The BBC has uploaded A Guide To Armageddon, an earlier Mick Jackson piece that is just as terrifying as his later nuclear war film, Threads. Directed by Mick Jackson, 1984’s Threads terrified a generation of British TV viewers. First airing in 1984, at a point when the Cold War was again at its height, the ... Before Threads, Mick Jackson made an equally terrifying film about nuclear armageddon
The BBC has uploaded A Guide To Armageddon, an earlier Mick Jackson piece that is just as terrifying as his later nuclear war film, Threads.
Directed by Mick Jackson, 1984’s Threads terrified a generation of British TV viewers. First airing in 1984, at a point when the Cold War was again at its height, the BBC film provided an unsparing account of what the UK might look like if it were subjected to a nuclear missile strike.
Shot on a budget of just £250,000, Threads ambitiously laid out a plausible political landscape for the conflict, then demonstrated the impact the results would have on ordinary people – the radiation sickness, the hunger, the total collapse of the social fabric. It was, in short, harrowing.
Even the US equivalent, ABC’s TV movie The Day After (1983), as effective as it was in changing then-President Ronald Reagan’s hawkish attitude to the Cold War, couldn’t match Threads for sheer grimness.
Threads wasn’t Mick Jackson’s first comment on the terrifying power of the nuclear bomb, however. In 1982, he made the 30-minute documentary A Guide To Armageddon, which aired on the BBC as part of its Q.E.D science strand. Less widely discussed than Jackson’s later, feature-length work, it’s similarly well made and researched – and just as terrifying.
Like Threads, A Guide To Armageddon takes a withering look at what a nuclear strike would do to ordinary people. War has broken out, and a bomb drops in the middle of London. St Pauls, at the epicentre of the blast, is instantly vapourised, Ludovic Kennedy’s crisp, eerily matter-of-fact narration says. Atomic rays incinerate everything they touch; at Battersea Dogs Home, some four miles away, the heat is strong enough to liquify the metal on cars and buses.
Writing as well as directing, Jackson uses a mix of graphics, miniature effects, still photos and stock footage and narration to provide the same nauseating level of detail that he later brought to Threads.
“At the shops in Holland Park Avenue, the effect on directly exposed flesh is the same,” a sample line goes. “It behaves like meat in the butcher’s window. Animal fats melt and burn. Tissues are charred to black carbon…”
It’s horrifying stuff, compounded by the anxiety-inducing sound of strings, the howls of nuclear gales and sudden blankets of deathly silence. Remarkably, Jackson went on to enjoy a successful career in Hollywood, where he made the entirely upbeat films L.A. Story, The Bodyguard and more besides. Perhaps the one-two punch of A Guide To Armageddon and Threads was more than enough despair for one lifetime.
Jackson’s documentary owes its existence, in part, to an earlier BBC film, The War Game, directed by Peter Watkins in 1965. Like Guide and Threads, it depicted the terrifying aftermath of a nuclear strike. Highly regarded at the time, The War Game even won an Oscar for Best Documentary feature, but for a complicated mixture of reasons, the BBC never aired it on television.
Over a decade later, with east-west tensions again threatening to boil over, Jackson – then a producer – pitched A Guide To Armageddon.
“With some trepidation, the BBC let me make [a documentary] on a very small budget and they thought…this may be a way of getting them out of this awful bind they were in about The War Game,” Jackson told Vice in 2018. “They could do this and portray it as a politically neutral, factually based issue which was of concern to people.”
Jackson’s research for the documentary led directly to his longer work on Threads.
A Guide To Armageddon initially aired on the 26th May 1982, safely after the watershed at 9:50 in the evening. Incredibly, though, the documentary was shown again two years later at around two in the afternoon. Your humble writer, who was about seven years old at the time, happened to see it – and the images of flying glass slashing through the flesh of pumpkins and faces stricken by radiation sickness gave me nightmares for days afterwards.
As upsetting as its images were, Jackson’s Guide has an important point to make. At the time, the British government had produced a number of leaflets that gave citizens supposed advice on what to do in the event of a nuclear attack. Point by point, Jackson coldly lays out how inadequate that advice actually is.
Here, we’re introduced to Joy and Eric – a young, jazzily-dressed couple who own a three-storey house in Finsbury Park. (That a young couple can even afford to buy a house in London ages the documentary somewhat, but that’s by-the-by.)
The couple follows the advice in the Protect And Survive pamphlet published a couple of years earlier. They dutifully collect buckets of water, then build a makeshift shelter using some dismantled doors and some luggage to shield themselves from the blast’s worst effects.
Jackson’s verdict on this advice is enough to still the blood.
“There may be fires in unprotected houses nearby,” the narrator says, “but Joy and Eric should survive… at least, for at least 17 seconds.”
We then see footage of their terrace being thoroughly flattened.
Other safety measures are explored and then dismissed as inadequate: the construction of a shelter in a garden takes days, requires space, heavy labour and money. Once it’s finished, it’s liable to fill up with groundwater, and would likely collapse if the nuclear warhead detonated less than six miles away from its location.
An elaborate-looking indoor bunker – a kit comprising metal and a large pile of housebricks – proves to be more resilient, but would still leave its occupants essentially trapped in a hot, suffocating cage. Probably with the remains of their house collapsed on top of it.
The point of the documentary isn’t to make audiences despair, however. Rather, it’s a quite angry demonstration of how useless the government’s Cold War preparations actually were. The assorted pamphlets and leaflets made the nuclear threat seem almost benign; a nasty act of god that could be survived, much like a tornado or the Blitz.
A Guide To Armageddon calmly shatters these delusions. Nuclear conflict isn’t something that could be muddled through with a bit of DIY and British fortitude; in all likelihood, it would mean the end of all of us.
Through this terrifying documentary and his later, more celebrated Threads, Jackson puts the onus back on the people in power who commissioned all those pamphlets. It isn’t up to us to build fragile bunkers or whitewash our windows; it’s up to the world’s leaders to do their jobs and protect us from the unthinkable.
As Jackson chillingly concludes, “When, after two weeks, you crawl out of your trench or your concrete bunker, it could be that your real problems will just be beginning.”
The BBC has now uploaded A Guide To Armageddon to its archive on YouTube. It’s still, we’d argue, a powerful piece of documentary filmmaking. You have been warned.
