Revisiting Threads 40 years on: How a BBC classic explored the chilling reality of nuclear war

The story spools out from two Sheffield families, caught up in the drama of an unexpected pregnancy. Around them, radio, television and print news speak of a conflict building overseas.

This ramps up slowly, then quickly, and after 47 minutes the unthinkable happens. But rather than the film ending with a bomb, it continues, showing what could happen to the people left behind.

My documentary Reweaving Threads, 40 Years On tells how this film came to be made by a brave BBC at the height of the Cold War.

I first saw it in 1999 on a dusty video, when its story felt like ancient history. I’ve spent this summer scouring the BBC TV and radio vaults to find reactions from the time and its influence since, to a backdrop of conflict in the Middle East and building tensions between the US and Russia.

Chillingly, it feels like the right time to assess the film’s legacy.

I also interview cast, crew, academics and politicians about Thread’s creation and legacy. Reece Dinsdale, who played main character Jimmy Kemp, was a particular highlight. A theatre actor who became a well-known face on TV in shows like Home to Roost and Waterloo Road, he’s now a director, currently working on Emmerdale for ITV.

"We were all aware that we were living under the threat of a nuclear war," he says, recalling that time and his motivations for taking the role. "I don’t think anyone could escape it."

Now 65, he remembers filming the early pub scenes – one where Jimmy’s girlfriend Ruth (Karen Meagher) announces her pregnancy – and running through the streets of Sheffield after the nuclear blast, to the safety of home, we hope.

"Barry Hines cleverly got you on board with these two kids – you go on this journey with them, and you like them," Dinsdale says.

Hines even made Jimmy a bird-lover like Billy Casper, Kes’s lead character. After the blast, Ruth finds Jimmy’s bird handbook in the rubble and carries it with her, one of many heartbreaking reminders of the world that once was.

I also spent time in Sheffield at the university where Barry Hines worked and where his fascinating archives are kept, poring over early versions of scripts, reams of reviews and international reactions (Threads was also picked up for broadcast in the US and Canada).

I also go to shopping district The Moor, which features in arguably the film’s most famous scene. As war sirens wail, panicked extras run around and a pram sits upturned in an echo of the famous shot from Sergei Eisenstein’s 1925 silent epic Battleship Potemkin.

A mushroom cloud rises in the distance and an edit suggests one woman in a doorway urinating in fear. The ordinary faces in the crowd only make the terror more real.

Author Catherine Taylor also tells me of her time on set. A teenage CND activist in 1984, she responded to an advert in the Sheffield Star newspaper asking for film extras, and went with a friend who wanted "to meet some boys, essentially", she laughs.

In the film, she is in one scene of a thronging CND demonstration outside Sheffield City Hall, attended by the pregnant Ruth, and another after the bomb has dropped where she had to lie on the floor, with hundreds of others, and pretend to be dead.

She still vividly remembers watching Threads on TV 40 Septembers ago. "I remember going into town a few days afterwards, surprised that Sheffield was still standing."

Along with so many of my interviewees, she also thinks Threads is an essential watch today. Why? "When the so-called superpowers are set on an obstacle course that can’t be won, and when ordinary humanity is obviously going to be just swept away as a result of that, we have to pay attention."

The film certainly made so many people do that back in 1984 – and still has the power to do so now.

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