Product Review

A couple face a nuclear holocaust with only the instructions from the government's infamous 'Protect and Survive' leaflet to help them in this glorious animated adaptation of Raymond Briggs' book, voiced by John Mills and Peggy Ashcroft.

Middle-aged Jim Bloggs becomes troubled at the mounting possibility of nuclear war. His wife Hilda is too busy with housework to be at all concerned. Jim returns home with some civil defence pamphlets and attempts to build a fallout shelter in his living room.

And then the nuclear strike comes. They make it to the shelter in time but when they emerge they too have to cope with the drastically changed world. At first they discover that this means wondering when milk and newspaper deliveries will resume and that there is no power to boil a cup of tea, but soon come to realise that the devastation is much wider than that.

After the success of his cartoons about Father Christmas, his book 'Fungus the Bogeyman' and 'The Snowman', creating a dark parable about nuclear fallout was not the most obvious for Raymond Briggs. But it was inspired. The grim humour and poignancy of his book rapidly made it a Cold War classic, and this animated adaptation directed by Jimmy T Murakami was one of 1980s cinema's most powerful indictments of mutually assured destruction.

Title song by David Bowie and Music by Roger Walters

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