It's hard to watch and it should be hard to watch. It should frighten people, and if it's done that, it's done its job. - Karen Meagher

At first he said that he wouldn't do Threads, but then he thought about it and thought, "Well, I'd rather nobody else do it, I'd rather do it myself".

I think Threads didn't keep people at arm's length, it drew people in because of the characters that everybody knew. I mean, we related to them, and that's what I think made Threads so visceral for people.

We did have rehearsal time at the BBC and we did have access to material out of Japan (Hiroshima and Nagasaki), which hadn't really been accessed at the time by people in the Western world, so literature that was grim, seriously grim. And I know there were times when I used to come home on the bus after rehearsal and having sort of steeped myself in this research where I wanted to shout out to everybody on the bus "do you know? Do you know what this is about? What could happen to us?". It gets into your bones a bit when you are working that closely with things.