Threads: How the nuclear bomb drama horrified Sheffield extras

A week after Threads was broadcast, the television review programme Did You See sought a range of views from people with a professional interest in the subject.

Bruce Kent of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament felt that “at the end it could have given people a bit more positive direction about the sorts of things they could actually do”.

Military strategist Air Vice-Marshall Stewart Menaul remained sceptical about the programme’s claims.

He said: “Let me emphasise straight away, nobody is going to start chucking 5,000 megatons around this planet. Nobody, neither the Russians, the Americans, the British, the French, or anybody else. It will simply never happen.”

One of those who watched the film at a formative age was Black Mirror writer Charlie Brooker, who was 13 in 1984.

He told Desert Island Discs in 2018: “I remember watching Threads and not being able to process what that meant; not understanding how society kept going.”

He added: “I assumed it [nuclear war] was going to happen and I think in the 1980s it did seem like that was going to happen.”

While the world has changed in so many ways since Threads was first broadcast, it retains its harrowing power.