"I think if you put an infallible weapon into man's fallible hands there is always a threat that something's going to go wrong."

“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.”

“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.”

“We did have rehearsal time at the BBC and we did have access to material out of Japan , 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.”

“I was unaware really of the importance of it at the time, but I was asked to go for an interview, which I did, and I was the first person that Mick Jackson saw for the part. And I went looking rather radical, because I thought "oh, it's about nuclear war", you know, and I'm a very radical person, so I kind of went wearing my sort of "combat gear" which was very "in" at the time. And it was really strange, because afterwords, when I got the part of Ruth, who turned out to be a very fragile sort of a person, I was surprised and he said having been the first one, he saw me for the part. He obviously saw something in me that was, I don't know, vulnerable, maybe. It was the only time I've ever said to a director "I would really like a part in this, regardless of what that part may be", because I knew that the content would be close to my heart.”

“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.”

“It was cloaked to a great extent in secrecy almost. You knew what it was about, but the script was a close-kept secret I think. Not many people had seen it, and I think they were worried that it would go the same way as War Games, which was made but never seen, so it was all quite mysterious really.”