It has been called "a film which comes closest to representing the full horror of nuclear war and its aftermath, as well as the catastrophic impact that the event would have on human culture." It has been compared to the earlier Academy Award-winning programme The War Game (1966) produced in the United Kingdom two decades prior and its contemporary counterpart The Day After, a 1983 ABC television film depicting a similar scenario in the United States. It was nominated for seven BAFTA awards in 1985 and won for Best Single Drama, Best Design, Best Film Cameraman, and Best Film Editor.

Plot

Soviet troop movements into Iran as shown in a clipping from The Observer early in the film (with occupied Afghanistan in red)

In the English city of Sheffield, young adults Ruth Beckett and Jimmy Kemp plan to marry after learning of Ruth's unplanned pregnancy. Meanwhile, an international crisis develops after the Soviet Union invades northern Iran in response to an American-backed coup in the country. The situation rapidly escalates with the sinking of the USS Los Angeles and American troop deployments in non-Soviet western Iran for protection of oil supplies as daily life in Sheffield continues, culminating in armed conflict breaking out between the two superpowers following a limited nuclear exchange in Mashhad after the expiry of an American ultimatum demanding joint withdrawal from Iran. News of the breakout of fighting spur British citizens into panic buying and looting, resulting in the enabling of emergency government powers across the UK for civil defence purposes. Officials of Sheffield City Council and many others across the nation hunker down in makeshift basement shelters to command the area should central government be destroyed, with many councillors being forced to leave their families behind. As Britain prepares for the possibility of nuclear war, society gradually destabilizes over the course of two days as panic buying, looting, and violent suppression of anti-war protests takes place across the country.

Early in the morning, the Soviets launch a nuclear strike, first disabling communications across Britain and northwestern Europe before attacking NATO military targets, then economic and industrial centres. The attack injures and kills tens of millions, and causes fires and devastation. Jimmy attempts to find Ruth and is never seen again, his brother Michael is killed in the initial firestorm, his mother is horribly burned and later dies, while his father suffers from the subsequent radiation poisoning.

The damage quickly results in societal collapse: firefighting and rescue attempts are halted to avoid spreading fallout, hospitals are overwhelmed and under-equipped, and the Sheffield officials die in their bunker, buried under the rubble of Sheffield Town Hall, over the course of a month. Local authority breaks down, martial law is implemented, and survivors are mostly left to fend for themselves. Food becomes scarce as a result of looting and nuclear winter-induced crop failures, resulting in it becoming the only form of currency, awarded for labour and withheld as punishment. The nuclear winter blocks out sunlight and drops temperatures drastically, resulting in a severely diminished harvest and the death of many survivors. The military punishes looting and crime through capital punishment as summary executions begin to occur.

Following the death of her grandmother, Ruth flees her family's basement shelter. She returns to Jimmy's destroyed house, finding only his mother's corpse and Jimmy’s bird book, which she takes with her. By the time she returns home her parents have been killed by looters. Making her way to the Buxton countryside, where local authorities unsuccessfully attempt to convince the residents to house refugees, she is reunited with Jimmy's friend, Bob, for a time. Ruth later gives birth to her daughter alone in an abandoned barn while being howled at by a mad, chained dog. A year after, sunlight returns but with higher levels of UV radiation due to ozone layer damage, causing cataracts and cancers.

10 years later, what remains of Britain's surviving population has dropped to a medieval level of 4 to 11 million people, and the UK remains devastated. Survivors primarily work in cultivating crops by hand or with basic tools. Children born after the war speak a reduced and broken form of English due to the absence of organised schooling, the long-term psychological effects of fetal radiation exposure, and the elective mutism of adult survivors. Ruth dies in bed, prematurely aged and blinded by cataracts. She is survived by her daughter, Jane, who stands by Ruth’s bed as she dies. She responds with apathy to her mother’s death, and steals the last of her possessions, leaving behind Jimmy’s bird book which Ruth had still kept with her.

Three years after Ruth's death, industry begins to return with limited electricity achieved through steam power, but the population continues to live in squalor. Jane and two boys are caught stealing food. One of the boys is shot dead, and Jane and the other boy engage in a struggle for food that degenerates into "crude intercourse." Months later, Jane gives birth in a makeshift hospital. The nurse wraps the silent baby in a bloody sheet and gives it to Jane, who looks at it in horror.

Cast

• Paul Vaughan as the Narrator
• Karen Meagher as Ruth Beckett
• Reece Dinsdale as Jimmy Kemp
• David Brierley as Bill Kemp
• Rita May as Mrs. Kemp, with Dorothy Ford as her stunt double
• Nicholas Lane as Michael Kemp
• Jane Hazlegrove as Alison Kemp
• Henry Moxon as Gordon Beckett
• June Broughton as Mrs. Beckett
• Sylvia Stoker as Granny Beckett
• Harry Beety as Clive Sutton (Controller)
• Ruth Holden as Marjorie Sutton
• Ashley Barker as Bob
• Michael O'Hagan as Chief Superintendent Alan Hirst
• Phil Rose as Dr. Carlton, the Medical Officer
• Steve Halliwell as the Information Officer
• Phil Askham as Mr. Stothard
• Anna Seymour as Mrs. Stothard
• Fiona Rook as Carol Stothard
• Joe Holmes as George Langley
• Victoria O'Keefe as Jane
• Lee Daley as Spike
• Marcus Lund as Gaz
• Lesley Judd and Colin Ward-Lewis as Newscasters
• Anne Sellors as Frightened Woman

Production and themes

Our intention in making Threads was to step aside from the politics and – I hope convincingly – show the actual effects on either side should our best endeavours to prevent nuclear war fail.

Screenwriter Barry Hines

Threads was first commissioned (under the working title Beyond Armageddon) by the Director-General of the BBC Alasdair Milne, after he watched the 1966 drama-documentary The War Game, which had not been shown on the BBC when it was made, due to pressure from the Wilson government, although it had a limited release in cinemas. Mick Jackson was hired to direct the film, as he had previously worked in the area of nuclear apocalypse in 1982, producing the BBC Q.E.D. documentary A Guide to Armageddon. This was considered a breakthrough at the time, considering the previous banning of The War Game, which BBC staff believed would have resulted in mass suicides if aired. Jackson subsequently travelled around the UK and the US, consulting leading scientists, psychologists, doctors, defence specialists and strategic experts to create the most realistic depiction of nuclear war possible for his next film. Jackson consulted various sources in his research, including the 1983 Science article Nuclear Winter: Global Consequences of Multiple Nuclear Explosions, penned by Carl Sagan and James B. Pollack. Details of a possible attack scenario and the extent of the damage were derived from Doomsday, Britain after Nuclear Attack (1983), while the ineffective post-war plans of the UK government came from Duncan Campbell's 1982 exposé War Plan UK. In portraying the psychological damage suffered by survivors, Jackson took inspiration from the behaviour of the Hibakusha and Magnus Clarke's 1982 book Nuclear Destruction of Britain. Sheffield was chosen as the main location partly because of its "nuclear-free zone" policy that made the council sympathetic to the local filming and partly because it seemed likely that the USSR would strike an industrial city in the centre of the country.

Jackson hired Barry Hines to write the script because of his political awareness. The relationship between the two was strained on several occasions, as Hines spent much of his time on set, and apparently disliked Jackson on account of his middle class upbringing. They also disagreed about Paul Vaughan's narration, which Hines felt was detrimental to the drama. As part of their research, the two spent a week at the Home Office training centre for "official survivors" in Easingwold which, according to Hines, showed just "how disorganised [post-war reconstruction] would be".

Auditions were advertised in The Star, and took place in the ballroom of Sheffield City Hall, where 1,100 candidates turned up. Extras were chosen on the basis of height and age, and were all told to look "miserable" and to wear ragged clothes; the majority were CND supporters. The makeup for extras playing third-degree-burn victims consisted of Rice Krispies and tomato ketchup. The scenes taking place six weeks after the attack were shot at Curbar Edge in the Peak District National Park; because weather conditions were considered too fine to pass off as a nuclear winter, stage snow had to be spread around the rocks and heather, and cameramen installed light filters on their equipment to block out the sunlight. Although Jackson initially considered casting actors from Granada Television's Coronation Street, he later decided to take a neorealist approach, and opted to cast relatively unknown actors to heighten the film's impact through the use of characters the audience could relate to.

Supporting artist Michael Beecroft appears briefly in the film as an injured traffic warden. His image endured in the popular memory and has been used prominently in promotional material. Beecroft's identity was unknown until 2024, when he was found by BBC Radio Sheffield.

For the horror of Threads to work, Jackson made an effort to leave some things unseen: "to let images and emotion happen in people's minds, or rather in the extensions of their imaginations". He later recalled that while BBC productions would usually be followed by phone calls of congratulations from friends or colleagues immediately after airing, no such calls came after the first screening of Threads. Jackson later "realised...that people had just sat there thinking about it, in many cases not sleeping or being able to talk". He stated that he had it on good authority that Ronald Reagan watched the film when it aired in the US. Along with Hines, Jackson also received a letter of praise from Labour leader Neil Kinnock, stating "the dangers of complacency are much greater than any risks of knowledge".

The conception of Jane's child towards the end of the film has been interpreted as rape.

Release history

Broadcast

Threads was a co-production of the BBC, Nine Network and Western-World Television, Inc. It was first broadcast on BBC Two on 23 September 1984 at 9:30 pm, and achieved the highest ratings on the channel (6.9 million) of the week. Around six hundred extras from the Sheffield area were invited to a private screening ahead of the official broadcast. It was repeated on BBC One on 1 August 1985 as part of a week of programmes marking the fortieth anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which also saw the first television screening of The War Game (which had been deemed too disturbing for television in the 20 years since it had been made). Threads was not shown again on British screens until the digital channel BBC Four broadcast it in October 2003. It was also shown on UKTV Documentary in September 2004 and April 2005. In January 2018, nuclear history journalist Julie McDowall led a distributed viewing of the film, encouraging the audience to share their reactions on Twitter under the hashtag #threaddread, as part of a campaign to ask the BBC to show the film for the first time since 2003. A new BBC broadcast, again on BBC Four, eventually took place on 9 October 2024 to mark the film's fortieth anniversary.

Threads was broadcast in the United States on cable network Superstation TBS on 13 January 1985, with Ted Turner presenting the introduction. This was followed by a panel discussion on nuclear war. It was also shown in syndication to local commercial stations and, later, on many PBS stations. In Canada, Threads was broadcast on Citytv in Toronto, CKVU in Vancouver and CKND in Winnipeg, while in Australia it was shown on the Nine Network on 19 June 1985. Unusually for a commercial network, it broadcast the film without commercial breaks; many commercial outlets in the United States and Canada that broadcast the film also did so without commercial interruption, or interrupting only for disclaimers or promos.

Home media

Threads was originally released by BBC Video (on VHS and, for a very short period, Betamax) in 1987 in the United Kingdom. The film was re-released on both VHS and DVD in 2000 on the Revelation label, followed by a new DVD edition in 2005. Due to licensing difficulties the 1987 release replaced Chuck Berry's recording of his song "Johnny B. Goode" with an alternative recording of the song. In all these cases, the original music over the opening narration was removed, again due to licensing problems; this was an extract from the Alpine Symphony by Richard Strauss, performed by the Dresden State Opera Orchestra, conducted by Rudolf Kempe (HMV ASD 3173).

On 13 February 2018, Threads was released by Severin Films on Blu-ray in the United States. The programme was scanned in 2K from a broadcast print for this release, including extras such as an audio commentary with Director Mick Jackson and interviews with actress Karen Meagher, Director Of Photography Andrew Dunn, Production Designer Christopher Robilliard and film writer Stephen Thrower. This is also the first home video release in which the extract from the Alpine Symphony remains intact.

On 9 April 2018, Simply Media released a Special Edition DVD in the UK, featuring a different 2K scan, restored and remastered from the original BBC 16mm CRI prints, which Severin did not have access to. This also featured all the original music, for the first time on home video in the UK. The Special Edition included commentaries and associated documentaries.

Reception and legacy

Contemporary

Threads was not widely reviewed, but the critics who reviewed it gave generally positive reviews. John J. O'Connor of The New York Times wrote that the film "is not a balanced discussion about the pros and cons of nuclear armaments. It is a candidly biased warning. And it is, as calculated, unsettlingly powerful." Rick Groen of The Globe and Mail wrote that "[t]he British crew here, headed by writer Barry Hines and producer/director Mick Jackson, accomplish what would seem to be an impossible task: depicting the carnage without distancing the viewer, without once letting him retreat behind the safe wall of fictitious play. Formidable and foreboding, Threads leaves nothing to our imagination, and Nothingness to our conscience." In his movie guide, Leonard Maltin gave the film a rating of three stars (out of a possible four). He called Threads "Britain's answer to The Day After" and wrote that the film was "unrelentingly graphic and grim, sobering, and shattering- as it should be".

Retrospective

Threads works on the viewer with a peculiar power: one finds oneself horrified, fascinated, numbed, provoked, unsettled, made restless. Its power may be the effect of its oscillation between form and content being so heavily weighted toward the pole of content—in this case, that threat of nuclear destruction which cannot help but feel 'real'--so that we are unable to relax into Threads as 'just' a movie.

Professor Andrew Bartlett of UCLA

Retrospective reviews have been very positive. On Metacritic, the film has a score of 92 based on 5 reviews, indicating "universal acclaim", whilst it has a Rotten Tomatoes score of 100% based on 10 reviews (with an average score of 8.90/10). The critical consensus reads: "An urgent warning against nuclear conflict, Threads is a chilling hypothetical that achieves visceral horror with its matter-of-fact presentation of an apocalypse".

Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian called it a "masterpiece", writing: "It wasn't until I saw Threads that I found that something on screen could make me break out in a cold, shivering sweat and keep me in that condition for 20 minutes, followed by weeks of depression and anxiety". Sam Toy of Empire gave the film a perfect score, writing that "this British work of (technically) science fiction teaches an unforgettable lesson in true horror" and went on to praise its ability "to create an almost impossible illusion on clearly paltry funds". Jonathan Hatfull of SciFiNow gave a perfect score to the remastered DVD of the film. "No one ever forgets the experience of watching Threads. [...It] is arguably the most devastating piece of television ever produced. It's perfectly crafted, totally human and so completely harrowing you'll think that you'll probably never want to watch it again." He praised the pacing and Hines' "impeccable" screenplay and described its portrayal of the "immediate effects" of the bombing as "jaw-dropping [...] watching the survivors in the days and weeks to come is heart-breaking". Both Little White Lies and The A.V. Club have emphasized the film's contemporary relevance, especially in light of political events such as Brexit. According to the former, the film paints a "nightmarish picture of a Britain woefully unprepared for what is coming, and reduced, when it does come, to isolation, collapse and medieval regression, with a failed health service, very little food being harvested, mass homelessness, and the pound and the penny losing all value".

Awards and nominations

The film was nominated for seven BAFTA awards in 1985. It won for Best Single Drama, Best Design, Best Film Cameraman and Best Film Editor. Its other nominations were for Best Costume Design, Best Make-Up, and Best Film Sound.

See also

• Able Archer 83, NATO command post exercise that resulted in the 1983 nuclear war scare and changed thinking about nuclear war in Britain
• List of nuclear holocaust fiction
• Nuclear weapons in popular culture
• Nuclear weapons and the United Kingdom
• Square Leg, a military analysis of the effects of a nuclear war on Britain, whose scenario the film somewhat follows
• Protect and Survive, the 1970s British government information films on nuclear war
• Brother in the Land, a 1984 novel for teenagers by Robert Swindells, about a boy's struggle for survival in the aftermath of a nuclear war
• The Day After, a 1983 television film about a nuclear exchange between the US and the Soviet Union
• Testament, a 1983 film about nuclear war affecting a small town in California, USA
• The War Game, a 1966 film about a nuclear strike and aftermath in the UK
• When the Wind Blows, a 1986 animated British film that shows a nuclear attack on Britain by the Soviet Union from the viewpoint of a retired couple
• Z for Zachariah, a 1974 young adult novel about a teenage farm girl's survival in the aftermath of a nuclear war

External links

• Screenplay as published in Threads and Other Sheffield Plays (Mangan, Michael (ed.) (1990) Critical Stages. Vol. 3. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press)
• Film database entries
  • Threads at IMDb
  • Threads at the BFI's Screenonline
• Behind the scenes
  • How we made... Threads in The Guardian
  • Threads in Pictures at BBC South Yorkshire
  • Was Threads the scariest TV show ever made? at BBC Culture