Review of Threads (1985) by Budge B — 17 Apr 2009

Written by Barry Hines, "Threads" is drama documentary made by the BBC and shown on British television in 1984. It echoes an earlier warning of the likely impact of nuclear war ("The War Game", scheduled for broadcast 1965 but banned by the BBC until 1985 on the grounds that what it portrayed was too shocking - it did the rounds of art cinemas, college film societies, and viewings organised by anti-war activists).

"Threads" follows the impact of a nuclear war on two working class families and an ordinary council chief executive in the English city of Sheffield. It emphasises the lack of preparedness for nuclear war by beginning its story three months before the missile strikes occur. While the daily lives of the protagonists follow a mundane course, we are given glimpses of television news coverage of an escalating international crisis - news coverage which is largely ignored by the mass of the population.

Only in the last few days does some degree of concern become widespread - even then largely confined to a run on food supplies and, finally, by an attempt to flee the city and find refuge in the country. The UK, of course, is a densely packed little island - there are few places or spaces which could offer anything purporting to be 'refuge', and certainly not enough to sustain the population fleeing from the cities.

The film follows the slow, almost innocuous build up to war - contrasting it with the panic and immediate collapse of society's structures as the first mushroom clouds loom over British cities. The portrayal of terror and devastation is graphic - cities ablaze as fire storms sweep across them, survivors left blinded, burned, badly injured, and traumatised. Those who opt to follow the government of the day's 'protect and survive' policies - building shelters within their homes out of doors and bits of furniture - succumb to the effects of fall-out and die a slow death in their houses.

Those who remain fit and active have to fight for food - and have to find somewhere to live (most of the housing stock will have been rendered uninhabitable). Law and order break down - the seat of local government is reduced to shambolic chaos, buried under the ruins of its municipal buildings. The surviving police and military institute martial law and try to cope with the disposal of the dead. Medical and emergency services are overwhelmed. And the effects of fall-out are yet to come.

The theme, 'threads', emphasises that modern societies are utterly dependent on a sophisticated interplay and interconnection of many things - from basic gas, water, electricity, sewage, road, rail, and distribution systems, to communications, agriculture, industry, local government, a functioning Health Service, respect for law and order (by and large), and assumed access to food supplies and the income with which to buy goods (including food, accommodation, transport, and all the necessities of life). Nuclear war severs all the threads, fragments society into tales of individual survival.

And following the nuclear devastation of the cities, there are the lasting effects of fall-out, and the immediate impact of nuclear winter as the explosions shut out sunlight and reduce agriculture to the stranglehold of an enduring absence of sun.

The film follows the survivors over a number of years - perhaps its most chilling message. It suggests that any recovery from a nuclear strike would take decades, that for years afterwards the country would be reduced to chaos and to medieval technologies, with survivors living a primitive, hand-to-mouth existence, never sure from one day to the next what hope there might be for continued living.

Utterly horrifying. Although nuclear weapons have become even more devastating in the years since this film was made, the message has not dated. It's a film which trivialises the Hollywood images of heroic survival in the face of Armageddon, a film which leaves you in abject terror of the possibility that such an atrocity could be perpetrated by human beings. It's a film which should be shown again and again until everyone appreciates that use of nuclear weapons leaves no winners and that the existence of nuclear weapons holds us all hostage to the certain prospect of becoming losers.

The film is available online - search "Threads" and envy the dead.