In the late 1960s, the film-maker Peter Watkins wrote to John Lennon and Yoko Ono, telling them: “People in your position have a responsibility to use the media for world peace.” This directly inspired the couple to start their own idiosyncratic protest, known as the Bed-In. Lennon described receiving that letter as “like getting your induction papers for peace.”
Watkins, who has died aged 90, had already nailed his pacifist colours to the mast four years earlier with his 1965 BBC television film The War Game. It used the hypothesis of a limited nuclear attack on Kent to demonstrate the futility of nuclear war, and to show Britain’s feeble defences against such a disaster. This was a film unstinting in its grimness, featuring shots of molten eyeballs and ravenous rats. The critic Kenneth Tynan called it “maybe the most important film ever made”.
