PRODUCER Peter Watkins

PROGRAMMING HISTORY  Produced in 1965

BBC-1
31 July 1985

Over thirty years since its production, The War Game remains the most controversial and, perhaps, the most telling television film on nuclear war. Directed by the young Peter Watkins for the BBC, its depiction of the impact of Soviet nuclear attack on Britain caused turmoil at the corporation and in government. Although it went on to win an Oscar for Best Documentary Feature in 1966, it was denied transmission until 1985. Announcing the decision to hold back The War Game in 1965, the BBC explained that the film was too horrifying for the medium of broadcasting, expressing a particular concern for "children, the very old or the unbalanced."

But BBC internal documents, and newly released Cabinet papers of the period, reflect the high degree of political anxiety generated by the film, and suggest that although the BBC was keen to assert its independence and its liberalism, The War Game was indeed the victim of high-level censorship. The popular press of the day, for their part, largely approved the ban, often reading the film as propaganda for the youthful Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.

The film imagines a period of some four months from the days leading up to nuclear attack. In a show of solidarity with the Chinese invasion of South Vietnam, the Russian and East German authorities have sealed off all access to Berlin, and have threatened to invade the western sector of the city unless the United States withdraws its threat to use tactical nuclear weapons against the invading Chinese. When two NATO divisions attempt to reach Berlin, they are overrun by communist forces, triggering the U.S. President's release of nuclear warheads to NATO. The U.S.S.R. calls NATO's bluff, leading to a preemptive strike by the Allies and, in a self-protective measure, the Soviet launch against Britain.

The War Game, shot in newsreel-style black-and-white, and running just over three-quarters of an hour, works on a number of levels. The main discourse is that of the documentary exposition itself, chronicling and dramatising the main stages and the key features of the countdown to attack and its immediate consequences. A second discourse, also playing on the relationship between documentary and drama, takes the form of two types of vox pop interviews which punctuate the text: interviews which illustrate the contemporary public's consciousness of the issues, exposing wide-spread ignorance; and clearly fictional interviews with (imaginary) key figures as the attack scenario itself develops and extends.

Further elements go some way to suggesting contexts for the public's failure to perceive the realities of nuclear war. One strand of the film highlights the pathetically inadequate information purveyed by the official Civil Defence self-help manual (cover-price: nine old pence). A fourth level of comment, provided by inter-titles, exposes the bankruptcy of statements on the nuclear threat emerging from religious sources such as the Ecumenical Council of the Vatican.

The film concentrates on the South-East of England, and, in particular, the town of Rochester in Kent. It bleakly illustrates the social chaos of the period before attack, focusing on the personal and ideological conflicts likely to arise from the enforced evacuation of large numbers of the urban population, and the impracticality of building viable domestic shelters--as the price of basics such as planks and sand-bags in any case escalates--against the power of the nuclear bomb. It depicts the immediate horrors of a nuclear explosion by invoking memories of the firestorms of Dresden and Hiroshima, the earthquakes and the blinding light, thirty times more powerful than the midday sun, which is capable of melting upturned eyeballs from many miles away.

The remainder of the film concentrates on the rapid disintegration of the social fabric in the aftermath of the attack, as civilisation disappears. In images of chilling and provocative power, policemen are depicted as executioners of the terminally ill and of minor criminals. The effects of radiation sickness are explained and illustrated, along with the psychological devastation which would befall survivors and the dying in a mute and apathetic world. There is a good chance of all this happening, the film suggests, by 1980.

The film's enduring power thus derives from a variety of sources. These include its cool articulation of momentary images--a child's eyes burned by a distant nuclear air-burst as the film itself goes into negative; a bucketful of wedding rings collected as a register of the dead, a derelict building which has become an impromptu furnace for the incineration of bodies too numerous to bury; "Stille Nacht" playing on a gramophone which, in the absence of electricity, must be turned by hand.

At a structural level the film achieves its overall rhetorical power through both its mixture and its separation of documentary and dramatic modes. It does not, for example, offer the purely "dramatic" spectacle of later TV nuclear dramas such as the U.S.'s The Day After (1983) or Britain's Threads (1984), with their more traditional identifications around character and plot. Nor does it simply document the drama in the manner of Watkins' previous Culloden (1965), in which the television camera revisits the battlefield of 1746 and interviews participants, or of Cathy Come Home (1966), Ken Loach's similar merging of the domains of documentary and drama in accounting for the rising problem of homelessness in 1960s Britain.

The War Game, on the contrary, confuses and yet demarcates the two modes. The "dramatic" sequences, with their highly "documentary" look, are retained as fragmentary and discontinuous illustrations of an ongoing documentary narrative which itself disorientingly moves back and forth between statements and assumptions that this is "really happening" before our eyes, and other types of proposition and warning that this is how it "could be" and "might look."

The British television audience was deprived of The War Game for two decades, until a moment in history ironically close to the events in Eastern Europe which canceled the particular Cold War scenario which underpins the film. Its banning nonetheless made the film a cause celebre and its notoriety grew in the troubled later 1960s as the film reached significant minority audiences in art-house cinemas and throughout the anti-nuclear movement. Introducing the 1985 broadcast, Ludovic Kennedy estimated that, by then, the film had already reached as many as six million viewers.

-Phillip Drummond