Adam Curtis's thrilling, maddening and soul-destroying portrait of a faithless, jaded nation

Telegraph

2 days ago

To try to explain what Adam Curtis's latest documentary series is about is like trying to build an igloo out of jelly. In one sense, Shifty (BBC iPlayer) has a simple premise – a jaunty yet thumpingly depressing trot through 20 years of British politics and economics (1979-1999), from Thatcher and monetarism to Blair and the Private Finance Initiative. It is, as the blurb has it, about how 'extreme money and hyper-individualism… undermined the fundamental structures of mass democracy'; it's about how and why British society is now so fragmented, atomised and siloed. Yet that barely scratches the surface of this gloriously obtuse series. It's like being talked at for six hours by a coked-up bipolar genius at an aggressively loud house party. It is a thrilling, maddening, brilliant and soul-destroying portrait of a faithless, jaded nation.
As the five episodes take us chronologically through 20 years of British economic policy, leaning heavily on Thatcher's premiership, Shifty has a more traditional shape than many of Curtis's other works (Hypernormalisation, Can't Get You Out of My Head). It also does not feature Curtis's languid, oft-parodied voiceover, relying instead on his trademark stark-white subtitles to give some shape to his traditional carnival of scintillatingly edited archive footage. There is less of the nightmarish incongruousness that marks his work, but it's no less chilling and disorienting for it.
There is still plenty, however, of Curtis's mind-boggling leaps. In the first episode, introducing us to Thatcher's policy of monetarism – reduce the amount of money circulating, inflation falls, wages stabilise, industry booms – you'll spend a long time scratching your head wondering what links the death of the Irish author JG Farrell, the remains of a Second World War fighter pilot found in a bog in Sheppey, a transgender dog called Bruno, the National Front and the cheese and onion crisp production line at the Golden Wonder factory. Each episode is like a Magic Eye picture – you just have to relax your eyes and stare and stare and stare. It all comes clear eventually. Well, some of it.
The rest of the series is a phantasmagoria of 1980s and 1990s home video and documentary and news footage, with Stephen Hawking, the Old Kent Road, hairdressers, the Duke of Westminster and house parties becoming surreal recurring themes. The picture it paints of the UK, then and now, is utterly bleak, with our institutions being shown as at best hollow. The police come out particularly badly – anyone wincing at Donald Trump's recent heavy-handed approach to protestors will be agog at the scenes of police violence here, while one sequence in which detectives in Reading interview a female rape victim is horrifying.
Despite this, Curtis finds an impish gallows humour in the decaying remains of 150 years of British exceptionalism. The first image we see, for instance, is Jimmy Savile introducing some schoolchildren to Thatcher, while a segment on the synthetised pop music of the 1980s warns us not to trust the past because it can be edited, remixed and repackaged – before launching into a pastiche of Curtis's documentaries. Those unconvinced by him will find it all simplistic and cynical, but Curtis has never claimed to be a historian. Instead, Shifty is a remarkable, unreliable and potent chronicle of a society in freefall. 'We are living [Thatcher's] version of Churchill's version of British history,' says Patrick Cosgrave, Thatcher's closest adviser. Shifty is Curtis's version.