END OF THE WORLD (on film and TV)
FOR four decades from 1953 until the fall of the Soviet Union the British government had a public announcement ready to be broadcast in the event of nuclear attack. It was known as the four-minute warning.
Four minutes was the time between a nuclear attack being confirmed and the missiles hitting their target: “This country has been attacked with nuclear weapons. Stay tuned to this wavelength, stay calm and stay in your own house. Remember there is nothing to be gained by trying to get away. By leaving your homes you could be exposing yourself to greater danger.”
That devastation never happened but for those who lived through the post-war decades The Bomb was a constant fear. If our world was going to end, that would be how.
There was any number of books and films making it feel real – in 1959 movie On The Beach the last people alive (Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner, Fred Astaire and Anthony Perkins) end up in Australia, which seemed the last safe place on Earth. But they all die there.
Raymond Briggs, the illustrator who delighted us with The Snowman, was among the many who terrified us with When The Wind Blows, his story of the gruesome demise of Jim and Hilda Bloggs who tried to carry on life as normal under the nuclear fallout.
These days we have two men facing each other across the world with nuclear buttons at their fingertips. Even so The Bomb is no longer our greatest fear. There are other threats that frighten us more, things that are part of everyday life: a fragile environment and technologies beyond comprehension.
An eight-week drama series Hard Sun began last Saturday on BBC One. Promoted as “a preapocalyptic crime show” it involves two detectives – a man and a woman – who find proof that the world will end in five years.
This is something they would be safer not knowing because the British government’s security services try to kill them before they can tell anyone else. That seems quite plausible.
It is a story of computer screens, cybernetics and electronic gizmos as well as car chases, fisticuffs and extreme violence. It looks promising but whether it turns out to be apocalyptic or merely average we shall have to see.
APOCALYPSE, Armageddon, alien invasion, global catastrophe – threats that are always in our minds – play everywhere from the Bible to the back row of the stalls to Saturday night TV. From the Book Of Revelation to Doctor Who, there is conflagration wrought by God in the book of Isaiah and by man with his nuclear bombs in film after film.
In The Day The Earth Caught Fire (1961) a Daily Express reporter discovers nuclear weapons tests had shifted Earth on its axis guaranteeing climatic catastrophe. Scientists decide the only way to correct things was more nuclear explosions.
Did that work? The Daily Express prepared two front pages: “World Saved” and “World Doomed”. The film ends before we know which.
Some would say we still do not know. And aliens are forever invading and are almost always bad news, except of course films by Stephen Spielberg whose ET does nothing wrong except failing to phone home often enough.
With Spielberg even a Close Encounter Of The Third Kind is one you would like to have. On the other hand think Invasion Of The Bodysnatchers (1956 and 1978) or The Blob (1958) where a meteorite lands on Earth and disgorges a man-eating, building-engulfing Blob that seems unstoppable until someone discovers that freezing does the trick. The Blob is taken to the Arctic where it does not die but is put to sleep. It has been stopped. “Yeah,” says the hero, “as long as the Arctic stays cold.” Not a line you would use so confidently today.
It is a matter of legend that on October 30, 1938, the 23-year-old Orson Welles caused mass panic with his radio broadcast of War Of The Worlds, produced as a series of news bulletins reporting invasion of the US by Martians. Two years later when Britain was being blitzed by Germany he met HG Wells, the British author of War Of The Worlds. “You aren’t quite serious in America yet,” said Wells. “You haven’t got the war right under your chins and the consequence is you still play with terror and conflict. It’s a natural thing until you are right up against it.”
Science fiction uses all the shock tactics cinema can offer but it only really frightens us when it keys into our real fears. But are we as frightened as we should be now?
The opening section of the 2014 film Interstellar gives a gripping account of a near future in the US where degradation of the environment makes it impossible to grow food to support the population. Life will soon become impossible. You may or may not think of that as a possibility but it is gripping and does not feel like fantasy. Though whether you are equally carried away by the astronaut hero’s drawn-out search for a hospitable planet depends entirely on whether you can treat space travel with gravity.
The most frightening totaldestruction film of them all is funny and uses no special effects at all: Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove in which madness meets M.A.D. (mutually assured destruction). It is terrifying because there is nothing unlikely about it. It ends with a mushroom cloud and Vera Lynn singing We’ll Meet Again, which of course we won’t.
As new BBC drama series Hard Sun imagines an imminent apocalypse, DAVID ROBSON looks at other screen depictions of Armageddon