10 Most Controversial British TV Films

The second nuclear holocaust themed drama for the BBC on this list, and just as controversial as Watkins' earlier The War Game. This time, it is Sheffield that's in for the nuclear winter treatment, with arguably a more visceral and dramatic depiction than the earlier drama's documentary sobriety.

When the Director-General of the BBC happened to watch The War Game, he commissioned Threads. Depicting the horrors of radiation sickness, burning, suffocations, and other deaths related to the bombs themselves, Threads also showcases the inexorable descent of society into savage, medieval barbarism, as communities breakdown and people regress due to the effects to the attacks, from cataracts and cancers to technological regress, resource poverty, looting, fascistic responses from the desperate remnants of government and more. Threads does not let up: you must keep looking at the horror.

One contemporary review called the film 'unrelentingly graphic and grim, sobering and shattering, as it should be.' That it still retains its disturbing power should be clear from the fact that since 1985, the BBC has only ever repeated Threads once, in 2003.