The War Game by Peter Watkins

This 1965 made for television film depicts a fictional, worst-case scenario about nuclear war and its aftermath in and around a typical English urban environment . Though the age of this docu-drama may suggest that its content and message could be outdated, its horrifying and powerful depiction of a British post-nuclear situation still resonates with current fears and tensions.

The film argues that citizens and Civil Defence authorities are ill prepared for such an eventuality, and describes the possible physical, psychological and social damage in graphic detail.

Shot and edited in the realistic and familiar style of a news programme, viewers are easily convinced that such atrocities, though harrowing and at times disturbing, have the possibility of becoming actual events. The film contains this thought-provoking quotation from the Stephen Vincent Benét poem "Song for Three Soldiers":

"Oh, where are you coming from, soldier, gaunt soldier,

With weapons beyond any reach of my mind,

With weapons so deadly the world must grow older

And die in its tracks, if it does not turn kind?"

It was scheduled for transmission on 6 August 1966 (the anniversary of the Hiroshima attack) though was not transmitted until 1985, the British Broadcasting Corporation publicly stating that "the effect of the film has been judged by the BBC to be too horrifying for the medium of broadcasting". It was however, widely exhibited before its BBC debut on video and in art-house cinemas.

The film deservingly won the Academy Award for Documentary Feature and has also been included on the British Film Institute’s list of Best British Television Programmes.

Watch The War Game on Google Video