As we inch ever closer to Halloween, the inevitable lists of the scariest films ever made have already begun to crop up. Whenever these lists are compiled by people who actually know what they’re talking about, there’s invariably an honourable mention of a small budget, in-house BBC production which aired on BBC 2 and was never shown in cinemas.
It was written by the author of Kes and directed by a man who would go on to make Hollywood fodder such as L.A. Story and The Bodyguard. Yet when novelist Barry Hines and a director with the BBC’s science department, Mick Jackson, collaborated on Threads, they created what is now widely regarded as one of the disturbing, if not the most downright terrifying, films ever made.
Celebrating – if that is the appropriate word – its 40th anniversary this year, Threads is being aired by the BBC for the first time in decades tonight at 10.15 p.m. on BBC Four. It will be preceded by a quick interview with the director at 10 p.m.
What made a film with such humble beginnings so traumatising that it moved the respected Guardian film critic, Peter Bradshaw, to declare it ‘the most frightening film I have ever seen’? There are two obvious explanations – content and context.
The set-up is simple and familiar to anyone who has read Hines’s work. A young couple in recession-hit Sheffield are enjoying their courtship when Ruth (the great Karen Meagher) finds herself pregnant. As was the style of the time, the young lovers decide to get married and prepare to navigate the potential tensions between Ruth’s middle-class parents and Jimmy’s (Reece Dinsdale) working class mam and dad.
It’s a scenario which has been a staple of British TV drama since the 1960s. But behind the usual kitchen sink conversations there are constant reminders that something much more terrifying than a parental meeting is brewing.
Between teletype displays on screen and fractured audio excerpts from the nightly news, it’s becoming increasingly clear that the world stands on the brink of nuclear war. Tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union over Iran are increasing and as the previously calm news bulletins become more alarmed, it’s obvious that this isn’t just the usual superpower sabre rattling.
There are angry CND meetings in Sheffield. Panic buying and price gouging begins in the local shop. But the young couple don’t really care. Ruth is occupied with wallpaper and her plans to redecorate their new flat while Jimmy sits in the pub with his mate Bob and frets about his new, grown up responsibilities.
Then, about an hour into what has been a solid but hardly groundbreaking family drama, the world goes to hell.
An EMP strike goes off over the North Sea and destroys all electronics. Pedestrians and shoppers in Sheffield town centre look up to see a single mushroom cloud rise above them.
Bob says in horrified wonder while he looks at the cloud blooming ever larger, ‘Jesus Christ. They’ve done it… they’ve done it.’
Immediately we see the near total collapse of civil society. The local government officials in Sheffield City Hall bicker and panic when they realise they are utterly impotent in the face of Armageddon. They die, suffocating helplessly when the buildings above them collapse.
We see the subsequent firestorm, immolating cats and melting the ET dolls which were popular at the time. We see the blast wave ripping through the houses and covering scorched children in rubble.
In a moment of mundane genius, we see one poor unfortunate man sitting on the toilet when the bomb goes off. He has to hurry to pull his trousers up while chaos ensues – not the most subtle metaphor for a lack of preparedness, perhaps.
Things, unsurprisingly, get worse. Looters kill ordinary people and, in turn, are shot by the authorities. The local tennis club is turned into a military food redistribution centre that becomes the scene of a massacre. Even the surviving traffic wardens still in uniform are deputised, given a gun and the instruction to shoot on sight. This leads to the grimly amusing scene when a prisoner shouts, ‘buggered if I’m going to be shot by a traffic warden.’
Throughout this increasingly horrifying vista, missives from Dante’s modern Inferno continue to appear on teletype on screen and the narrator gives ever more depressing updates. All of these were, by the way, accurate scientific predictions of what would occur in real life. There’s no point in going to the nearest hospital, people are told, because all the doctors and nurses are dead. If they aren’t, there are no medicines left anyway.
In fact, we learn that a single missile attack on any English city would be enough to utterly overwhelm the resources of every hospital in the UK even during perfect peacetime conditions, let alone the aftermath of a mass nationwide attack in world war three.
And so we watch the slow degradation of society. A terrified Ruth bites through her umbilical cord as she gives birth on her own. Far from being the central character of Threads as we were led to expect, Jimmy is never seen again after the initial blast.
Temperatures drop below freezing. Crops and animals die. Rats become a prized source of food. Children born after the bombs have dropped have never been taught English so have no language skills, communicating instead through grunts and half remembered words. Medieval conditions reign.
You get the picture.
This, it’s fair to say, is not a date movie. Instead, it is a work of uniquely stoic British brilliance that stands in sharp contrast to the other big nuclear war movie of the era, the big budget, blockbuster American TV movie, The Day After.
In fairness, The Day After isn’t as bad as some modern critics claim, although a nuclear holocaust has never looked so telegenic. But in comparison to Threads, with its unflinching demand that the viewer watches the unwatchable, The Day After looks about as hard hitting as a TV shampoo commercial.
But if that was the content in all its apocalyptic glory, what about the context?
Well, just look at the news. Even the most prescient TV scheduler couldn’t have predicted that we would currently be going through what is arguably a more fraught and volatile geopolitical situation than when Threads originally aired. At least during the Cold War there was a sense that calm heads on both sides were desperate to ensure that the red button was never pressed and that sanity would ultimately prevail.
Now, with Russia’s battlefield defeats making some of their generals even more bellicose than normal, and a nuclear armed Israel facing an existential war for its own survival on seven fronts, there is an uncomfortable sense that the grown-ups have left the building.
In rather uncanny symmetry, Iran is again at the centre of the geopolitical storm. Except this time Tehran is edging ever closer to having its own nuclear programme.
As a result, there will be a large audience sitting down tonight to watch a 40-year-old masterpiece about the end of the world that feels uncomfortably laden with modern parallels.
Comments