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Does anyone remember seeing a 'nuclear war' public service broadcast?

posted 9 years ago by donaldking
8 replies | jump to latest

I have just watched the second episode of 'The Game.' Judy Parfitt (playing Bobby's deranged mother) is watching TV - and on comes a public service broadcast telling people what to do in the event of a nuclear strike. This seems so ridiculous, but I wonder if anyone can actually remember seeing such a programme in the 1970's. I was born in 1960, and I'd certainly don't.

The security services would never take seriously a 'defector' who suggested the Soviets were thinking of launching a nuclear strike on Britain. In the programmes based on John Le Carre's novels, Smiley & Co. would be unable to stop laughing. No wonder the character Bobby is so broadly comic for what is supposed to be a 'thriller' - Paul Ritter acts and looks like a cross between Michael Sheen in 'Fantabulosa!' and James Dreyfus in 'The Thin Blue Line.'

[–] jbaddock 9 years ago

I don't think it was actually broadcast, but it was certainly recorded, just in case. Some of the soundtrack for it (featuring Patrick Allen) was used on 'Two Tribes' by Frankie Goes To Hollywood in the 80s.

[–] ib011f9545i 9 years ago

see my posts about the FIRST STRIKE PLOTLINE.

I am the same age as you,I was obsessed by the cold war and atomic threat from an early age.

I used to love seeing public information films,often shown at lunchtime on BBC on a Saturday before the football show.

They showed films about how to survive a plane crash at sea,how to survive in an arctic situation,films about what the ROYAL OBSERVER CORP provided us with attack warnings but they did not screen the films we would have seen in a pre war crisis situation.

These films (voiced by PATRICK ALLEN)were shown in documentaries in the 1980s and in THREADS ? but they would not show them in full in case people thought there was a real crisis.

The whole PROTECT AND SURVIVE idea was not taken seriously by the mid 1980s,hip opinion said there would be no point in any preparations against attack but what of a limited use of atomic weapons in central europe?

[–] jaguar-92201 9 years ago

Yes, but not as graphically as shown during that episode. The announcement warning on TV were in the 1950's. We even had drills called " Duck and Cover". By the 1960's, everyone realized that if we got hit by an nuclear bomb, we would all be dead from the blast or dying from radiation. Unless you had your own stocked bomb shelter. Very popular in the 1960's.

[–] ib011f9545i 9 years ago

America had DUCK AND COVER films and the turtle and all that stuff but in Britain we never had that sort of public information campaign,well they tried it for a while in the 1950s but by the early 1960s they stopped pretending that they could do much for ordinary people and shut down the civil defence corp.

[–] Prismark10 9 years ago

I remember seeing something in the early 1980s just about the same time everyone got a booklet in the post.

Its that man again!!

[–] ib011f9545i 9 years ago

I think they showed bits of the film they would show as a news item but they did not show all the films because it was not world war 3.

[–] bwhami-1 9 years ago

I grew up in the states and during the Cuban Missile crisis, not only did they broadcast PSA's about what do do in an attack, but we practiced bomb drills in school. In Los Angeles on the last Friday of every month, at 10:00 am an Air Raid siren would go off and sound for a few minutes. People built bomb shelters in our neighborhood. Nuclear war was a very real possibility back then. In School we had to go from the second floor of the building to the first floor and line up against the wall, sit down, put our head between our knees and then put our hands over our heads. We were told we would be safe that way if a bomb went off.

[–] Royalcourtier 8 years ago

Everyone seems to be missing the point. The programme showed a nuclear war "public service broadcast" on British TV. That did not occur in reality, not in 1972.