TRASHFUTURE - *PREVIEW* Britainology 94: Threads (1984) feat. Jamie Allerton

Episode Date: November 23, 2024

  For this month's first Britainology, we've decided to watch a sunny, optimistic film from 1984 called THREADS. You may have heard of it—it's a slice-of-life kitchen sink drama set in Sheffield, except a nuclear war breaks out between the US and the Soviet Union, resulting in a total and complete apocalypse. It is... harrowing to say the least, but we tried to find something interesting to say about it.   Check out more from Jamie here! Get the whole episode on Patreon here! MILO ALERT Check out Milo’s UK Tour here: https://miloedwards.co.uk/live-shows TRASHFUTURE LIVE SHOW ALERT We will be live in London at Between the Bridges on Sunday, November 24! Get tickets here. Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and November (@postoctobrist)

It's unclear exactly how old they're supposed to be. I mean, I would guess like maybe like 20. They're kind of like adults, but very young. And yeah, we get the scene of them at the fingering valley or whatever. And then it just got, it turns out that she's pregnant. And we get this whole conversation between the boy and his parents

about how they're gonna keep the baby. And then his like teenage sister comes down and starts like rinsing him. And then the mom is like, what have I told you? Stop being rude. Preteen brother overhears the conversation and asks what's an abortion. They're like, no, don't, don't ask questions. Just play your game. And I'm like, it's the opposite of the problem today. It's like the, the, the preteens weren't looking at enough screens

in 1984. And so they were asking really uncomfortable questions. Um, you know, in fact it bothers the character Jimmy so much he can't even eat his, I don't want to call it a grim dinner, but it's chips and reheated frozen peas so it doesn't exactly seem like the most exciting dinner. So that would have been a Wednesday in the Sheffield I think, because we do follow a certain pattern in the North. You have your fish and chips on a Friday, you roast on a Sunday. So yeah, that dated to Wednesday, frozen peas and chips on a Friday, you roast on a Sunday. So yeah, that dated to Wednesday, frozen peas and chips.

Yeah. And that's why they're called Sheffield Wednesday, because they always serve frozen peas and chips in the stands. And they do keep the peas still frozen. They're not cooked. I mean, I would say that, you said that you can see every pound of this. I actually, I don't know, like there's an element to which some of the footage is dated in the sense that they did what they could with the effects they had at the time. But I actually was kind of impressed by a lot of the props and special effects given that budget. And also it didn't look anywhere near as cheesy.

I didn't think the acting was bad. It just seemed very... To me, at least, it just seemed very meant to seem like Quot, quotidian, like really, it was supposed to seem really slice of life. And yeah, so basically, young couple getting married, it's the plot of the squeeze song up the junction, except something really bad is gonna happen in the second verse. It takes a bit of a turn. Squeeze B-side. Yeah, yeah.

Do you think he's using it as a metaphor? It's like the idea of being a young man in your 20s and then being told you have to get married by a place and settle down because you're having a kid. It's like, that's your nuclear war. I was trying to think of how... It's the end of life as you know. I was trying to think about how Chris Difford would rhyme, I never thought it would happen with nuclear war in Iran and I can't really do it on the fly but yeah, there's something there.

And then in parallel to this plotline, we also have the chief executive of Sheffield City Council, which is, I have to say, this plotline is extremely giving the movie Cumbernauld hit that we watched for TF years ago. In this, I don't know, Jamie, have you ever come across this? No. So the government made a movie to promote the Glasgow concrete suburb of Cumbernauld, like in the 60s, as like a model, like the suburb of the future. Oh, I'm already invested in this, so that's why I haven't seen it. I don't need it. I'm

what I am. Yeah, okay. And so, yeah, they built this kind of like... It's like what people thought the future would be like in the 50s or 60s. That's kind of what Cumbernauld looks like. And they basically made a fictional spy thriller movie set in Cumbernauld called Cumbernauld Hit with the idea that it would promote these kind of new towns they were building in the UK and You get all these scenes at like Glasgow City Council and also in like Glasgow University. They're like, there's a problem. We're going to get the boffins of Glasgow University on the case. And yeah, it's very weird. But yeah, this was kind of like, because they're doing this like kind of dramatic, like almost like West Wing style stuff where it'd be like, walking down the corridor like Mr. President, but it's like, Mr. Leader of the council.

We've got to do something about the bins, sir. We get this notice that like, these people have been sort of arranged by British government plan and if an emergency were to take place, then regional governance would be devolved to them. And so you get these kind of interstitial moments with talking about... You hear about the backstory about the war with the US and the Soviet Union almost entirely through news dispatches until the actual nuclear exchange starts. But effectively... Yeah. It's typewriter on the screen. Or like TV in the pub, in multiple different pub scenes. That there was a coup in Iran

that was now pro-US. The Soviets accused the US of fomenting it. They invade. The US gives an ultimatum. There's naval engagements. The US invades. This turns into the Soviets firing a nuclear anti-air missile at conventional bombers and the US then using a battlefield nuke. And then it just more and more and more and more just keeps happening. But meanwhile- And then eventually the Russians are like, we've got a nuke Sheffield. It's the only reasonable escalation from this war in Iran. I felt this was one of the biggest plot holes in the movie Was like the way in which I think obviously in hindsight looking back on the Cold War now We kind of know none of this happened

but obviously people were very scared of it at the time but the idea that like a proxy war in Iran would escalate into like Both like a presumably all of NATO and all of the Soviet bloc nuking each other into oblivion seems crazy. It just doesn't seem like it would happen. I think that the idea was that it just went from being a proxy war to an actual... The US and the Soviet Union were fighting. Their militaries were fighting.

In my notes, I was actually pretty impressed. They did counterfeit Reagan voice pretty well. They nailed the sort of beats of Ronald Reagan being like, we have to annihilate- You could really tell it was a British actor doing it though. It had that faint like, uh, sats quality. Yeah, but they did the best they could. They couldn't hire actual Ronald Reagan. They didn't have the budget for that.

He was too busy being president and trying to do another movie about the smart monkey or whatever it was. Y'know, Ben. Comrade Charnenko, if you nuke Sheffield I'll be forced to respond with maximum prejudice. They could've just used old Cowboy clips and just be like, yeah. The president's decided to dress up for the day. I mean, genuinely, if you took this movie and changed nothing, but instead of the news updates it was just clips of Ronald Reagan and like Gipper or bedtime for Bonzo or whatever. It would just feel

like Repo Man. It would just be one of those weird 80s surreal cult films. But yeah, he basically... While this is happening, we're getting updates about the world situation. Jimmy and Ruth buy a flat. There's a bit where Jimmy says that his dad's... Mom has convinced his dad to give him his redundancy money to help renovate it that he was planning on going to on holiday in Bermuda and instead was going to go to Blackpool like usual. And I was just sort of like, in 2004, a 19-year-old college student in Bloomington, Indiana, this would have meant nothing. But now it's like, oh, Bermuda, where they killed Captain Tom. Blackpool, worse than death. One is a mysterious black zone from which nothing ever returns. And the other is the

Bermuda. Yeah, exactly. But Blackpool is the only place I've ever been to where there was a nightclub with a carpet on the dance floor. The pubs in England, my first encounter, I had my mom's from England but I hadn't been to England except for like a couple days as a little kid until I was in my thirties and going to a pub on a Saturday night and massive crowd and incredibly packed and there's carpets I was like that's so ambitious. Like this is so, you'd be like, oh we can keep this

clean. Like that's not going to smell. It soaks in the flavour. Yeah, that's not going to smell that Yeah. He's not going to smell that. Not, not, no one spills liquids in a pub in England when it's crowded. Like being the carpet fitter hired to fit the carpet on the dance floor of a nightclub must feel kind of like being like the builder hired to build an execution chamber or something like in principle, it's just another job. But I know that I'm complicit in something really heinous, but the fluids that thing's gonna soak up, I mean, yeah, you really don't wanna...

I just don't wanna be the one to remove the carpet at the end. That's the one thing I asked. There was a time where they just said, okay, no more smoking in this room, and then that is when the ghosts would have emerged. Like that bit in Ghostbusters 2 with the Titanic. Just absolute monsters of the history of that nightclub coming out to get everyone. Yeah, I think I would rather just be in a smoke-filled club versus having the souls of every cigarette that's ever been smoked on this earth haunting the room that I'm in, which is what it's gonna smell like if you cut out the active cigarette smoke. I took

some notes- Yeah, the smoke is covering the other smells, surely. You actually want the smoke, isn't it? I took some notes as this was progressing. You know, there's the title card listing the main industries of Sheffield. I wrote, do not inquire further. Do not seek historical updates on this. I wrote, I wouldn't have... Oh yeah, because it was like what? Steel, chemicals, and engineering, as though that's an industry. They just, yeah, every, Sheffield has an assembly line to produce guys who, you know, have pocket protectors and slide rules and do those, what are they called, the prefab estates, where

it's like, this will absolutely be watertight if you connect all nine connectors on each panel but you can get away with connecting two or three because Britain's not a damp country. Doesn't rain. There's no problem with that. I also wrote, in fairness, I wouldn't have picked anything up about the class stuff that was happening and that was sort of between Jimmy's family and Ruth's family when that sort of the awkward family meeting taking place. Oh yeah. Ruth's dad who is like 90 years old for some reason. And they're obvious. He fully looks like near death, but he's supposed to be the father of a 20 year old woman.

So let me just make sure, you know, it's nice to reassess my prior. So suppose I read this as Jimmy's family is clearly far more working class than Ruth's. Ruth's family is more like suburban middle class. They obviously live in a bigger home. The mother seems very worried about what they're going to think of her curtains and whatnot. And I wrote, I hate meeting my girlfriend's parents on the eve of the apocalypse. I also wrote when they were in the flat doing the renovation. So I was like, yes, that's right. Get rid of the wallpaper, please. Because wow. Yeah, it was pretty horrible. I will say this one thing that was interesting is that the Sheffield, the Sheffield council

headquarters building or wherever where the sort of boffins, the Q of Sheffield Council, the M of Sheffield Council is hanging out. It's like a brutalist building, but it actually looks kind of new. And as such, it actually kind of looks modern-y, future-y. It doesn't have that sort of concrete soaked with decades of rain look that a lot of those buildings have now. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it definitely is.'s like, oh, these things used to be in good repair at one time. A lot of the buildings, so you are like, not much has changed after this nuke. Yeah, there's that. I mean, I will...