Can anyone PLEASE help me identify this '80s British post-apocalyptic thing for the sake of my sanity?!

C

Chris L

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One Christmas (1988? 1989? Somewhere thereabouts) I remember coming downstairs to find my parents watching the end of some British post-apocalyptic thing. A band of ragged kids/YAs were roaming some woods, accompanied by some low synth notes. Were they looking for civilisation, or someone/somewhere in particular? Who knows.

Anyway, eventually they arrive at this abandoned brick building filled with rubbish. Among said rubbish is a baby doll toy, which someone triggers. it says something like "I want my nappy! I want my mummy!", before concluding with an unsubtly cautionary "I want! I want!! I WANT!!!" Cut to closing credits.

I remember that ending so vividly, but no amount of Googling causes me to do anything other than circle back to Threads and Survivors and other things it's patently not. Does anyone have the faintest idea what I'm talking about?!
 
Off the top of my head, the last section of Threads involves some children wandering around a wasteland, and one of them becomes pregnant, but she has a mutated baby rather than a doll. I wonder if the children in Threads find a doll? If they do, there would be about 10 minutes of further misery before the credits roll.
 
Toby Frost said:
Off the top of my head, the last section of Threads involves some children wandering around a wasteland, and one of them becomes pregnant, but she has a mutated baby rather than a doll. I wonder if the children in Threads find a doll? If they do, there would be about 10 minutes of further misery before the credits roll.
Click to expand...

Threads was shown to us in an English class back in about 82, Bleak and god-damn terrifying it was easily the most horrifying thing we watched in class since Apaches in Junior school.
 
Toby Frost said:
Off the top of my head, the last section of Threads involves some children wandering around a wasteland, and one of them becomes pregnant, but she has a mutated baby rather than a doll. I wonder if the children in Threads find a doll? If they do, there would be about 10 minutes of further misery before the credits roll.
Click to expand...
Well, I'm planning to subject myself to Threads while the family are out on Saturday night, so I guess I'll find out for sure ("lucky" me), but I really don't think it's that from what you were saying. The "I WANT!!!" was definitely intended as a kind of final, didactic punchline along the lines of "See what your greed/consumerism/capitalism will reap!" That bit is really clear in my mind; the rest, unfortunately, isn't...
 
I have a memory of a 'play for the day' sometime in the 1980s, of a post-Apocalyptic community/tribe who live in a green valley, somewhere in England, but they had some very strict rules that the children didn't really understand, like eating animals. But it turned out that the adults, who remembered the times before the nuclear war (I assume) couldn't help it, because they craved such food, so they ate meat they caught secretly. But this slowly killed them all (because of radiation???) and it left the kids by themselves as all the adults succumbed.

I am sure it was something like that and could potentially dovetail with the OP ending. But...

...it doesn't quite make sense, as surely everything, including plants would be radioactive - unless they were spinning a 'silent spring' sort of vibe that some animals concentrated the poisons. But all the radioactivity would be building up in the humans as well.

It's not threads, I've had a look at the plot summary and the final scene on Youtube.
 
That does sound possible - there was an attempt at more serious drama for older kids later in the afternoon. There was a run of short films for children in the 80s (I think it was the Children's Film Foundation that made them) so it could be one of those, perhaps. If it is Threads, I think it's slightly misremembered - it certainly sounds grim enough, though.
 
I've never seen this, but it sounds like it is heavily influenced by PK Dick - underground radiation shelters and Perky Pat Dolls.

It does sound more like a Play for Today than a film, or else an Outer Limits/Twilight Zone type TV drama. If it was late 1980's then it's too late to be any of those. I thought maybe it could be Tales of the Unexpected? That ran until 1988. However, looking through the episodes, there is nothing like that:
Tales of the Unexpected (TV Series 1979–1988) - IMDb
 
There are a number of British post-apocalyptic dramas; Threads, The War Game, The Bed Sitting Room, The Survivors, The Last Train etc. This doesn't sound like any of them, and it's also unlikely that any of them would be on tv around Christmas time. It does sound more like a 'Play For Today' or similar.

One of the benefits of British tv back then was that there were only 4 channels. And it's more likely that it was a tv programme rather than a movie. So I bet if you could view the Christmas editions of the Radio and TV Times (which covered the 2 weeks of the Christmas period) then you'd find what you were looking for.
 
Further thought: Play for Today looks like it finished its run a shade too early in the '80s, but can anyone remember a Screen One/Screen Two film that might fit the bill?
 
Just a thought but could this have been Zero Population Growth (1972)? It has been on TV a couple of times, not sure when. It features animatronic baby-dolls. Right at the end the couple (played by Oliver Reed and. Geraldine Chaplin) do escape the closed society they live in, to reach what they have been told is a post-nuclear hell outside. But it is not, and as I recall (this is 50 years ago!) the film ends on an optimistic note.
 
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