THREADS – 40th anniversary

Tonight marks the 40th anniversary of the first broadcast of THREADS. If you’ve spent any time loitering around here, you’ll likely have read how much the film affected and influenced me. As a kid I had – and still have – an unhealthy fascination with all things apocalyptic. Back then, at the age of 13, I was still naive enough to believe in the excitement and adventure of the post-apocalyptic world of science-fiction and horror movies, but I was also becoming increasingly aware of the reality and possibility of nuclear war. The talk among the kids at school had always been about where we’d build our shelters and how we’d race around on our bikes and fight mutants and looters and so on, our action-filled daydreams no doubt naively influenced by listening to grandparents’ memories of life during World War II. But things were changing. Although many thousands of miles away, to an adolescent kid growing up in Birmingham, the Falklands War in 1982 made war feel uncomfortably close. Couple that with the steady stream of TV news reports about the Greenham Common protests when US missiles were based on British soil, the regular unannounced tests of air attack sirens and so on, and the realisation that nuclear war was a) possible and b) that it would be NOTHING like the movies was beginning to dawn on me.

40 years ago tonight, I sat perched on the end of my bed to watch THREADS on the little TV in my bedroom. I don’t quite remember what I was expecting, but I could never have foreseen the impact of what I was about to watch. It remains a staggeringly important film that, incredibly, has not lost any of its impact over the decades. Given the current deteriorating geopolitical climate, in many ways it’s more prescient than ever.

I doubt there are many people who haven’t heard of THREADS. A BBC production, it’s no exaggeration to say that it scarred a generation. Several generations, actually, if not ALL subsequent generations. In all my years working in and around the horror genre, I can’t think of another single piece of work that’s had such a profound and specific impact. After that traumatic first viewing, I found rewatches difficult because it had affected me so deeply, and also because at the time it was beginning to feel like Armageddon was a heartbeat away. Over the decades since I’ve owned several VHS, DVD, and Blu-ray copies, and even attended a rare big screen showing of the movie in December 2018. Despite all that’s happening in the world, I feel better equipped to cope with the horrors of THREADS today, but its blunt power hasn’t dulled in the slightest. It remains as relentless and visceral as it did on that Sunday evening 40 years ago. As a human being, this film broke me in two. As a writer, it made me.

Some background for those of you who are new to the game.

THREADS deals with the build up to and subsequent impact of nuclear war. Set in and around the city of Sheffield, it primarily follows two families – the Becketts and the Kemps – through the apocalypse. Ruth Beckett is pregnant with Jimmy Kemp’s baby, and the unplanned pregnancy brings the two families together, forcing them to deal with their domestic issues at an accelerated rate whilst, in the background, a potential conflict between superpowers looms. Thousands of miles away, tensions are escalating between the United States and the USSR. Before long the unthinkable happens, and a nuclear war breaks out. THREADS follows its cast of ordinary, straightforward characters, through the days, weeks, months and years that follow.

Written by BARRY HINES and directed by MICK JACKSON (who went on to direct Whitney Houston in THE BODYGUARD and Steve Martin in LA STORY amongst others), it was filmed in and around Sheffield with a cast of relatively unfamiliar faces and willing volunteers. Jackson had previously made a similarly themed episode of the popular (at the time) BBC science show QED called A GUIDE TO ARMAGEDDON (you can find it on YouTube here). This half hour quasi-documentary sowed the seeds for THREADS by looking at the questionable usefulness of the government approved survival instructions issued to UK households at the time. You may have heard of PROTECT AND SURVIVE? In retrospect, these instructions were little more than a pacifier, designed to prevent panic. Here’s an interesting PANORAMA episode featuring a young Jeremy Paxman that looks at the pointlessness of these (top secret at the time) publications. In terms of helping anyone survive a nuclear attack, they were about as much use as the DUCK AND COVER guidance given to kids in the 1950’s – if a nuclear bomb explodes nearby, get under your school desk. Yeah, that’ll help.

Perhaps the most obvious reason for the resonance of THREADS is its sheer ordinariness. That might sound odd given the subject matter but let me explain. The first section of the film feels almost like a soap opera as, via Ruth and Jimmy and their baby, we’re plunged into what feels like a typical domestic drama. These people are completely normal, and it’s easy to buy into their trials and tribulations. This has two effects: it helps us to identify with the characters (they’re so normal you can’t help but fill in the blanks of their lives from your own experiences), and at the same time it puts the viewer on the back foot, diverting our focus from the deteriorating international situation in the papers and on the TV news. Ruth and Jimmy are stressing about their respective sets of parents meeting for the first time, and Mr and Mrs Kemp have got other things on their mind – their kids Michael and Alison have homework that needs doing… they’re all too busy to worry about another war breaking out elsewhere. To these people, Sheffield is the world.

You know it’s coming, but when the bomb drops and the people we’ve got to know are vaporised, crushed, starved, burned, beaten etc., it hits you like a hammer blow. Rumour has it that the original plan was to cast actors from Coronation Street, but the docu-soap approach has even more of an impact precisely because of the anonymity of its cast of largely unknowns. In my books I regularly write about apocalyptic events, but I’ve always shied away from having any true ‘heroes’ as such. I don’t want super-soldiers, spies, or action hero scientists, because the horror of any situation can usually be amplified if the reader/viewer can identify with the characters through whose eyes they’re witnessing events. I can trace my decision to adopt that approach directly back to THREADS.

Barry Hines was a master of this. Best known for his novel A KESTREL FOR A KNAVE, filmed as KES by KEN LOACH in 1969, he was the perfect choice for THREADS. In 1977 he wrote a two-part drama for BBC’s PLAY FOR TODAY, called THE PRICE OF COAL. Watching it back today, you can see how it was a precursor to THREADS. The first episode is a quaint and disarmingly funny tale about the miners and managers of a Yorkshire coal pit preparing for a visit from a member of the royal family. We’re drawn into the lives of the characters as they get everything in order for the visit, and we’re completely blindsided when, at the beginning of part two, there’s a cave in and many of the miners are killed.

This isn’t sensationalism, this is astonishingly clever writing. The skill is in the set-up. By focusing on the normality of these people, the banality and familiarity of their daily routines, Hines binds us to them. We might not care about them as such, we might not identify with all or any of them, but we do recognise them. We can relate to their innocence and helplessness. When the pit caves in in THE PRICE OF COAL and when the bomb drops in THREADS, we know the people we’re watching will try to survive but will likely fail. It makes us question what we’d do. It shows us how vulnerable we are.

And in THREADS, we’re forced to watch all of this with our eyes wide open. The camera’s eye never even blinks.

If you haven’t yet watched THREADS but plan to, you’ll need to steel yourself for the moment the bomb drops. There’s no sensationalism here, and I’ve already mentioned how some of the special effects really aren’t that special, but the attack itself is a remarkably powerful scene. How would you react? Would you run for cover or just stand staring at the mushroom cloud like a gibbering mess – that’s what happens to Jimmy’s friend Bob. Or would you just stand in the street and piss yourself with fear – that’s what another person famously does. Would you refuse to go down into your basement shelter? Would you try to improvise a shelter, knowing you’re already too late and it probably won’t do any good anyway? Would you try to reach friends and family? Would you just run in directionless panic? Try and get home? We see all of these reactions and more in a succession of quick cuts. The mushroom cloud looms over Sheffield, and all that anyone can do is absolutely nothing. Then, the front of a branch of Woolworths explodes. Milk bottles melt. A traumatised cat rolls around in the ashes. We see fire – lots of fire – and it’s only when you stare into the flames that shapes appear. You see a kid’s bike in the branches of a burning tree. A human hand on fire, then a face, then another corpse… Again, I have to stress, none of this is gratuitous. There’s no sensationalism. These horrific things are just what the camera happens to see. It gives the impression that no matter how long it’s left filming, it would never run out of nightmare sights to record. It makes you think there’s always something even more terrible just out of shot. It makes you not want to see any more, but at the same time you know you have to keep watching.

As an aside, some of the effects in THREADS are magnificent for the time and budget. It’s interesting to note that the then Labour council of Sheffield were fully behind the film, and they gave Jackson and his crew use of part of a housing estate near Hillsborough which had been earmarked for demolition. The empty houses were redecorated and dressed to film the initial scenes, then destroyed. So, when you see Mr and Mrs Kemp emerge from their makeshift shelter out into the ruins of their home, it’s the exact same building where they had dinner the night before that’s been destroyed, not a set. It’s details like this which increase the realism and, therefore, the impact and the horror.

Speaking of Mr and Mrs Kemp, its perhaps these characters who best illustrate the effectiveness of the film’s approach. In earlier scenes they bicker about removing doors to make a fallout shelter – they’ve just been painted, after all, and Mrs Kemp’s worried the wallpaper will get marked. They’re a typical 1980’s couple: him out of work and spending increasing amounts of time on his allotment, her constantly cooking and cleaning. They’re almost comedic at times, and Mr Kemp is actually on the toilet when the bomb drops. Perhaps this vulnerability is why it hits so hard when we first see them after the attack. Mrs Kemp is horrifically burned. Mr Kemp is vomiting. When they go outside to look for their kids, they find their son Michael’s foot sticking out of the rubble of their home. Mrs Kemp says ‘I wish it was me. I wish I was dead.’ The emotional impact of all this is devastating.

Prior to THREADS, many dramatizations of nuclear attacks focused on the impact of the initial blast. THREADS showed that things won’t get better once the mushroom cloud has dissipated, they’ll only get worse. Much worse. It was one of the first films to address this, coming as it did when research had just been released which proposed the phenomenon of a nuclear winter – prolonged plunging temperatures caused by the massive volume of soot and ash sucked up into the atmosphere, blocking out the sun. And again, in showing us all of this, the camera never looks away. As each minute of THREADS ticks by, so the nightmare on screen continues to worsen. Radiation sickness, psychological damage, freezing cold, lawlessness, starvation, overwhelmed authorities, squalid blood-soaked hospitals with no medicines… this is just the beginning.

At this stage it’s worth mentioning the quasi-documentary style of THREADS, because as we watch this drama unfold, we’re far better informed than the characters themselves. We’re told in uncomfortable detail what’s happening to the people we’re watching, and how and why they’re suffering. In 1966 the BBC commissioned a film from director PETER WATKINS called THE WAR GAME. This too portrayed the effects of nuclear war on the UK, so successfully that it was banned from TV broadcast for more than twenty years. In THE WAR GAME and several of Watkins’s other films such as CULLODEN and PUNISHMENT PARK, he employs an unusual narrative device to tell the story: these films are made as straight-faced documentaries filmed by a camera crew that, by all logic, shouldn’t be there. This always unseen crew is unaffected by what’s going on around them, and if you suspend your disbelief it’s powerful stuff. Trouble is, suspending your disbelief becomes difficult in a CLOVERFIELD kind of way – you’re at the top of a collapsing skyscraper being chased by a city-destroying monster: PUT THE FUCKING CAMERA DOWN!!! Vox pops with seventeenth century soldiers and with the scarred survivors of a nuclear attack on Kent work surprisingly well, but the more you think about it, the less sense it makes.

THREADS takes a different approach. Throughout, the kitchen-sink drama is interspersed with captioned images, still photographs and an emotionless narration: this is what’s happened, this is why it’s happening, this is what’s going to happen to these people next. Rather than pulling you out of the story as you might expect, in THREADS this approach increases the horror. It’s like being given a guided tour of the apocalypse. You might think it would be patronising or distracting, but it’s not. It adds context. It’s like being awake through an operation, listening to your surgeon explaining which bits of you they’re cutting away. It’s terrifying.

There’s another aspect of THREADS which goes hand-in-hand with the soap-style set-up and the documentary-style approach, and that’s the film’s portrayal of the government’s completely ineffective approach to an impossible situation.

The film follows another group of characters, this time wholly disconnected (both physically and emotionally) from everyone else. This is the regional authority, working from under Sheffield City Hall. Despite their radios, their charts, and their ring-bound war books, they’re hopelessly under-resourced and ill-prepared to carry out their duties. When we first meet the regional controller Clive Sutton, he’s tending flowers in his office. His wife is more concerned with packing him enough clean shirts for the apocalypse than anything else. Even before he’s been dispatched to the shelter, it’s clear that Sutton is fighting a losing battle. In a series of phone calls, we learn just how under-equipped the authorities are, and when they get into the bunker, there are deaths and equipment failures as soon as the bombs drop.

By letting us get close to this group of under-trained, frightened, and under resourced low-level politicians and civil servants, Hines and Jackson are again able to demonstrate the futility of trying to survive. The way these people bicker, fight and eventually die in their sarcophagus-like bunker illustrates in microcosm how what remains of a national government would almost certainly fail. And perhaps that’s one of the main reasons why THREADS still has such emotional impact today. There’s no point trying to survive. I posted recently about my trips to Hiroshima and Nagasaki last November, and how those once-devastated cities have returned to life, how Hiroshima in particular feels more hopeful and alive than perhaps anywhere else I’ve been in the world. The recovery of the bombed cities in Japan took decades, and was only possible because everywhere else remained intact. It’s hard to imagine any kind of recovery from a global nuclear war.

THREADS is a remarkably honest and unfiltered vision of a nightmare future that remains frighteningly possible, permanently just minutes away. By focusing on normal people like you and me, we can see how the entire world would fall apart. It forces us to confront the full scope and horror of nuclear war, and it does so without offering even a glimmer of hope. It remains true to its bleak message from the first frame to the last: there’s nothing positive to say, because absolutely nothing positive will ever come of this kind of conflict. People will try to survive, because that’s what people do, but that’s not necessarily the best option.

I mentioned at the beginning that I saw THREADS on the big screen once. It was the first and only time I’ve watched it alongside other people, and that made for a wholly different experience. It’s surprisingly funny at moments (admittedly very few moments), but what struck me most was the numb silence after the film had finished. Utter quiet. Pin drop time.

THREADS is a masterclass in the use of normality and scale in writing. It taught me not to compromise in storytelling and has had an influence on pretty much everything I’ve ever written. It’s a vital, unmissable film which everyone should watch at least once in their lifetime. If you’re interested, there’s an excellent new BBC Radio 4 documentary – REWEAVING THREADS, 40 YEARS ON – available here.