Like the BBC’s earlier The War Game, Threads is scary in a way that commercial channels can only dream of.  It has a bureaucratic public information feel that other broadcasters would have replaced with emotional spectacle.

Of course, Threads still has it’s big moments, with a mushroom cloud over Sheffield and soldiers shooting looters in the streets, but it’s the local-ness of it all that kills you; the emergency committee trying to manage the civic fallout and the iconic image of the armed Traffic Warden working alongside soldiers.  The core of Threads is the very British terror that we already know how shit the local council is at getting the bins collected so lord knows what’ll happen if the bomb drops.