Threads

Threads

Director ~ Mick Jackson

Writer ~ Barry Hines

1984, UK

Stars ~ Karen Meagher, Reece Dinsdale, David Brierly

 

Certainly one of the grimmest of watches, and a show that surely terrified everyone that saw it, and sees it. It’s not comfort viewing, but a Nuclear Age warning. There is an inimitable grubbiness and rawness that only British television early 80s/post-70s television can convey. Dazzling effects are beyond the budget, but melting milk bottles signifies that the cosiness and discipline of civilisation is gone in an instant, and the aftermath is full of dead pets, hands, trainers and charred mouths sticking out of rubble. Civilians just dying slowly upstairs and bickering bureaucrats in the bunker. It’s just horrible, relentlessly so. Even births must be accompanied by violently barking dogs or deformed faces. No-hope nuclear fear confirmed with British TV miserabilism.

The message is loud-and-clear. Look at all the experts listed as advisors at the end, their advised facts and figures conveyed by a voiceover familiar from any public information film. And rarely has the faux-documentary aesthetic been so chillingly applied. The familiar television blandness of the opening family soap opera dramatics is wisely placed to compare with where it ends up: a post-apocalyptic world where looters are shot and the new generation survive on scraps of language and empathy. If it goes fully science fiction at the end, it’s still invested in the consequence of nuclear war and the outcome is nothing but unbearable.And in that way, a rebuke and tirade against the politics of the day.

I lived an adolescence under the dominant cultural fear of nuclear war. Pop songs in the charts regularly reminded us of the possibility. Even the fantasy post-apocalypse of ‘Planet of the Apes’, even though made the in the previous decade, seemed to have the burden of prophesy: mankind wants to and will self-destruct. But ‘Threads’ was something else, looking like the budget-compromised TV fare we were familiar with; it’s deliberate soap opera/documentary aesthetic – intertitles with horrible estimates and information on the devastation of civilisation; a chillingly detached narration omnisciently commenting and relating like a grim wildlife programme – brought it closer to home and more recognisable than it had ever been, surely. Written by Barry Hines (‘Kes’), this came like a mash-up of the mockumentary technique of Peter Watkins’ banned ‘The War Game’ and the soapier ‘The Day After’. You were worried before? This is what it looks like.

‘Threads’ was shown in schools to traumatise a generation.  It is the kind of film that quantifies that the medium isn’t just for entertainment, but for putting cultural nightmares on screen. Possibly the ugliest watch, and all the more stunning and unforgettable for that. A unique masterpiece of horror. But you'll probably only want to watch it once.