Fleapit revisited:Threads.

On the 23rd September 1984 I had not long left school, I had turned sixteen less than a month earlier, and, that evening, the BBC showed a film that almost everyone who saw would never ever forget. Threads. It was a time when fear of nuclear conflict was extremely heightened. It was an era of Two Tribes, Dancing With Tears In My Eyes, and I Won't Let The Sun Go Down On Me.

Yes, the fear of nuclear war infiltrated pop culture so deeply that even an artist as innocuous as Nik Kershaw got involved. During the eighties (the mid-eighties, especially) the threat of nuclear war, of mutually assured destruction, seemed all too possible. A year previously, the American film The Day After had been screened in Britain and, for the most part, it failed to convey the full horror of what nuclear war would be like. Threads did not make that mistake.

Threads (written by Barry Hines who'd written the screenplay for Ken Loach's Kes back in 1969, and directed by Mick Jackson who went on to make the Hollywood blockbusters L.A. Story and The Bodyguard) had a very big effect on me and my friends and we've spoke of it for years but I've not had a chance to watch it again for over forty years. Until this week that is when it was shown on BBC4. It's still up on iPlayer for a few more weeks.

Has it stood the test of time? Spoiler alert. Yes. It is still just as good/bad as it ever was and, most depressingly of all, it is still relevant. With a deranged lunatic like Trump close to regaining power, it is perhaps more relevant than it has been since the 1980s. What a world to live in.

What is unusual, but highly effective, about Threads is that it starts off almost like a soap opera (a technique that Russell T Davies and others would employ decades later for shows like Years and Years). Young Jimmy Kemp (a pre-Home to Roost Reece Dinsdale) and Ruth Beckett (Karen Meagher) are young lovers. They listen to Chuck Berry and make out in Jimmy's Ford Corsair on a hill overlooking their home city of Sheffield.

When Ruth falls pregnant, unplanned, they expedite their plans to marry and both families, though worrying about their relatively young ages, are supportive as Jimmy and Ruth look for flats and look forward to marriage and parenthood in an easily recognisable world of milk floats, paper rounds, football scores on the radio, handheld video games, pints of beer in smoky pubs, Airfix kits, Rubik's Cubes, and, of course, lots and lots of cups of tea. This is Britain.

Yet in the background, television (featuring ex-Blue Peter presenter Lesley Judd) and radio news reports of an escalating civil war in Iran. Soviet convoys descend on the country, US warships appears in the Gulf of Oman, and American paratroopers land in Isfahan. We hear the voice of then president Ronald Reagen chillingly warning the Soviets that they're taking the world to "the brink of an armed confrontation with incalculable consequences for all mankind". Narrator Paul Vaughan occasionally explains to us, matter of factly, the logistics of everything.

Then shit, as they say, gets real. Britain gets involved, the government takes control of British Airways and all channel ferries, troops are sent to Europe, and the Royal Navy are deployed to protect the North Sea oil rigs. On top of this there passionate CND marches, equally fervent counter-protests, panic buying, and, eventually, looting of shops. 

Further escalation happens apace. Conventional weapon attacks are followed by the first (unseen) nuclear attack by the US on a Soviet base. The art gallery in Sheffield takes its paintings down to protect them from being damaged or destroyed, tailbacks form as people try to escape the city, TUC officials call for a strike, and stern voiced and dispassionate advice on how to prepare for, and react to, a nuclear strike are broadcast on the radio. All trifling and useless in the face of such impending disaster.

"You are better off at home - stay there" is one of the least disturbing pieces of advice given by the Scarfolk like authorities. Others advise on how to bury your dead and how to build an "inner refuge", and there's advice about what to do about deadly nuclear fallout. Nothing, basically. There's nothing you can do.

Then, shockingly - even though it's been signposted for the best part of an hour, the bomb hits. A huge mushroom cloud rises in the sky above Sheffield as, on the ground, absolute chaos is loosed upon the city. The casualties of the blast (and others believed to have gone off around Britain) are estimated at between 2,500,000 and 9,000,000. Yet, nothing speaks as loudly as the scene of a woman involuntarily urinating down her trouser leg.

Another equally iconic moment comes with the scene of the melting milk bottle but it's not just the milk bottles that melt. People do too. Both Jimmy and his younger brother Michael (Nicholas Lane) are killed instantly (we don't even see what happens to Jimmy but we know he's dead, he's in an area where there are no survivors). Sheffield is destroyed - and so is most of the rest of Britain.

But that's not the end. Far from it. Where Threads was particularly strong, as I recalled, was that it continued to show the affects of a nuclear bomb long after (for over a decade) after the bomb itself had fallen. First the fallout, the lethal radioactive dust, the radiation sickness, the panic. A post-nuclear bomb Britain, you'll not be surprised, is not a pretty place.

Dead bodies strewn across the rubble filled streets, ruined buildings, shivering bandaged wrecks (including the traffic warden who terrified kids from the cover of that week's Radio Times), darkness, coldness, horrendous makeshift medical procedures performed without anaesthetic or even water, mass homelessness, potential starvation, cholera, dysentery, typhoid, ten to twenty million unburied human corpses lying in the street (in the UK alone, we have to imagine this doomsday scenario is repeated globally) and through at all Ruth is still pregnant.

When Ruth finally has her baby, Threads still has some unpleasant surprises left for us. One would imagine that defenders of what they would call a 'nuclear deterrent' would have seen Threads as a piece of leftist, peacenik, propaganda at the time and, in some ways, they're right, it is. But that's because it has to be. Nobody can ever win a nuclear war. You can only lose. Everybody loses. Threads was not shy in making that point and making it abundantly, and brutally, clearly.

There's a sense of impending doom from almost the very beginning but from the moment the bomb lands on Sheffield, the screaming, the sheer disbelief that "they've done it", everything is rendered incredibly powerfully and, it seems to me - someone who has quite clearly never lived through a nuclear blast, very realistically. 

Threads does not shy away from showing people in acute pain, people falling over dead in fields that resemble the Khmer Rouge under Pol Pot, and people undergoing severe distress. One of the most powerful scenes, and one I remembered most clearly, comes right near the end of the film when we see a barn full of wretches watching a beaten up old television showing footage of the old children's show Words and Pictures. It's an episode about "skeletons and skulls" and features a voice over asking people to identify a "cat's skeleton". Then it cuts to Ruth's unnamed child who is giving birth to a rape baby in another barn as a crazed, yet chained, alsatian barks wildly at her. Her face freezes in fear and the credits begin to roll. In complete silence. There's no more music. There's no words left need saying.