The War Game

I couldn’t decide which was the scarier prospect from this docu-drama? Finding somewhere safe to shelter from the eye-watering megatonnage of uranium enriched warheads or to emerge afterwards to a society that is truly dog-eat-dog, survival of the fittest, with no power or food or water or just about anything else - except, perhaps, some semblance of a military dictatorship run by the few lucky enough to be fifty feet under the ground. This has all the trappings of a public information film. It advises us how best to seek refuge behind over-priced sand bags - even more expensive if you actually want the sand, too! The ridiculous ineffectiveness of these glorified balsa-wood barriers against a force that could level the whole house isn’t wasted on the viewer, nor is the stoicism of a society who have not, as yet, succumbed to more animalistic impulses. It uses faux vox-pops to question the public about whether or not we ought to retaliate and the levels of responses are frankly quite stupefying at times. On the stupefying front, there are also some statistics bandied about that are all fairly horrific and it isn’t hard to comprehend why, with war raging in the far East and with the Cold War at it’s height, the BBC decided that this “War of the Worlds” scenario wasn’t quite what the people needed to see. It’s easier to question that conclusion almost sixty years later, but back then when access to mass communications was limited and the broadcaster amongst the most trusted on Earth, it might well have caused some panic had it been seen in it’s gritty and authentic glory.