The Seminal 1984 Drama Threads Is Getting A Rerun On BBC 4 And IPlayer Tonight At 22:00.

BBC

Threads: How the nuclear bomb drama horrified Sheffield extras

One of the most terrifying programmes ever shown on British television, Threads is the nuclear apocalypse docudrama that continues to haunt

The seminal 1984 drama Threads is getting a rerun on BBC 4 and iPlayer tonight at 22:00.

This has always been one of those line in the sand dramas: you had to be there to 'get it', did you see it when it aired, did it scare you to your bones because it - at the end of the cold war with its brinkmanship and rhetoric - still seemed one breath away from becoming reality. The city chosen to play out this nighmare as drama was Sheffield, more recently the home base and setting for Jodie Whittaker's Doctor Who.

This is the fear my generation grew up with, and Threads made it... oh so real. I was 10. I saw it change the minds - overnight - of complacent adults who were sure "we" would "win" a nuclear conflict. That having US nuclear bases on our soil meant - insanely - that we were "safe", not an ideological target as well as a strategic one.

I lived in a first-strike target area, surrounded by UK and US airbases and MOD admin facilities. I grew up knowing that too. Gasping when jets scrambled and shook the windows with a sonic boom, wondering if this was it. Knowing I'd be wiped off the map if someone in a cushy office somewhere in the stratosphere of international politics blinked. And I was grateful to know that I wouldn't survive that first wave, because that was not a tomorrow I ever wanted to live to see. At 10, I knew that like cold, hard comfort. The generation who'd weathered the Cuban missile crisis - my parents among them - had grown numb to it.

Threads made everyone see what it would be like to survive the first wave, and that the standard advice to shelter in place and wait for official assistance and the resumption of normal services was the wizard behind the curtain. Showmanship, propaganda, misdirection - not reality.

It's history now and Threads is an important piece of the historical archive. Important in entertainment history in a way few other TV dramas can boast. Everyone who saw it remembers it, and remembers the next day when we all had to look each other in the eye, scared and humbled. That's history too. But nuclear attack is only ever a couple of power-crazed autocrats surrounded by yes-people - or even just some badly maintained technology and a miscommunication - away from becoming all our tomorrows. My home is no longer a first-strike target. I'd live to see that unthinkable tomorrow.

'Influential' isnt even the word for Threads. It changed a nation's mindset in one, brutal, educational strike. Drama matters. Threads, nightmare that it was, is one of the reasons I'm so, so passionate about stories.

❝martha, where are you?—❞

Imagine if I made a whole Supernatural Tarot Deck

Lesser-known steps of the writing process:

Finding all the paragraphs where you used some hyper-specific word more than once

Rearranging paragraphs that you swear you wrote in the right order but turned out to be totally backwards

Going for a walk, coming up with the perfect line, and forgetting it as soon as you get home and open your laptop

Creating a separate document where you can dump all of those nice sentences that no longer fit in anywhere

Waking up in a cold sweat because so-and-so was supposed to be barefoot but never actually took his shoes off

Forgive me if this doesn't make sense but

Dean understands himself. He is not drowning in internalized homophobia. He doesn't not know that he's into men. What Dean is, however, is a liar. He lies to everyone, all the time. I think this touches on the queer experience in a way we dont always see in media. We always talk about coming out and coming out scenes but why never talk about why we come out. It's because of how difficult the lying is. But deans lied about everything, all his life. Not just about his sexuality, or things related to hunting. But he lies (directly or by ommission) about the music he likes, the clothes he likes, literally everything, just to fit into this box of what everyone expects him to be. He understands himself, you just don't have the critical thinking skills to see past his lies, you take his word at face value even though the show has told you repeatedly that dean is a liar

There's got to be some fandoms/ships you hate? Come on...

Why would I waste my energy on hating fictional things? I just avoid the ones I don't like and save my energy for enjoying the ones I do.