The night the country didn’t sleep: 40 years of Threads, the BBC’s traumatising TV movie

Forty years ago, the Soviet Union launched a salvo of nuclear warheads against its targets in NATO territories. Eight megatons fell on the UK with two single ballistic missiles hitting a key manufacturing and military target: Sheffield.

The impact at 8:37am was beyond apocalyptic. Children and mothers en route to school screamed as a mushroom cloud rose above the city. Commuters, blinded by the nuclear flash, drove head on into brick walls. Everything electrical stopped working. One female onlooker lost bodily control, earning the infamous movie credit “Anne Sellors as Woman Who Urinates Herself”.

Fortunately this nuclear attack only occurred on screen, but that didn’t reduce its impact, which is still being felt decades later. Branded “the most disturbing movie ever made,” Mick Jackson’s TV movie Threads (1984) imagines a global thermonuclear exchange between the superpowers at a time when many believed nuclear war was inevitable. The film aired on the BBC2 on 23 September 1984 and again on BBC1 in 1985 before disappearing from view for years (its original transmission date became known in broadcasting circles as “the night the country didn’t sleep”).

Today, the fallout of Threads continues to resonate: the BBC last year reported that the film’s popularity is surging, no doubt helped by President Putin’s continued nuclear threats and the launch of a social media app which shares its name. Filmmakers recently led a campaign to identify an extra who appeared as a burned traffic warden in Threads’ iconic poster (they were successful; he was a traffic warden in real life), commemorative screenings are planned for the 40th anniversary, and a new BBC Radio 4 documentary traces the film’s legacy.

What made Threads so effective as a single drama? Unlike the World War III films being produced around the same time, Jackson’s story – written by Kes author Barry Hines – focused not on well-intentioned military personnel or heroes in the rubble but civilians trying to go about their daily lives while conflict ratchets in the background. As young couple Ruth (Karen Meagher) and Jimmy (Reese Dinsdale) deal with an unplanned pregnancy, snippets of news on radio and TV describe the Soviet Union carrying out a military operation in Iran in response to a western-backed coup. Submarines disappear, talks break down, and while Jimmy and Ruth are wallpapering their new flat, world leaders crack open their nuclear codes. 

It’s a situation that must have seemed all too plausible to viewers in 1984, occurring in the wake of the Able Archer war simulation exercise across Western Europe which the Soviet Union suspected was a cover for a NATO nuclear attack. One month before Threads was broadcast, US president Ronald Reagan had joked before a radio address: “My fellow Americans, I am pleased to tell you today that I’ve signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes.”

As the producer and director of Threads, Mick Jackson had a more immediate and private fear: that his film wasn’t the only gritty nuclear attack story on the block.

“I was deeply troubled when I heard, as we were already into pre-production on Threads,” says Jackson via email, “that ABC was shooting The Day After with a large-for-television budget and starring Jason Robards and JoBeth Williams.”

Jackson resolved to abandon his project if The Day After committed to delivering an honest depiction of nuclear Armageddon, something he feels it didn’t. “At one point, in what should be the hellish confusion of a hospital overrun with maimed survivors – and isn’t – the camera ‘dramatically’ dollies into a close-up of Jason Robards as he delivers a set-piece monologue, describing ‘what he saw’ and ‘what he felt’. I’m not sure if the music swelled or not, though I certainly remember it doing so.”

Jackson wanted to approach the apocalypse from a scientific perspective, and he had the credentials to do so. “At the time, I was working in the BBC Science Features Department, which was responsible for the Horizon series among other things. The Science Department was generally thought of as ‘respectable’, possibly a little ‘nerdy’ and we didn’t normally cause any kind of political ruckus. So that meant a lot less day-to-day scrutiny. The upper echelons knew – in rough outline – what I was preparing but I wasn’t any kind of flashing red ‘blip’ on the radar screen… yet.”

This scientific structuring of Threads, complete with documentary-style voiceover from Horizon narrator Paul Vaughan, resulted in a taut production with a sometimes guerilla feel. “The tightness of the schedule and the absurdly small budget really gave us no choice but to work fast and with great intensity,” recalls Jackson. “The very grimness of what we were doing generated its own ‘esprit de corps’ and the overall mood on-set was positive. We ended the shoot exhausted but in surprisingly good spirits.”

That spirit may have faltered once production wrapped and the prosthetic radiation burns made from Rice Krispies and ketchup were removed. “I’m certain,” writes Jackson, “that once it was over and we all disbanded, when we ceased being members of a movie ensemble and became just anxious individuals in the 1980s, what we’d depicted and its implications stayed in the minds of every actor and crew member for a long time. I’m sure there were some nightmares.”

Today, the brutal imagery of Threads – which sees society collapse in the wake of the bombs and devolve into a radioactive fiefdom – continue to cause bad dreams as well as inspire.

Electronic composer Jonathan Sharp samples the film’s dialogue in ‘You Cannot Win a Nuclear War’. Jim Jupp, owner of hauntology record label Ghost Box is providing the soundtrack to Reweaving Threads, the BBC radio retrospective on the film due to air this month.

Black Mirror creator Charlie Brooker even attended a Halloween party dressed as the Threads traffic warden. And the most recent entry in the popular Scarred For Life book series devotes over three chapters to why the film continues to resonate.

Students of the Cold War may be aware that Threads wasn’t the first British-made nuclear TV drama to achieve infamy. Peter Watkins’ The War Game, also commissioned by the BBC, was shot in 1966 and depicted President Lyndon B. Johnson authorising a strike on the Soviet Union. The film focused on the effects of a retaliatory one-megaton bomb falling on Kent.

Despite a similarly low budget for its time and limited international screenings, The War Game won the 1967 Academy Award for best documentary. But in the UK it was never publicly aired and remained banned for almost 20 years, deemed “too horrifying for the medium of broadcast” and possessing the potential to cause “considerable distress and a defeatist attitude amongst the mass TV-watching public”.

“When it was at its coolest and most factual it was devastating,” says Jackson of The War Game, “It gave people the information and then left the emotional impact for them to feel for themselves. The only mistake I think Watkins made was to inject his own passionate anti-war sentiments into the film as well (actors dressed as bishops talking about ‘blessing the bomb’, for example). It was unnecessary and gave his critics all the ammunition they needed to dismiss it as ‘left-wing propaganda’. I didn’t want Threads to be so easily dismissible.”

Jackson’s intentions would come back to haunt him as he personally struggled with the effect of authentically depicting nuclear slaughter. “For many months after the film was finished and done with, I would still have moments where that alternative reality would suddenly ‘flash’ into my consciousness – as if I were actually there. I guess it eventually faded but it still hasn’t quite gone … It would be a pretentious stretch to compare it to PTSD – I was never in combat or anything like that – but I suspect there was a similar kind of mechanism at work.”

Lead actor Karen Meagher – whose character Ruth carries her baby to term during the attack’s nuclear winter – is glad of the punch that the film packs. “It was only after Threads was aired that I realised what impact it had on the viewing public, and how important it was at that time and of course today in uncertain times,” she writes via email. “I have always said I think it a huge mistake [to place] infallible weapons in fallible hands … I think it’s more relevant now than ever as it feels like the Cold War never really ended – it just took a break for a few years.”

One Cold War figurehead who shared Meagher’s appreciation of Threads is former Labour leader Neil Kinnock. In a letter to Jackson written the morning after the film’s transmission, he declared “The story must be told time and time again until the idea of using nuclear weapons is pushed into past history. Don’t, by the way, be troubled by the possibility that some people might be inured to the Real Thing by seeing horrifying films. The dangers of complacency are much greater than any risks of knowledge.”

Despite the threat of nuclear destruction persisting (the Doomsday Clock stood at three minutes to midnight in 1984; today it is at 90 seconds), one of Kinnock’s wishes has borne fruit: that future viewers would remain aware of the perils of atomic weaponry.

In 2018, an American teenager wrote to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists – the keepers of the Doomsday Clock – imploring filmmakers to provide her generation with a new terrifying nuclear war film. One that could remind today’s leaders of the folly of pushing launch.

Such a film has yet to materialise. But as evidenced by the upcoming Survivors documentary (another Threads retrospective investigating its impact on viewers, and the project which triggered the hunt for the traffic warden), there’s no danger of the granddaddy of terrifying nuclear war films being pushed into past history either.

Threads is available to stream on Shudder and on special edition Blu-ray from Simply Media. Reweaving Threads airs on 21 September on BBC Radio 4.