Threads anniversary: Why chilling BBC drama filmed in Sheffield still cuts so deep 40 years later

“There’s nothing a 40 year old film can throw at me that I can’t handle,” I thought. “What was shocking in the 80s will be tame in 2024.”

I was ready to admit I was wrong even in the first 30 minutes, even when the chest-tightening, mounting dread was confined to fictional escalating news reports of an escalating war and the simple, suppressed fear on the faces of citizens who know ‘something’s up.’

Then I was shown a mushroom cloud framed by The Moor - a street I walk down every day - and realised I had just gone cold all over.

Today, Monday, September 23, marks the 40th anniversary of when Threads debuted on BBC2 in 1984 and shocked the world.

Released at the height of the Cold War, it was the nightmare-inducing TV drama that has haunted its viewers for decades with a simple premise - what might happen if Britain was destroyed in a nuclear war?

‘It has left a smouldering mark’

It was a unprecedented two hours of media for all - but as a film set in our own city of Sheffield, it has left a smouldering mark on the Steel City’s people.

The story follows a handful of ordinary faces in a crisis no one should see - young lovers Ruth and Jimmy who otherwise had a typical life ahead of them, a city councillor tasked with emergency wartime decisions, a number of parents absurdly wearing waistcoats and aprons in the apocalypse - all as the viewer is coldly informed by a documentarian narrator of the megatons that have fallen, the rising death tolls, the collapse of food production, the brutality of ad-hoc governments deciding only those who can work deserve food.

It was hearing the accents of our grief stricken cast that hurt me the most. Threads is not just set in Sheffield, but stars hundreds of Steel City folk, and arguably the city itself is in the starring role. We see its day-to-day domestic dramas unspool as doomsday looms, then we hear how Nether Edge, Stocksbridge, Abbeydale and Totley have fallen to pieces as the crisis unfolds - then, unbearably, our Sheffield is all reduced to rebar, rubble and fire.

I had so many presumptions about this film. For one I thought it was a story about the havoc caused by a single bomb, famously landing at 8.37am on May 26, 1984, AKA ‘Threads Day.’

So I believe I felt the same lurch of horror as the characters as a second roaring boom marked another warhead detonating, then another. And I realised this was not a story about a bomb hitting Britain, but the loss of the whole world in a nuclear war - just set in Sheffield.

So many films considered ‘bleak’ or ‘dark’ pull their punches. Grapes of Wrath defends the resilience of human spirit. Children of Men carries the one-in-a-billion hope our species may not be entirely doomed. Disaster films end as soon as the crisis does. I waited and waited for Threads to show how humanity endures and, that no matter what, all will be well.

‘Nothing to soften the raw sadness’

It isn’t that kind of film. There’s nothing to soften the raw sadness writer Barry Hines and director Mick Jackson have imagined.

Nothing can alleviate the sheer bleakness of a woman crying desperately as she tries to mill grain with a tin can as the only means to feed her child. Of two aging parents, slowly losing their minds and strength in a ‘shelter’ made of a couple of stacked mattresses in their blasted house, admitting they wish they had died and not their children. There’s no release in the infamous scene of main character Ruth wandering the streets of a destroyed Sheffield and the gallery of ruined survivors she sees.

Phrases from the film keep coming back to me - “Most of the windows in Britain are broken.” “I don't care about this baby anymore.” A councillor in a bunker saying: “I've got starving mobs in Sharrow, Ecclesfield...”

And this all ends with no assurance the world will recover. The final 20 minutes of the film focus on the period 5, 10, 15 years after the attack. They were almost easier to watch as it had passed into the realm of science fiction. It shows Britons reduced to rag-wearing medieval peasantry in a nuclear winter, where children speak broken, guttural English (”Gizzit! Ruth, work. Work. Babby comin’.”), and the final seconds suggest infertility will wipe out whoever is left in a generation. It is truly a film without hope.

I had to watch this film for work purposes. Maybe I can take this up with my union for the damage it’s done.

I’ve written today about how ruinously effective Threads portrays the inevitable horror of nuclear weapons and its ability to seed disturbing thoughts in your mind forever. Ask any of the Sheffield schoolchildren who stayed up to watch it debut 40 years ago.

‘Everyone must see it’

But now it’s done, I’m of the opinion everyone must see it, from ordinary citizens to world leaders.

The fear of nuclear armageddon loomed much larger in the general consciousness when Threads first aired 40 years ago.

But with the Ukraine-Russia war and the Israel-Palestine conflict still raging, the danger of nuclear warfare has not gone away.

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Threads really brought home to many people just what that would mean for humanity. It did so by showing people we know and recognise, on streets we have walked, facing the terror of a nuclear blast.

But the most chilling thought you were left with was that you might be one of the survivors, coping with unimaginable grief amid the wreckage, while civilisation as we know it unspools around you.

That’s why, four decades down the line, Threads still cuts so deep and has lost none of its raw power.