As I sit writing this a BBC film from 1984 has just finished a repeat on BBC Four. Nothing unusual so far. When I tell you that as far as I know it is it’s first repeat, (at least I’ve not known it to be shown since)* then the story deepens slightly. I sat and watched it – on 23 September, 1984, I was 15 years old. I recorded it on a Sony VHS tape on a top load Hitachi VHS recorder. I remember this VERY clearly as if it were yesterday, rather than 40 years ago! I didn’t sleep much that night. Thoughts were spinning in my mind keeping me from sleep. Questions that a 15 year old shouldn’t be asking themselves. Would I survive living in a house without a cellar? Will my parents die? Would I be the one to have to put my grandmothers body in bin liners? Would we all be killed off by marauders? The thing is, these were very real questions – relevant questions. Not something from a fantasy film, something that may happen next week! The film is called Threads.
In what could loosely be called a docu-drama, it postulated what would happen if a nuclear bomb was detonated above Sheffield. Being British and made by a British company, indeed our main news supplier, it had punch. That same company at the same time was telling us about women protesting at nuclear war heads being stored at the American Air Force Base at Greenham Common. In my youth nuclear war seemed a very real possibility, and this showed frankly what it may well be like. It wasn’t pretty.
It’s never left me. Not only the film, but that night, the images. 40 years later I can still recall many images from the film, they are still in my brain. The bombs still exist. The madmen who may use them still exist. All be it, in a low lever background way, there is still a threat.
Every time I hear about how many seconds from midnight the nuclear clock may be, or Putin uttering the word nuclear, I go straight back to Threads.
I was fascinated to read/watch some of the press, including it’s effect on others.
BBC Article from the week Meta launched Threads
*Apparently it has been shown on two other occasions! How did I miss that?
S.H.O.U.T. 
I was the same age when I watched it on its original airing. Living in Sheffield, it certainly upped the ante seeing the places I knew and frequently visited being destroyed in an Armageddon!
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