30-07-2025
The BBC banned this horrifying tale of a nuclear attack on Kent
I watched the world end in Cheadle Hulme. The blinding light, the firestorms, the blasted aftermath in which housewives killed policemen for tins of pineapple chunks. The BBC and the government didn't want us to see it, so one evening in 1984, me and some of my fellow Youth CND members went to a hired room in a house on Station Road, closed the curtains and watched England burn. We were given cups of tea to make us feel better – unlike those unfortunates who survived the airburst.
That, for two decades, was the only way to watch Peter Watkins's The War Game, his banned 1965 pseudo-documentary on the impact of nuclear war. It was the greatest recruitment tool that Youth CND ever had; aside, of course from the dread produced by living with the daily threat of annihilation.
When the BBC commissioned the film in December 1964, its incoming head of programmes, Huw Wheldon, described it as 'horrifying and unpopular – but surely necessary'. A year later, it was canned by his superiors. 'Too horrifying for the medium of broadcasting,' said the press statement. The writer-director, Peter Watkins, quit his job in disgust.
The previous year, Watkins had made Culloden, a docudrama that recreated the last major battle on British soil as if a crew covering the war in Vietnam had been sent back to 1746. The War Game did the same for the conflict of the future. It was shot in Kent with a cast of 350 amateurs and volunteers – firefighters, schoolkids, pensioners – who helped Watkins simulate a thermonuclear attack on Tonbridge. The build-up to it is imagined with the authority of those who experienced the last one. Local councillors frown over paperwork. Watkins shows a young black woman being bussed out of Bermondsey, then cuts to Kent householders refusing 'coloured' evacuees.
The blast is depicted with superb economy – a boy stands in a garden, covering his eyes, as the screen goes negative; a family struggles to extinguish their burning curtains, while Watkins shakes the camera.
The aftermath, though, is the part that freezes the soul. Those blistered corpses, ranged on the kerbside or piled in trucks; those hopeless cases, despatched by a gun to the temple – are they really members of the public who fancied being on the telly? And the figures upon whom the camera lingers – an old man too traumatised to use a spoon; a dazed policeman in a dirty uniform; the hollow-eyed kids who, when asked about the future, chorus, 'I don't want to be nothing,' in a chilling echo of Michael Apted's series 7 Up – are they really just the cream of Kentish am-dram? They seem genuinely doomed. We believe it. Not least because we are told that some of the worst things we see – the mercy killings, the pyres of corpses, the shooting of looters – happened in Dresden without a single atom being split.
The record has the answer: those amateur actors were among the loudest complainants when the BBC announced, in November 1965, that The War Game would remain unshown. Robert and Olive Harrison, Medway residents and members of the St George's Players, started a petition. 'Any form of censorship on this production is wrong,' Mr Harrison told his local paper. Watkins asked the BBC for a print of the film to show privately to the cast. He did not receive a reply. The following year, the BBC struck a deal with the British Film Institute to give it a limited cinema release. It won that year's Oscar for Best Documentary Feature.
The War Game was not screened on TV until July 1985 – as part of a season commemorating the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It will be shown again on BBC Four double-billed with Threads, Barry Hines's equally harrowing 1984 drama about a nuclear attack on Sheffield. (Threads is now being reworked as a series by the makers of Adolescence.) It took even longer, however, for the truth about the cancelled broadcast to emerge. Ironically, it was uncovered in a 2015 BBC radio documentary narrated by Michael Apted and researched by historian John Cook, who used FOI requests to obtain documents from the Home Office and the BBC itself.
The story has familiar points for students of the fractious relationship between the national broadcaster and the state. It was not a case of official suppression, but one of a management, morally and intellectually infirm, censoring itself and failing to defend its own programme-makers from the criticisms of government officials and activists. It started when one of the great campaigners of the age, Mary Whitehouse of the National Viewers and Listeners Association, read a Daily Express interview with one of Watkins's technical advisers.
Whitehouse wrote to the prime minister, Harold Wilson, to convey her fear that The War Game 'could have a serious effect upon the morale of people at home'. Simultaneously, the BBC's chairman, Lord Normanbrook, without any knowledge of Whitehouse's letter, wrote to Sir Burke Trend, the cabinet secretary, to share his doubts about the film and offer to screen it to Home Office officials. Normanbrook knew this field: he had been Trend's predecessor in Cabinet and had once sat on the secret committees that planned Britain's nuclear civil defence. He was, in effect, one of the War Gamers.
After the viewing in late September 1965, Trend came to the same conclusion as Whitehouse: 'The film would be liable to cause unnecessary and undesirable alarm and despondency.' The memos then piled up: the home office defence and overseas policy committee heard that Watkins's work offered 'an unduly pessimistic view of the effects of a nuclear strike, and may undermine the credibility of the government's civil defence programme.' The Ministry of Defence warned the BBC that the broadcast of The War Game 'would not be in the national interest.'
No direct order to kill the film was issued, but the message was received. 'The decision whether or not the film should be shown,' noted Sir Charles Cunningham, permanent under-secretary of state at the Home Office, 'must be taken by the BBC itself and […] the Corporation must accept full responsibility for it.' The language was echoed in the Corporation's official statement of November 26, 1965. The shelving of The War Game was 'the BBC's own decision [...] taken after a good deal of thought and discussion, but not as a result of outside pressure of any kind.'
What was once too shocking to screen is now programmed on the channel for connoisseurs of archive TV – and less subject to editorial interference than the old episodes of Top of the Pops scheduled later in the week. But The War Game has not lost any of its power. It has gained uncanny new ones. It was an attempt to visualise an apocalyptic future, which it predicted would arrive by the 1980s. It still seemed that way to me, at a Youth CND meeting in 1984. But the patina of time has made Watkins's black-and-white footage appear as old as if it had been shot during the Second World War.
In one scene, a man disposing of charred bodies explains that he is saving the wedding rings of the dead in the hope that they might be identified later. The voice-over tells us that what we are seeing also happened during the Allied bombardment of Germany. We are in Kent. We are in Dresden. The man raises the bucket. It contains a tangle of blackened jewellery, gathered like the fruits of the apocalypse.
