Originally Posted by
SilsoeSid
'Threads'
"
One of the most terrifying programmes ever shown on British television, Threads is the nuclear apocalypse drama-documentary that continues to haunt people’s nightmares 40 years on. Ahead of a rare new showing on the BBC, here’s a look at how the drama still has the potential to terrify people. First broadcast on 23 September 1984, anyone who tuned in to BBC Two on that Sunday evening would experience a bleak and unforgettable depiction of a massive nuclear bomb attack on a British city and its aftermath.
It was a nightmare scenario that was all too plausible in an era of heightened tension between the West and the then Soviet Union. Rarely seen on television since its first broadcast, it's being shown again on BBC Four and iPlayer on 9 October. Sheffield was chosen as the fictional nuclear target because its writer, Kes author Barry Hines, lived there.
(continues in link)
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p02kgkkg
https://www.bbc.co.uk/articles/crl8nj3xxp7o
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threads_(1984_film)
PSB used in...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pO1HC8pHZw0
Watched it when it first went on air back in the early 1980's in the same year the US produced and broadcast a similar series 'The Day After'.
Threads, for me at least, is by far the more harrowing depicting the lead up to and immediate aftermath. It loses its way somewhat in the last third though and verges on surrealism at times.
As a child starting school mid 1960's and then a teen in the 1970's, the weekly test of the 4-minute warning siren (mounted on the local police station), sunk into the background becoming noise blended with traffic along with the local church bells on Sunday morning or our town clock tower bell chiming every hour. Secretly though, everyone welcomed the scheduled test as somewhat comforting opposed to the siren wailing at any other time. The public information films 'Protect and Survive', regularly broadcast on national TV at peak viewing times, are in hindsight almost laughable if they were not so chilling. Duck and cover under school desks was a bit of fun - the gravity of which was completely lost on all of us in 'juniors'.
Another programme well worth hunting down and aired in 1986, is based on Raymond Briggs book 'When the wind Blows'. Sublime to ridiculous, Briggs also wrote the childhood classic 'The Snowman'.