- 2 days ago
Ahead of a rare rescreening of the BBC’s apocalyptic drama Threads, director and producer Mick Jackson looks back to 1984 and shares the story behind the creation of this acclaimed vision of Britain suffering the effects of nuclear war.
Taking Sheffield as the focal point for the aftermath, the film was highly praised for its examination of the social, economic and environmental damage that such a war would bring and has been described as one of the most haunting and unforgettable dramas of the 1980s.
This was broadcast on BBC Four for 15 minutes before a re-showing of Threads on the 9th of October 2024.
Taking Sheffield as the focal point for the aftermath, the film was highly praised for its examination of the social, economic and environmental damage that such a war would bring and has been described as one of the most haunting and unforgettable dramas of the 1980s.
This was broadcast on BBC Four for 15 minutes before a re-showing of Threads on the 9th of October 2024.
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00:00The
00:30Come on!
00:48Come on! I just passed out of it!
00:51Come on!
00:59Jesus Christ!
01:04My name is Mick Jackson. I'm the originator, producer and director of Threads,
01:09which I shot 40 years ago in 1984.
01:13The film deals with very unsettling events.
01:17It's the events leading up to passing through the outbreak of and the aftermath of a nuclear war,
01:25an exchange between the two superpowers between East and West.
01:29This time, they are playing with at best the destruction of life as we know it,
01:34and at worst, total annihilation.
01:37You cannot win a nuclear war!
01:40And basically, through this period, it traces the fate of a small group of people in the city of Sheffield,
01:48right in the heart of Britain.
01:50You never really see any generals or politicians, just this group of ordinary people, going through this.
01:56And that's what the movie is about. It's very explicit and very disturbing.
02:04In an odd and unsettling echo of today, the 1980s started with Russia invading a neighboring country.
02:11It was, in fact, Afghanistan.
02:13And it continued through there. The rhetoric between the East and West ramped up.
02:19The Russians shot down accidentally, they said, a Korean airliner full of passengers
02:25under the impression that it was an American spy plane.
02:28Reagan reacted by saying, this is an evil empire.
02:31The rhetoric just doubled and doubled and doubled.
02:34It's a period where the futurologists and strategists were actually starting to introduce the concept
02:41that you might be able to win a nuclear war, that you could prevail in a nuclear war.
02:45At that time, I was recently remarried, and my wife and I wanted to have kids.
02:51And we thought to ourselves, what the hell are we doing bringing kids into a world like this?
02:56Professionally, I was at the BBC as a senior producer, and I was hoping to get off the ground
03:01a new series of programs called QED, Popular Science, half an hour at a time.
03:06And the idea I had was a guide to Armageddon.
03:09Let's do a kind of computer report, like a wished report on fallout shelters, nuclear shelters.
03:16How well do they work? What's good value for money? What do they protect you from? And so on.
03:20And obviously, if you're going to do this, you need to say, well, what do they need to protect us from?
03:26And so I had to deal with what a nuclear weapon does. Heat, heat pulse affects the hazard on your skin,
03:34and on flammable things. Blast, the shock wave, what that does. And radiation, what the fallout does afterwards.
03:43Now, I decided I had to do this in a very powerful way, but not an explicit way.
03:47So I came up with a number of analogues, for example, talking about the effect of flying glass.
03:53As the pressure wave sweeps outwards from St Paul's, it shatters and bursts every window in the city,
03:58from the M4 services near Heathrow to Hornchurch in Essex, an area of 500 square miles.
04:05I actually shot a flying glass at a pumpkin, and you could see it ripping the flesh off.
04:10No, it doesn't take a lot to make the mental leap from that to what it was talking about.
04:21Anyway, the film was seen, and it's as scientific and as unpartisan as I could possibly make it.
04:28I had a citation for everything. I did a lot of research. And it went out, and lo and behold, people said,
04:34Wow, we're glad to know that. Thank you for telling us this is a really valuable contribution to the debate about nuclear weapons.
04:43But I'd done all this research. I'd spoken to, for that program, I'd spoken to agronomists, nuclear physicists, strategists, intelligence buffs,
04:53people who knew about climate, people who were investigative journalists.
04:59I had all this stuff in my head. And one of the things I had in my head that I hadn't been able to cover in that one program
05:05was, yes, heat, yes, blast, yes, radiation, and four, trauma.
05:11What are the psychological effects of all this happening to you?
05:14You know, people have studied the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and found that they were almost incapable of functioning
05:21because of what they had been through. And I thought, somehow I have to deal with this psychological,
05:27this kind of threat of societal collapse that seemed to be happening.
05:31And I talked to someone like Robert J. Lifton, an amazing psychologist who had studied the survivors of Hiroshima,
05:37and all this work was bubbling up in me. I went to the BBC and said,
05:42Look, I'm going to go and research this, but I think it needs a drama to get into people's emotions and emotional state.
05:48I'm going to propose taking a dramatist like Barry Hines,
05:53a very famous screenwriter who had written cares and looks and smiles,
05:57and a really kitchen sink approach to drama, but who had this amazing empathy
06:03and somebody described him, Tony Garnett described him as an angry man with the kind and sweet nature inside him,
06:11who was really a champion of ordinary people. He had a deep empathy and commitment and passion to them.
06:17And he would take a group of people living in one place, he lived near Sheffield in a suburb called Hoyland,
06:24so I thought, well, Sheffield wouldn't be a bad place. I had this little silly line to myself,
06:29it's bang in the middle of Britain. It's an industrial centre, there's a NATO air base nearby,
06:34and it's a communication centre, so that would be a natural target.
06:38So I rehearsed in my head this scenario. I went off to talk to even more scientists and read more stuff,
06:46and Barry started writing and I would feed stuff to him and we'd write it into the screenplay,
06:51and we came up with this thing, which was Threads.
06:54The government has taken control of British Airways and all cross-channel ferries.
06:59They say it's a temporary step to help move troops to Europe.
07:03Thousands are stranded at Heathrow and Gatwick.
07:07And the Royal Navy is to guard the North Sea oil rigs.
07:10The MOD says it's a prudent, precautionary measure.
07:13One of the principal things I consulted was this, it's called the effects of a nuclear weapon.
07:18It's one of the main nuclear weapons, the main repository of everything that the Americans had learned
07:25in all these nuclear tests in the Nevada desert and Pacific atolls.
07:28Everything is in here.
07:30They even gave you, in the back cover of this book, a little kind of computer, a little plastic thing.
07:36You could turn the plastic things here and it would tell you, you enter how many megatons or kilotons,
07:42you enter how far away you are, and it will tell you how big the fireball is,
07:46how deep the crater.
07:48Oh yes, and how fast you'll be travelling if you're thrown against a wall.
07:51Will your eardrums rupture? Yes, they will.
07:53Will your skin burn? Yes.
07:55How deep? Look up here.
07:57This thing contains everything that the laws of physics, the laws of nuclear weapons have.
08:02This was what I set against the families in Sheffield.
08:06This wasn't the voice of God. It wasn't an all-over view.
08:09You never saw any of that.
08:10You only saw these people trying to cope with this, with the irradiation,
08:15with the blast, with the heat, the burns, everything.
08:18Hanging in the atmosphere, the clouds of debris shut out the sun's heat and light.
08:23Across large areas of the northern hemisphere, it starts to get dark.
08:27It starts to get cold.
08:29I came up with this strange structure of having a drama, but there is a voice-over occasionally coming in,
08:35just to recite what I knew from my research, the laws of physics, what a nuclear weapon would do.
08:41Even in Britain, within days of the attack, it could fall to freezing or below for long, dark periods.
08:48Barry Hines loathed it, hated it.
08:51He said to me, we had a very tempestuous relationship as he was writing it, and I was working with him on the structure of it.
08:57He said, what does this have to do with a drama?
09:00I had never had this with Ken Loach. I never had to do this thing.
09:03And I said, no, that's what makes it different. That's what makes it work.
09:08It has to be studiously scientific, and that has to be the backbone of it.
09:13And it's almost sadistic, but you put these people through whatever the laws of nature say, whatever the laws of physics,
09:19you burn them, you throw them against things, and they have to cope with it.
09:23This is a way of telling the story. That turned out to be right.
09:27We'll have to cut their rations. I've worked it out there.
09:311,000 calories for manual workers and 500 for the rest.
09:35500? 500? That wouldn't keep a flea alive.
09:40Should we be bothering to keep anybody alive if they can't work?
09:43A lot of people are going to die anyway.
09:46Back to survival of the fittest, I suppose.
09:49They gave me a tiny budget.
09:52I had 17 days to shoot at the end of the world, basically, in two hours,
09:56which prevented a kind of guerrilla warfare.
10:00The idea was, you know, if you've never seen a nuclear weapon explode,
10:04if nuclear war is something so completely outside your experience as a human being,
10:10how do you think about it?
10:12What decisions do you make about who to support?
10:14If you don't have a vocabulary in your head for what it will do,
10:18how can you think about it? It's thinking the unthinkable.
10:21I thought, well, I'm a scientist.
10:23I know how to read textbooks. I know how to read scientific papers.
10:26I have a visual imagination in my spare time. I'm a painter.
10:29Let me give the public watching this a visual vocabulary,
10:34a series of images that, once you see them,
10:36you can't get them out of your head. You can't unsee them.
10:39Mandy! Mandy!
10:47The camera work was amazing.
10:49Andrew Dunn, the cameraman, for one shot,
10:51tracking Ruth, this leading character, through the ruins,
10:54had to walk backwards through smoke and flames and over rubble,
10:59not knowing what he was getting
11:00because he couldn't see anything through the viewfinder,
11:02but knowing that it would be good and we could use it.
11:05The government announcements that you hear in this movie are real,
11:14and you may be familiar with them from watching Panorama
11:17when the bomb drops.
11:18Somebody got hold of these things,
11:20which were pre-recorded and pre-made,
11:22that were only to be used in the immediate run-up to a nuclear war.
11:26They're chilling.
11:27If anyone dies while you are kept in your fallout room,
11:31move the body to another room in the house.
11:34Label the body with name and address
11:37and cover it as tightly as possible in polythene, paper, sheets or blankets.
11:43The narrator is saying in a very bland voice,
11:45if someone dies in your house, put them in a plastic sack
11:50and number it and name it and put it in a place in the garden
11:53and mark it with a stick.
11:55That's chilling. That's chilling.
11:58If, however, you have had a body in the house for more than five days,
12:03and if it is safe to go outside,
12:07then you should bury the body for the time being in a trench
12:10or cover it with earth and mark the spot of the burial.
12:13I had to make this film on a shoestring budget
12:16and I had to use every trick in the book
12:19to shoot it like a documentary.
12:20If something was in the way, we had to be ingenious,
12:23cover it up, throw a tarpaulin over it,
12:25shove gravel or cement dust or something over it.
12:28The designer drove a Porsche and he opened up the back.
12:30He used to arrive on the set with sand shoveled into the back.
12:33So if anything was destroyed by the nuclear war,
12:37we'd shovel sand over it or gravel and throw rubble over it.
12:41Amazingly, for such a dark subject, everybody was on board.
12:46All the extras that we got in Sheffield, the cast, the crew,
12:51pulled out everything to make sure this worked.
12:54However hard it was to do and how difficult it was to do,
12:57Karen Ma went through the birth scene in a deserted balm
13:01with an Alsatian dog barking at her without any qualms at all.
13:14She has to bite through the umbilical cord.
13:16I'm giving away kind of spoilers here.
13:19We were near the Bassett's Licorice Allsorts factory in Sheffield
13:23and they made us an umbilical cord out of licorice
13:27and covered it with goo and stuff.
13:31This is what you do when you have the passion to make a movie,
13:44but you don't have the money to make it.
13:46I used all kinds of shortcuts,
13:49bits of stock footage here and bits of stock footage there.
13:52Everybody on the set had a great time.
13:55This sounds terrible, but we did.
13:57We all knew that we were doing something which was very dark
14:00and very explicit and very terrible.
14:02And that kind of sense of purpose united everybody.
14:05So I hope when you see the movie,
14:08if you see it for the first time,
14:10you recognize that this is done with commitment and passion,
14:14but it's the passion that disguises itself as dispassion.
14:17That voice that tells you this is what fallout is doing
14:21at this particular moment is a cool, cold voice.
14:25It has no commitment to those characters.
14:28It's just saying, this will happen.
14:30And you see that happening to these poor people
14:33and it's horrifying, but because you want them to survive,
14:37you desperately want them to survive,
14:39you're with them and you stick through really upsetting scenes
14:44because of that.
15:11The movie went out.
15:12I watched it go out on television,
15:14waited for the phone to ring.
15:16There's a kind of convention in the BBC
15:18that your colleagues support you.
15:20They give you a morale boost.
15:22When one of your programs or movies or whatever it is goes out,
15:25they call you up immediately afterwards
15:27and they either say, amazing, you really nailed it.
15:29That was amazing.
15:30Or they say, and it's kind of code word,
15:32well, you made some interesting, brave choices there,
15:35which is kind of code for it sucked.
15:37The phone didn't ring and the phone didn't ring
15:39and I just sat there totally dejected.
15:42I switched the set off.
15:44And it wasn't until the next morning
15:46that I was told that very few people who'd seen it
15:50went to bed that night.
15:52They'd just sat there in their chairs thinking about it,
15:56maybe afraid to go to sleep for those dreams that would come.
16:00Some people I know saw it as kids.
16:03They weren't supposed to see it.
16:04They were sent to bed and they peeked round doors
16:07and I saw this thing which stayed with them until they were adult
16:11and then they told other people.
16:13It gave people a way of thinking about the unthinkable,
16:17a way of reacting when someone says,
16:19oh, you can escalate in order to deescalate,
16:22the other side will back off.
16:23Or what if they don't?
16:24Well, you escalate them all.
16:25Every time a politician used that kind of language,
16:28they would think of the images in threads.
16:32I think everybody's familiar by now with the iconic image
16:37of the traffic warden with bandages on his face
16:39and a machine gun over his shoulder,
16:41which is on the cover of Radio Times
16:43and all the publicity for the movie.
16:45People seem to, to my great surprise and bemusement,
16:48have latched onto this figure.
16:51I can see why I think, you know,
16:53the holes cut in the bandages for the eyes,
16:56it's almost like a death set,
16:58it's like a death's mask over the face.
17:01And you can't really see much except for the very grim set lips.
17:05It's like Freddy Krueger,
17:07it's like the villain in a horror movie
17:10and a machine gun over his shoulder.
17:12It's a very menacing image
17:14and I can see now why everybody went on this search
17:18to try and find the actor.
17:19The extra who played the traffic warden was a traffic warden,
17:22which was great and it must have occurred to the producers,
17:25the assistant directors and so on,
17:27this was a man who comes with his own costume.
17:29It's a saving on the budget.
17:32Nuclear war in this movie,
17:34and I think it makes it clear and I hope it makes it clear,
17:36is not a one-off event that then is over.
17:40In a nuclear war, it just goes on.
17:43There isn't any day after,
17:44there's the day after that and after that,
17:46and it goes on and on and on.
17:49And you'll see, watching this film,
17:52what that on looks like.
17:54And it's not particularly encouraging.
17:57If you watch this,
17:59there will be many things that make you uncomfortable,
18:01but they won't make you, I think, squirm,
18:03and they will help you understand what it is
18:06that you didn't know all these years.
18:08And hopefully,
18:09when you hear someone talking about a game of nuclear chicken,
18:13when you hear someone saying,
18:15we're going to release on you fire and fury
18:18like the world has never seen,
18:20you will remember some of these images from Threads,
18:22and that will give you pause
18:24and give you cause to hold people accountable
18:26and say, back off, back off.
18:30Because of Threads,
18:31I got to do a thing for Channel 4,
18:33not on the BBC,
18:34called A Very British Coup,
18:35which was quite successful,
18:36and various people saw that.
18:37Gary Oldman saw it and he said,
18:39would you like to direct me in this movie Chattahoochee,
18:42which I said, yes,
18:44it was my first feature,
18:45taken out of this realm of British broadcasting.
18:48Steve Martin's producer saw it and said,
18:51would you come and direct LA Story for Steve for us?
18:55Kevin Costner saw LA Story and said,
18:57would you come and direct The Bodyguard
18:59with Whitney Houston and me?
19:01I mean, that's putting it very simply,
19:03but it was a kind of rolling thing,
19:05one damn thing after another,
19:07I never expected to happen.
19:08But with all that,
19:09with that commercial success and critical success,
19:11and a lot of things that don't count,
19:14I still feel prouder of this movie
19:16than anything I've ever done.
19:18or whatever I readily iceberg don.
19:20you
19:21I can't afford it.
19:23I never, you know,
19:24I never thought I'd have ever done.
19:27You
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