Film maker Adam Curtis has many detractors: his naysayers suggest he’s cynical, paranoid, unwatchable, a conspiracy theorist. I think this is all a tad unfair. He simply curates archive footage, patchwork style, adds ideas and weaves it all deftly together, both a satirist and retro-futurist. He lets the viewer go along with his non -linear rides, and make of them what they will. Essentially, I think he deals in anti-nostalgia.
The new series, Shifty, follows what happened in the UK from the time of Margaret Thatcher onwards, chronicling the atomization of society and rise of the individual as consumer. Great, Curtis suggests, for the moneyed, not so for minorities. It’s all there in glorious saturated Technicolour: Jimmy Savile and kids meeting Thatche; racist attacks, paranoid housewives installing CCTV, glue sniffers, crisp factories, comedy shows, horrible policemen interrogating a traumatised rape survivor, house parties, mass unemployment, banned pop songs, reggae soundsystems, peace protests, all the way up to supermodels and Tony Blair.
He takes as the jumping-off point how the Tory party deployed monetarism as their primary ideology to attempt the controlling of inflation – this, as we all know, backfired spectacularly. Systems of governance and religion were crumbling, as mass media conglomerates under Rupert Murdoch tried to dictate the direction they wanted to take Britain.
Curtis (sans his eerily soothing voiceover this time) may be covering old ground here, but the leftfield footage he often uses is what makes his work so unique, if no less bleak, than other (more conventional) documentary series.That, his wry sense of humour, and interesting use of music sets him apart. It’s the eighties and nineties, but not (quite) as we know it. It’s a dystopian dream from which it seems we’ve yet to wake up . I like him, he has good taste and an arched eyebrow, even if the images and Barbara Kruger style captions can sometimes feel overwhelming .
Available to watch on BBC I Player
Hit The North 