I’ve just seen the film Threads for the first time, a BBC drama that first aired in September 1984 in the UK. It’s set in Sheffield and we follow a young couple as they take their first faltering steps into married life after an unplanned pregnancy. In the background, on the TV, there’s the slow drip of increasingly dire news reports as the Soviet Union invades Iran in response to a US-backed coup. And then, unthinkably, a mushroom cloud blooms over the city. The film, which was rescreened in the UK this October, terrified many who saw it 40 years ago, and while it hasn’t aged particularly well, you can see how hard it must have hit home.

My own Threads was a VHS copy of The Day After, from November 1983. Here, it’s a dispute between NATO and Warsaw Pact countries over Germany, which, again, sees a nuclear conflict between the US and the Soviet Union. The filmmakers focused on farms near US missile siloes in Kansas and Missouri, and the mad rush for the bunkers as war is declared.