This completely enthralling and thoroughly depressing, made for TV faux docu-drama – A BAFTA winning downer from the apocalyptic harbingers at BBC2 – posits an alarmingly matter of fact beginning, middle and end to issues concerning the nuclear nightmare. Highlighting the social, economic and environmental collapse of Britain as mushroom clouds erupt and subsequent fall out fill the skies, Threads straddles the borders of what-if drama and World in Action style bleak reality…
Pre Apocalypse, Sheffield City Council prepare for things to go sideways by holing up beneath the town hall, ID‘s Reece Dinsdale sups pints, ignores the reporting of intensified political tension and cheats on his pregnant fiance whilst her upwardly mobile family treat him with disapproval. The prevailing conceit that people ignore the warnings is an important, if overplayed, one. Director Mick Jackson fills us in on the circumstances that lead to the Big One™ (yes, that old chestnut, The Warsaw Pact), through news broadcasts that wall paper scenes in the pub, over breakfast papers and in the backdrop of pokey, inner city bedrooms. These admonishments surround the numerous characters on hand but they’re too pre-occupied by the trivial, soap opera problems in their day to day lives to take any heed.
When things turn ugly and NATO and The Warsaw Pact get round to clashing heads, the film follows the obligatory rules laid out in The Day After. Except here a shopper wets herself in the street, a milk bottle melts and Dinsdale’s poor little brother gets it in the garden aviary. This may appear condescending. The truth is these banalities are terrifying; or certainly would have been one grim sunday evening in September 1984 as Threads played the nuclear nightmare out to its original broadcast audience.
What might threaten to play out as a particularly intense episode of Emmerdale is thankfully saved in the final third as any attempt to provide a narrative purpose is dispensed with, making way for a series of increasingly bleak vignettes. Britain is plunged back into the middle ages and any hint at class concern is abandoned. Suitably miserable looking survivors are left to farm the scorched earth; give birth to radioactive deformities and grunt and groan as PTSD and social anxiety takes hold.
By approaching the subject with an increasingly cold and detached manner, and assisted by Kes scriber Barry Hines‘ incredibly sharp writing, Jackson succeeds in placing the terror of nuclear war firmly on our doorstep.
