Latest news with #AdamCurtis
Telegraph
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Adam Curtis's thrilling, maddening and soul-destroying portrait of a faithless, jaded nation
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.
The Guardian
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Shifty review – Adam Curtis's new show is an utter rarity: stylish, intelligent TV with something to say
Hello and welcome to the latest addition to Adam Curtis's growing compendium of documentaries I have unofficially entitled How Did Things Get So Shit? Let Me Explain in a Weirdly Uplifting Manner. Previous volumes include The Century of the Self, The Power of Nightmares, The Trap: What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom, All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace, HyperNormalisation, Can't Get You Out of My Head and Russia 1985-1999: TraumaZone. Even if you have not had the challenging pleasure of watching, the titles alone should be enough to evoke most of the concerns found therein – the rise of individualism, the fragmentation of old systems, the political vacuums new people and powers have rushed to fill, the death rattle of formerly dependable entities on which western civilisation has traditionally rested and once allowed us to sleep peacefully at night, the creeping destabilisation of all things, and so very much on. The new entrant is a five-part series called Shifty. It is a rare purely UK-focused dissection of recent history, built around the idea that the growing atomisation of society has ushered in an age in which the concept of a shared reality on which we can all depend has dissolved – and with it any hope of a functioning democracy. Come on in, guys, the water's lovely! Though we can't even agree that it's wet any more. In Curtis's trademark telling – a vast, kaleidoscopic assemblage of archive clips from news reports, TV shows, vox pops, pop videos, home videos, celebrity and political profiles and whatever else he has found that serves his purpose, cleverly curated, wittily juxtapositioned and bouncily soundtracked – the decline began, as so many seem to have done, with Margaret Thatcher. The series begins with her opening her study door to a group of children escorted in by her favourite man-of-the-people Jimmy Savile because – well, how could it not? Once that clip had been found, it was going in. From there, we follow Britain through the 1980s – the Falklands, the Troubles, the miners' strike, Kelvin MacKenzie, Wham!'s first tour, the advent of CCTV, the transformation of houses from homes into assets, art and fashion into diffusion lines, all of them uncoupling the old ways from the new powers, truth from reality or Britain from its moorings in some way. On we go through the next decade as old imperial ways, people and myths struggle to survive under the onslaught of new media, new tech, new economic experiments and a new privileging of individual independence, self-interest and the profit motive that was absolutely never going to end badly for anyone. New Labour arrives in the fifth and final episode, however, and the idea of society arranged around working for the common good is restored. I'm kidding! 'They couldn't escape the world they had inherited and its pessimism about human motives.' Not simply regarding the electorate – the venality and sleaze that had enshrouded the Tory party over the preceding years (and may I say that there really should be a public health warning any time clips of David Mellor are to be shown, whether or not you lived through the Antonia de Sancha scandal) had also eroded all remaining trust in politicians and Blairites 'just accepted the belief that politicians were always self-interested'. If you watch party conference clips closely, you can see the light in Gordon Brown's eyes gradually going out. The last noble mien. We stop before Brexit and Donald Trump, but it is clear how Curtis believes the seeds have been sown for all our current sorrows. Is the viewer persuaded? It depends where you start from, of course – I can't speak for anyone who wasn't already halfway there before kick-off as I was – and it will depend perhaps even more on how you feel about this most Marmite of film-makers. Now that I have learned to let his films wash over me, to pay attention but not drill down as they go, then wait and see how they work on my consciousness afterwards, I manage much better and admire much more. But perhaps that is partly a function of context too. It is an increasing rarity to stand in the presence of anyone with an idea, a thesis, that they have thoroughly worked out to their own satisfaction and then present stylishly, exuberantly and still intelligently. The hell and the handcart feel that bit more bearable now. Shifty is on BBC iPlayer now
BBC News
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- BBC News
Adam Curtis takes us into a world gone Shifty
The documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis gives a guide to some of the key moments from his new series his documentaries, Adam Curtis has taken us everywhere from Russia during the breakdown of the Soviet Union, in TraumaZone, to the war in Afghanistan, in Bitter Curtis, whose work has been called "dazzling" and "terrifying" by critics, has set his sights on Britain at the end of the 20th century for the five-part BBC series time Curtis's signature style sees him use a bizarre array of archive clips to explore, he says, how "life in Britain today has become strange - a hazy dream-like flux in which no-one can predict what is coming next".In Shifty, clips of the major players of the era – Prime Ministers Margaret Thatcher, John Major and Tony Blair – exist alongside surreal moments sourced from the BBC's extensive archives, like avant-garde hairdressing competitions, suburban line dancing parties and children hot-wiring a the uninitiated, his documentaries can feel impenetrable, so we spoke to Curtis to curate and explain some of the key clips from the new also suggested a title for each clip that perfectly places viewers into the strange and murky world of Shifty. 'One of the few moments of honesty' One section details the rise of the musical remixes in the 1980s, and its societal implications – how, in Curtis's words, "we are trapped by a cascade of endlessly replayed images, songs, dreams from the past".However, he admits, "that's the way this series was made, so I'm just as bad. If it's become a prison, I may be one of the jailers."One way Curtis remixes the past is by reusing an interview with Sir Alan Budd that Curtis filmed for the 1992 documentary Pandora's a remarkably honest interview, the one-time chief economic adviser to the Treasury during Thatcher's tenure worries that "the people making the policy decisions… never believed for a moment this was the correct way to bring down inflation."They did, however, see that it would be a very, very good way to raise unemployment, and raising unemployment was an extremely desirable way of reducing the strength of the working class.""I've always been fascinated by that interview that Budd gave," says Curtis. "It's one of the few moments of honesty I've ever had from someone in power like that being interviewed." 'A past that was about to go' As a young BBC employee, Curtis worked on That's Life. The show combined consumer affairs with lighter stories – most famously, a dog that could 'say' the word credits his ability to juggle tragic and comic tones to this early role: "It showed me that you could go from a badly-built housing estate built on poisonous waste ground to a talking dog."In Shifty, clips of societal unrest exist alongside Bruno, a dog who is, according to his vet, "changing his sex" – their male organs disappearing and their female ones says that it was Bruno's owner that drew him to the clip: "The way she's sitting and her hair," he says, "it felt like a past that was about to go."Animals in his work can often represent our secret lives, he says – "they are these creatures who live with us who probably have a lot of hidden knowledge about us."For Curtis, animals also counterpoint what he calls the "highly pretentious" elements of his work: "They just entertain people." 'A tragic figure' In this clip, an archivist at Cambridge University takes one of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's handbags out of a box, noting how the bag still smells strongly of her Thatcher's presence can be felt in much of the series, as we see the effects of her policies in the 1980s and 90s. Before Thatcher became Prime Minister in 1979, Curtis argues there was "a collective model of society, where people came together in factories, were exploited, then realised they had power as a collective group."He feels, however, that the closure of industries like mining led to "a society full of fragmented individuals who were powerful in the way they thought about their own desires, but actually on their own were powerless."Despite this, Curtis sees Thatcher as a "tragic figure", who unleashed forces she could not control."She was the last politician who had an idea of how to change the country," he explains. "She wanted to create a society in which politics doesn't have as much effect as it did, and should allow individuals to be loose and free." 'Ever more irrational assumptions' Another recurring character in Shifty is scientist Stephen Hawking, whose theories about multiple universes destabilised how we think about putting together the series, Curtis began to think of Hawking in parallel to Thatcher, he explains."She believed that rationality applied through money would regenerate the country. He believed that the rational power of mathematics will lead you to a unified theory that will explain the whole world."What fascinated Curtis about Hawking was how his seemingly rational theories led him to "ever more irrational assumptions"."When he says that matter is eaten by black holes, other scientists say that cannot be true. So he says there must be other universes where they don't eat the matter, so it balances out. To me, that's absurd."However, Curtis began to be touched by Hawking's humanity, like in a clip when we see him saying goodnight to his child. 'Very good trashy music' One of the threads of Shifty is what Curtis calls "the rise in confidence among people to talk about your own feelings, your own experience".This is shown in one of the documentarian's favourite clips, which sees two boys in Swindon discussing the banning of the song Relax by Frankie Goes to Hollywood due to its sexual imagery. The clip, from one of a series of public access shows which allowed members of the public air time on the BBC in the 1980s, ends with one of the boys out of nowhere adding that the government should legalise their willingness to criticise the BBC while appearing on it, we see a lack of deference to authority that Curtis thinks would have been unimaginable two decades also gave the filmmaker the chance to use the song Relax, one of a number of pop songs that feature in the song is central to the series's idea that the late 20th century in Britain was "wild and extraordinary, and had some very good trashy music in it, but it also unleashed a corrosive force".Shifty is available on BBC iPlayer on Saturday 14 June.
The Guardian
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Shifty to The Waterfront: the seven best shows to stream this week
The first people we see in Adam Curtis's latest documentary series are Jimmy Savile and Margaret Thatcher. It's hard to think of a more fitting pair to embody the disappointments of Britain in the late 20th century. Curtis's signature style – a mix of archive deep dives and uncanny juxtapositions – still startles. Loss is the theme of Shifty: it's a story of Britain losing industry, community and empire, and struggling to come to terms with the individualistic complexity that replaced these certainties. It takes a while for the narrative to sharpen, but Curtis's films are often best understood as impressionistic art installations so maybe abstraction is their natural final destination. BBC iPlayer, from Saturday 14 June A wealthy businessman with a recent health scare reasserting himself as his adult children jostle for inheritance? This drama from Dawson's Creek creator Kevin Williamson has echoes of Succession, albeit without that show's razor-sharp wit or psychological acuity. It centres on the Buckley family, whose fishing dynasty is threatened by environmental regulations and corner-cutting competitors. When a ship runs aground (and reveals its illicit cargo), it triggers conflict between ailing patriarch Harlan (Holt McCallany) and his son and apparent heir Cane (Jake Weary). Netflix, from Thursday 19 June Looking back on the story of the late Toronto mayor Rob Ford, it is tempting to posit his success as an early warning of Trumpite populism; a politician whose lack of polish (to say the least) only served to make him more relatable to certain sections of the electorate. However, as this documentary shows, Ford, who became mayor in 2010, pushed this trend to extremes. It explores his unlikely appeal to voters as well as his chaotic lifestyle, which included allegations of sexual harassment and culminated in revelations about crack cocaine use in from Tuesday 17 June The indefatigable Philip Rosenthal has, for eight seasons now, occupied one of the most desirable niches on television: he gets to travel the world, eating the best every country has to offer. As ever this is a convivial affair – Rosenthal sees food as an expression of friendship and cultural exchange, a means by which people can offer and receive hospitality. This time his destinations include Guatemala, Tbilisi, Amsterdam, Adelaide and San Sebastián. Look out for cameos from actor Brad Garrett, comedian Ray Romano and singer Donny Osmond. Netflix, from Wednesday 18 June Sign up to What's On Get the best TV reviews, news and features in your inbox every Monday after newsletter promotion This frothy 'gilded age' costume drama is proudly maximalist, adding sex, sass and power games to its picturesque settings and lavish selection of gowns. In the first season, the brash American arrivals took London society by storm. Now, some of them have become the establishment. As we return, Nan (Kristine Froseth) is preparing for the corseted life of a duchess while Conchita (Alisha Boe) is now Lady Brightlingsea. Still, at least Imogen Waterhouse is keeping things messy: she's on the run from the police and on the front page of the papers. Apple TV+, from Wednesday 18 June The Sinclairs are American old money – the kind of rich, complacent family who 'summer' on a private island in New Hampshire. However, their idyll is jeopardised when a terrible accident befalls the golden girl of the family, Cadence (Emily Alyn Lind). Does their apparent paradise have a dark side? As Cadence tries to understand what happened to her, it starts to seem as if everyone is hiding something. This adaptation of an E Lockhart novel is a glossy, melodramatic, YA-slanted story of wealth and privilege as a pressure cooker and, eventually, a prison. Prime Video, from Wednesday 18 June This series will probably gain added traction in the wake of Adolescence and the panic about children's online habits that has ensued. It sees parents and their children swap phones for 48 hours to sample digital life as it is experienced by another generation. Afterwards, psychologists assess the results and suggest possible solutions to problems around bullying, pornography and simple information overload. Expect a lot of frantic deleting from the younger participants but also, hopefully, some fresh understanding of the challenges they face. Channel 4, from Thursday 19 June
BBC News
15-05-2025
- Entertainment
- BBC News
Shifty - A new series by Adam Curtis coming to BBC iPlayer in June 2025
Following on from the success of Adam Curtis's previous BBC iPlayer films including the BAFTA winning Russia 1985-1999: TraumaZone, and BAFTA nominated HyperNormalisation, comes a brand new five-part series Shifty. This series shows in a new and imaginative way how over the past 40 years in Britain extreme money and hyper-individualism came together in an unspoken alliance. Together they undermined one of the fundamental structures of mass democracy - that it could create a shared idea of what was real. And as that fell apart, with it went the language and the ideas that people had turned to for the last 150 years to make sense of the world they lived in. As a result, life in Britain today has become strange - a hazy dream-like flux in which no one can predict what is coming next. While distrust in politicians keeps growing. And the political class seem to have lost control. SHIFTY shows how that happened. But it also shows how that distrust is a symptom of something much deeper. That there is a now a mismatch between the world we experience day to day and the world that the politicians, journalists and experts describe to us. The map no longer describes the territory. The films tell the story of the rise of that unstable and confusing world from the 1980s to now. They use a vast range of footage to evoke what if felt like to live through an epic transformation. A shift in consciousness among people in how they saw and felt about the world. Hundreds of moments captured on film and video that give a true sense of the crazy complexity and variety of peoples actual lives. Moments of intimacy and strangeness and absurdity. From nuns playing Cluedo and fat-shaming ventriloquists to dark moments - racist attacks, suspicion of others and modern paranoia about conspiracies in Britain's past. The politicians from Mrs Thatcher onwards unleashed the power of finance to try and manage and deal with this new complexity. But then they lost control and the money broke free. While at the same time the growing chaotic force of hyper-individualism created an ever more fragmented and atomised society that ate away at the idea that was at the heart of democracy. That people could come together in groups. Leaving everyone unmoored and isolated in a society which is waiting for something new to come. Something that will make sense of today's unstable and shifty world. Full transmission details will be announced in due course. SH3
