Humanity’s preoccupation with the impending apocalypse is nothing new.
Today, the end of the world may be nigh because of climate change, but from the Fifties until the end of the Eighties, it was all about the threat of nuclear war.
How ordinary Britons were supposed to prepare and protect themselves from the possibility of annihilation at the hands of Soviet Russia is the subject of this gripping — though at 75 minutes, overlong — documentary, directed by Daniel Vernon and with a superbly eerie soundtrack by Daniel Goddard.
Using only archive film footage and contemporary broadcasts, together with personal testimonies from those who experienced it, the story begins in 1957, when a small unit of British soldiers are flown out on a secret mission to Christmas Island, a tropical atoll in the Pacific.
“In those days you just did as you were told,” says one unnamed narrator. “We soon found out we were there to witness nuclear weapons being tested,” says another.
What comes next is so shocking, it’s hard to believe. The grainy colour film shows the men wearing uniform but no protective clothing, sitting on the beach and shielding their eyes with their backs to the sea where the bomb will be dropped from the plane flying overhead. “They said we had nothing to fear.”
Many times more powerful than those used at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it explodes and even on this vintage reel, its glare is blinding.
“The flash seemed to come through the back of your head. You could see the bones in your fingers through your closed eyes,” says another narrator. “We saw what looked like Catherine wheels spiralling. They turned out to be birds on fire, hundreds of them burning. A lot of them were still alive and blind.”
The second chapter begins with the Soviet army parading its nuclear armament in 1962 and goes on to show how ordinary Britons responded. “It may seem strange now, but we really did believe we were that close to nuclear war. The policy was Mutual Assured Destruction, MAD, certainly very appropriate under the circumstances.”
As much as the clips tell the extraordinary story of what now appears to have been naive and largely futile behaviour — from families building concrete bunkers in their back gardens and village publicans installing warning systems behind the bar, to WI speakers instructing their members to include “a little bit of morale-boosting make-up and tissues” in survival blanket packs — this is also a wonderfully evocative portrait of a bygone Britain.
The puffy mullet hairdos. The bellbottom trousers. The spectacles. The voices. But for all that has changed, the threat of Armageddon has not. “You hear things every day on the news that makes you think, even more, that it’s coming. The war’s coming,” says a woman in 1983.
She might just as well have tweeted that yesterday.
Arena: A British Guide To The End of The World is on BBC Four tonight at 9pm.
