Threads

And horror in the non-traditional kind of sense.

if anyone has ever heard of or watched Threads, it's somewhat of the animated equivalent to

that.

I described it as the quirky and sometimes funny animated cousin of Threads.

Yes.

Yeah, there is a little bit of a humour to it.

Welcome back to Jesus Christ They've Done It.

This episode we speak to Professor Sue Weiss, Threads researcher at the University of Sheffield.

She is Emeritus Professor of English Literature and her interests lie in the areas of contemporary literature, film and Holocaust studies.

Her books include Barry Hines, Kez, Threads and Beyond with David Forrest and Claude Landsman's Shoah Outtakes, Holocaust Rescue and Resistance.

We talk about deleted scenes, spiritual defiance and why Threads might be a gothic story.

Professor Zuweiss, thank you for coming on the Threads podcast.

It's a pleasure to be here to talk about this amazing artwork.

Could you tell us about when you first watched Threads and what your memories are of that experience?

Instead, it's a battlefield weapon designed to be used specifically against military targets, with the payload ranging from a fraction of a kiloton all the way up to 50 kilotons now for context the weapon used against hiroshima was about 15 kilotons that's 15 kilotons of tnt of dynamite that might sound like a lot then you're saying a tactical nuclear weapon could be the same size as hiroshima but remember the most powerful nuclear weapon that's ever been tested the czar bomber by the soviet union had a payload of 50 megatons 50 000 kilotons it was so powerful it had to be exploded in midair the shock went around the world three times uh that makes it three thousand times more powerful than the little boy that was dropped on hiroshima uh in 1945 so that killed tens of thousands of people it wiped out a major city but it's nothing compared to the hydrogen bombs that were developed over the 1960s and 1970s barry We talk about the possibility of a nuclear confrontation.

I recently highlighted the film Threads.

People should watch that.

You can watch it on YouTube.

But...

If it's a serious war with hydrogen weapons, thermogenic nuclear weapons, you ain't surviving.

But you have to tell people that, right? And this is the extraordinary thing with Threads, and I really do recommend people watching it, because we talk about existential threats all the time, don't we? And until I watched that, I watched it for the first time a couple of years ago, and I watched it again a couple of weeks ago, last week.

I never viewed nuclear war as an existential threat.

My mouth wants to talk faster than my lips are moving.

Next up, we tackle one chosen by me, and it is Threads from 1984.

The feel-good movie of 1984.

This

But it was called The Third World War, August 1985.

It was a fictionalized account that reads kind of like Threads.

I know Threads, you know, was a movie, but, uh, you know, the...

It, it doesn't have like a traditional, like, fiction narrative structure.

You know, like it'll jump to some, you know, like Warsaw Pact, like early warning post, you know, um, in, uh, East Germany.

Hello, welcome to this audio commentary track for Threads by Barry Hines.

I'm Simon Falkiner.

I'm a writer and critic, and I'm delighted to be sitting here with-

Even in the charts that year, there were three songs about nuclear attack.

There was, um, Forever Young, Two Tribes, and Ninety-Nine Red Balloons.

And in the week that Threads was broadcast, there were two other programs about nuclear attack.

CND was a huge organization at the time, the Greenham Common thing and all that.

Yes.