The War Game is a 1965 television documentary-style drama depicting the effects ofnuclear war on Britain. Written, directed, and produced by Peter Watkins for the BBC’sThe Wednesday Play anthology series, it caused dismay within the BBC and in government and was withdrawn from television transmission on 6 August 1965 (the twentieth anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing). The Corporation said that „the effect of the film has been judged by the BBC to be too horrifying for the medium of broadcasting“. However, it had some distribution in cinemas and won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in 1966.^[1] But it remained unshown in full on British television until 1985.

Fail Safe is a 2000 televised broadcast play, based on Fail-Safe, the Cold War novel byEugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler. The play, broadcast live in black and white onCBS, starred George Clooney, Richard Dreyfuss, Harvey Keitel, and Noah Wyle, and was one of the few live dramas on American television since its so-called Golden Age in the 1950s and 1960s. The broadcast was introduced by Walter Cronkite (his introduction, also broadcast in black and white, is included in the DVD releases of the film).

(Ich kam neulich darauf, dass diese Filme in voller Laenge auf Youtube zu sehen sind. Jeder von ihnen waere einen eigenen Post mit umfangreicher Kommentierung wert. Vielleicht ist es aber besser, sie fuer sich stehen zu lassen.)