'Threads': Nuclear War on the BBC Quiz

Answer: Sheffield

It was set in Sheffield, still an important steel manufacturing centre in the early 1980s and therefore a prime target.

Answer: Joiner

All honest working-class trades, of course. The Kemps are quickly established as a solid working-class family, in contrast to the middle-class Becketts.

Answer: Iran

The war starts after a presumably pro-Western coup in Iran leads to an invasion by USSR forces. The build up to the nuclear exchange is superbly handled, always in the background in news broadcasts or background conversations, as things begin to run away from the politicians' control and gradually spill into the everyday lives of the ordinary people.

Answer: Wartime Controller

And I quote: 'If it should suddenly become necessary, he can be given full powers of internal government'. Sadly Mr Sutton had little training or preparation for the task that was dropped in his lap. The first forty minutes of the drama show him struggling to catch up with a job that he wasn't trained equipped or prepared for.

Answer: Fire engines deployed to safety

At 10.30 p.m. on Wednesday May 25th, the fire engines of the Sheffield Brigade are deployed to safety. For me, the convoy of silent vehicles moving slowly out of their fire station was one of the most powerful images of the first half of the film, a warning that events had got out control and there was only one outcome left.

Answer: Above the North Sea

The first warhead to detonate is an EMP generator, intended to send out an electro-magnetic pulse which wipes out most of the UK's communication as well as a lot of other unshielded devices, from transmission cables all the way down to an electric iron on an ironing board. Two minutes later the first ICBM detonates over RAF Finningley, 17 miles from Sheffield.

The pulse also wipes out post-1975 vehicles' starter motors, hence the last we see of Jimmy Kemp is him desperately trying to start the works' Transit van and then running off in a vain attempt to find Ruth.

Answer: 210 megatons

The UK gets 7% of the entire throw weight of the exchange. It is, in short, bombed off the map.

Answer: Mr and Mrs Kemp

To our certain knowledge, only Mr and Mrs Kemp survive the first attack, although Mrs Kemp is terribly burned and dies three days later. Michael, the youngest, is buried by debris in the Kemps' back yard where he had hid in Jimmy's aviary. Allison and Jimmy are just never seen again, presumably caught in the open by the one megaton airburst and killed more or less instantly.

Answer: Beaten to death by looters

In the more prosperous suburbs, away from the blast (and probably sheltered by one of Sheffield's many hills) the Becketts survive the initial attack in much better shape than the Kemps. However, with the structure of law and order gone, they are as vulnerable to looters as anyone.

Answer: 1000 calories

The ration scale set by the Chief Medical Officer is 1000 calories per manual worker, 500 calories for everyone else. As the script itself puts it,
'In the grim economics of the aftermath, there are two harsh realities. A survivor who can work gets more food than one who can't, and the more who die, the more food is left for the rest'.

Answer: A cemetery

In a grimly appropriate touch, he is last seen (in a black and white still photo) propped against a gravestone, dead. Except for the foetus growing inside of Ruth, the entire Kemp family is now dead.

Answer: Buxton

Ruth is just one of the thousands of Sheffield refugees that have made the nightmare twenty mile trek without food or clean water to the small Derbyshire spa town. Although assigned living quarters with three other refugees, she is thrown out by the house owner and left to have her baby, a girl named Jane, somewhere in the wasteland on the skirts of the ruined city.

Answer: Words and Pictures

Ruth has died of exhaustion, not much older than thirty. Jane has been collected with a class of other orphans. We have the feeling that Jane may not be quite 'right' in her mental development as we watch her trying to understand the distorted pictures of a school's TV programme on video. The play script is very certain on this point. Amongst other effects, radiation damage can cause mental retardation in unborn children.

Later, in a very symbolic scene, we see her and the other orphans picking apart old clothes for their threads.

Answer: We never find out

We never see. The last scene is of Jane, recoiling with horror from the bloody cloth containing whatever she has given birth to. The screen freezes, the credits roll and the most frightening drama ever screened by the BBC ends.

Answer: Johnny B Goode

We hear 'Johnny B Goode' twice within Threads; at the start, in Jimmy's car as he sits with Ruth, and just before the end, as pregnant Jane staggers through a semi-deserted ruined town looking for a doctor. It serves as a reminder that the happy, hopeful prewar world is the same one as the post apocalyptic nightmare we find at the end.