Four-minute Warning - Cultural Impact

Cultural Impact

The cold war and the fear of nuclear attack permeated pop culture up until the 1990s. Examples include Four Minute Warning as the name of a 1980s hardcore punk band from England, the poem 'Your Attention Please' by Peter Porter, as well as the name of a solo song by Take That singer, Mark Owen, "Four Minutes" by Roger Waters (of Pink Floyd fame) on his 1987 solo album Radio K.A.O.S.. John Paul Jones has a song entitled "4-Minute Warning" on the 1988 Brian Eno album Music for Films III, the 2008 Madonna track "4 Minutes" and the name of a 2007 Radiohead song, on the second disc of their album In Rainbows.

The four minute warning was a central plot and narrative device in dramas (both on stage and screen) and novels, often being the motor force of plays, films, novels and cartoon strips. The BBC drama Threads, about how society decays after a nuclear holocaust, which focuses on an attack on Sheffield. The War Game also portrays the four minute warning, pointing out the warning period could be even less. The narrator, Michael Aspel, says it could even be two minutes between issuing the warning and impact on a target. The film adaptation of Raymond Briggs's satirical and blackly comic cartoon strip, When the Wind Blows, has the warning message as part of the script, which triggers arguing between Jim and Hilda Bloggs. Although this is not Peter Donaldson's pre-recorded warning (which was not available on grounds of national security and for copyright reasons), this was a fictional announcement written on grounds of artistic licence. It was read by Robin Houston, a voiceover artist who was known in London as a newsreader for Thames Television (who played the role of newsreader in the film).

The adult humour comic Viz ran a photo strip in its issue 107 called "Four Minutes to Fall in Love", where a boyfriend and girlfriend cram a whole relationship into the four minutes before a nuclear attack. The Four Minute Warning had become the inspiration for many jokes and sketches in comedy programmes in Britain, in the same way that the Emergency Broadcast System had in the United States (see nuclear weapons in popular culture). In one episode of Only Fools and Horses, "The Russians Are Coming," Delboy and Rodney Trotter sell fallout shelter kits and have an attack drill. Driving towards their shelter, they are stopped by the police for speeding and asked: "You just heard the four minute warning?" After being sent on their way, Rodney points out: "We died forty-five seconds ago." Around the same time, a sketch on the BBC Scotland programme Naked Video had a mock announcement warning of an attack with a punchline of "...except for viewers in Scotland."