Dystopian, post-apocalyptic, mockumentary: these are common, even hackneyed genres in today\u2019s movies and television. But when film-maker Peter Watkins deployed them in the 1960s, they were revolutionary, and Watkins himself was revolutionary as well \u2013 an English revolutionary, in fact, alive to the cruelty and iniquity of kings but also to that of people bent on decapitation. His cinema persistently asked questions about those in power, and what will happen when their power goes catastrophically wrong. An artist dedicated to challenging and upsetting, Watkins came from the dissenter tradition of uncompromising radicalism on screen and stage \u2013 the same tradition as Edward Bond, Ken Loach and Dennis Potter.<\/p>\n
His enduringly brilliant and angry anti-nuclear drama The War Game<\/a> was commissioned but then banned by the BBC in 1965. (It screened in cinemas, and was finally shown on television a couple of decades later.) It lasts just 47 minutes but viewers felt they had lived through a lifetime of fear. When I first saw it as a teenager at a CND meeting 15 years after it was made, it seemed as if I had entered a new era of disillusioned adulthood.<\/p>\n Demonic genius \u2026 The War Game. Photograph: TCD\/Prod.DB\/Alamy<\/p>\n Movie audiences knew about Kubrick\u2019s Dr Strangelove, which had been released in 1964, and they may have known about Sidney Lumet\u2019s Fail Safe from the same year, but The War Game was chillingly different. Strangelove and Fail Safe, in their different ways, were top-down dramas, dramatising the people in charge. The War Game is about the ordinary people on the ground: the chivvied, anxious, ordinary British people glumly submitting to the instructions of the increasingly dumbstruck low-level admin types, a few minutes before and then during and after a nuclear bomb blast. We saw that these GPs, police, soldiers and civil servants, whose authority and expertise had been developed for the needs of the second world war, were grotesquely inadequate.<\/p>\n And the almost demonic genius of The War Game is that it is addressed to the viewer in the clipped, informative tone of a Protect and Survive<\/a> public information film, a Reithian, Men-from-the-Ministry voice that would in other circumstances be deployed to bamboozle or soft-soap the public. Watkins uses it to reveal the awful truth. It is this voice that coolly comments as police constables execute irretrievably irradiated casualties in the street with specially issued revolvers, in an effort to prevent the health service from being overwhelmed.<\/p>\n Radical style \u2026 Culloden (1964). Photograph: Collection Christophel\/Alamy<\/p>\n The film is all in the pseudo-documentary style, with the faces of shocked, wraithlike people looming up to the camera as they obediently answer the implacable narrator\u2019s questions. The mockumentary form \u2013 so often used for irony, comedy and satire, and to undermine the status of media and television \u2013 is here deadly serious. Watkins used it to emphasise that this is real; what happens on screen in The War Game happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and indeed in non-nuclear theatres of war including Dresden, Hamburg and Tokyo. Perhaps we in the west had been encouraged not to think about these things; to think they applied only to the defeated Axis powers \u2013 and since the passing of the Cuban missile crisis, that the problem was in any case at an end. Watkins fiercely told us: \u201cNo \u2013 it could happen and is happening.\u201d The unstable geopolitical negotiations were always wobbling. Barry Hines\u2019s Threads<\/a>, from 1984 was the obvious inheritor of The War Game on British television.<\/p>\n