Ahead of a timely re-airing of Mick Jackson’s famously bleak docudrama, its director recalls why he unleashed a mushroom cloud on Sheffield in 1984
ne Sunday night in September 1984, between championship darts and the news with Jan Leeming, the BBC broadcast one of its bravest, most devastating commissions. This was Threads, a two-hour documentary-style drama exploring a hypothetical event deeply feared at the time and also somehow unthinkable: what would happen if a nuclear bomb dropped on a British city.
Made by British director Mick Jackson with Kes author Barry Hines, and set in Sheffield, it begins with a young couple, working-class Jimmy and middle-class Ruth, dealing with her unexpected pregnancy in familiar kitchen-sink drama surroundings. International tensions build slowly in the background as the minutes tick by, bursting in through newspaper headlines, radio and TV news, and the ominous words of narrator Paul Vaughan, known then as a presenter of BBC science series Horizon.
Then come CND protests; council officers being summoned to an emergency bunker; and animated films on TV instructing people how to survive. Forty-seven minutes in, a nuclear bomb drops. The film ends more than a decade later with Jimmy and Ruth’s baby, Jane, now an adolescent, giving birth in a world devastated by nuclear winter.
Bringing horror into the homes, shops and streets of a very ordinary world, Threads is a brilliant, terrifying film, and for anyone who has seen it (I watched it in 1999 on a dusty VHS), its effects will have been long-lasting. To mark the film’s 40th anniversary, I have examined its creation and legacy for a forthcoming radio documentary, Archive on 4: Reweaving Threads, 40 Years On, digging into the BBC vaults to show how the film has influenced writers, politicians and fans (including Jim Jupp of the brilliant Ghost Box record label, who has created an exclusive soundtrack for the programme).
The BBC has shown Threads only three times to date: in 1984; in August of the following year, to mark the 40th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; and as part of a cold war special on BBC Four in 2003. Another – timely – showing is planned for October. When I watched the film at the end of the 20th century, Threads felt like a piece of history. Today, in a world of conflict in Russia, China and the Middle East, and expanding nuclear capabilities, it no longer does.
In a light-dazzled sunroom in Santa Monica, California, Mick Jackson, director of LA Story and The Bodyguard, is remembering the film of which he’s most proud. “You know that on the Internet Movie Database, at the end of each entry for a film, there’s a space for people to write their own comments? I’ve checked that page for Threads practically every year. It varies with the state of tension in the world, but regularly there are [new] entries there saying: ‘I saw this as a kid sitting around the door when I was supposed to be in bed’, or ‘I came to this because people had talked about it and it’s the most horrific, sobering thing I’ve ever seen’.” The latest reviewer, jotchy-14285, posted in June, saying: “Just watch it people, judge for yourselves and hope that the ones with their fingers on the buttons have seen it as well…”
A science documentary-maker in his early career, Jackson joined the BBC in 1966, soon after the corporation decided to ban another film it had commissioned about the effects of a nuclear bomb: Peter Watkins’s The War Game. Blending documentary, newsy vox pops and a cast of amateur actors and extras, it was dropped from the schedules following advice from the Home Office, but later won the 1967 best documentary Oscar after a cinema release. “So I entered a corporation where everybody felt a great deal of shame, that the BBC has somehow betrayed them,” Jackson says.