Forty years ago, a nuclear bomb went off in my living room. Or at least that’s how it felt as I watched the BBC film, Threads.
I was just 11 years old when I watched the two-hour drama, which is set in Sheffield. I looked on in growing dread as the kitchen-sink characters slowly realised that growing tensions between the US and Russia were going to go nuclear.
I could hardly breathe.
Then came the horrifying attacks, starting with the iconic scene of a woman wetting herself as she sees the mushroom cloud go up. Things only got worse from there as the film shows in grisly, graphic and relentless detail what the aftermath of a nuclear attack would mean for people and animals alike: agonising deaths, societal breakdown, sexual assault and vomiting galore.
I, too, threw up near the end and was speechless as the credits rolled.
I went to bed that night feeling absolutely terrified and devastated. This wasn’t science fiction or fanciful horror – this was something that could happen in real life.
Kids knew less in the 1980s than they do now because there was no internet or 24-hour media, but Threads had blown apart an innocence in me. It’s still the most terrifying thing I’ve ever seen.
The day after watching it, I woke up in a complete state. I found a screwdriver and started to unscrew the living room door so I could build a nuclear shelter in our cellar. I moved a torch and tinned food into the shelter area.
I kept picking up the phone and dialling the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) to find out how I could join but their line was busy for hours, no doubt dealing with other people like me.
I eventually got through. They took my address and sent me an information pack about nuclear war. I filled in the membership form and saved up to buy CND badges, with which I covered myself.
For the next few years I went full anti-nuclear activist: I co-founded a local Youth CND group, handed out leaflets on the high street, went to peace camps and joined ‘die in’ protests, where we laid down in the middle of the shopping centre, pretending to die to warn of the fallout from nuclear war.
I couldn’t understand why people were going about their usual business after what Threads had shown us. I trembled when the news came on. Whenever a plane flew overhead I’d look up to check it wasn’t a bomber. I felt sick a lot of the time.
The film has cast a (mushroom) cloud over my life ever since.
Although the unflinchingly gory second half of Threads is the most graphically memorable part, I think it’s actually the ominous, pre-attack first half that has haunted me most.
On 9/11, I got text messages from various friends checking in on me because they knew I didn’t need much to tip me back into that 1980s state of nuclear paranoia. Naturally, I was sure that a nuclear war would break out by the end of that awful week.
Scenes from the film also flashed through my mind at the start of the Covid pandemic. The panic buying, talk of lockdowns and mass deaths – it all seemed oddly familiar.
I worry a lot about things and my ability to assume the apocalyptic worst of any hiccup is Olympian. Even when my village gets a mild flood warning I start to think we might all die.
But much as Threads ruined my life, it’s also made my life. In just two hours at the age of 11 I learned so much of what we should all know about important things: the fragility and ugliness of life, the brutal truth of power and the people who wield it.
What a wake-up call. I’ll always be grateful for it.
These days, Threads is having something of a renaissance. A brilliant podcast called Atomic Hobo has broken it down in Four Minutes Of Threads episodes, resulting in 12 hours of unimprovable detail.
In a lively Facebook group called Threads Survivors, many of us whose lives were changed by the film swap experiences, memes and in-jokes about the goriest scenes, using humour to process our trauma.
You can even buy plastic figures of the film’s terrifying traffic warden, who stalked a tennis court of survivors with a gun. What was once horrific is now almost fun.
I wonder how I would have felt back in 1984 if someone had been able to show me that the Cold War would end in 1991 and there would be no nuclear war for the next 40 years at the very least. I expect I’d have asked: ‘Yeah… but what about after that?’
As I read the news each morning, with Putin and Netanyahu latest actions dissected, and Trump possibly returning to the White House within months, I fear that the rising global tensions will inevitably spill over into a nuclear conflict.
And I’m sometimes transported back into the little shoes of that trembling boy, who sat spellbound and terrified by that horrible, brilliant film, praying that it would never become reality.