Latest news with #Shifty
The Guardian
a day 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
New Statesman
a day ago
- Entertainment
- New Statesman
The savagery of Alexander McQueen
Alexander McQueen was many things to many people: a genius; a puerile provocateur; a young upstart who became Givenchy's head designer when he was just 27 years old; 'masochistic and insecure and unhappy and [with] very low self-esteem'; a man with a 'wicked sense of humour' who cared deeply for his family; a self-confessed 'big-mouthed east London yob'. Curiously for Adam Curtis, he was also an astute observer of the ways in which Britain had been corrupted by the turn of the 21st century. Shifty, Curtis's latest series for the BBC, is a hallucinatory study of Britain's backwaters over the last 40 years. In his signature style, seemingly disparate archival footage is woven together to narrate with devastating lucidity the story of how one of democracy's tenets – a shared sense of reality – was dismantled by Margaret Thatcher's free-market ideology and neoliberalism's emphasis on individualism. In Curtis's telling, democracy didn't so much collapse as dissolve into paranoia and political distrust – something that, he believes, was understood by McQueen. In one scene, Curtis unexpectedly invokes McQueen's iconic 2001 Spring/Summer show 'Voss', calling it a dramatisation of the 'modern illusion of freedom that [McQueen] had helped to create'. He means this not as condemnation. Rather, McQueen is cast as a kind of cultural diagnostician, a man who knew that beneath the sleek surface of late-Nineties Britain was something feral and broken. 'Voss' – known colloquially as the asylum show – featured a mirrored glass cube that, when lit from within, resembled a psychiatric ward. Before the show started, the audience sat, forced to look at themselves, for an hour. The models then emerged, stumbling around the box, their faces obscured by bandages. The audience could look in, but the models could not look out. 'It's interaction,' McQueen said, 'but also suffocation.' It's tempting, and perhaps not entirely wrong, to see McQueen as fashion's darkest fabulist. But fashion was, for him, a conduit for self-enquiry. 'My work is autobiographical,' he said in 2003. Born Lee Alexander McQueen in Lewisham in 1969, he always knew he wanted to be a designer. As a young boy he would dress his older sisters. After dropping out of school aged 16, he went to work as a tailor on Savile Row. From there he unsuccessfully applied for a lecturing job at Central Saint Martins, but was offered a place on the coveted MA course instead. He graduated in 1992, the same year his eponymous line was founded. By 2001 he was churning out up to ten collections a year for both Givenchy and his own label. It's no wonder the distinction between real and other became blurred. Violence was never hypothetical for McQueen. His sister, Janet, was beaten so horrifically by her first husband that she miscarried twice. McQueen, from the age of nine, was sexually assaulted by the same man. Savagery, then, wasn't metaphor, it was memory. And so his fashion became testimony – not to provoke, but to process. His clothes – metal armour, ripped shirts exposing breasts – were both a means of providing protection from the world and evidence one had already endured its cruelty. He knew that the world can be a harsh place for unprotected women. 'I want people to be afraid of the women I dress,' he said. Janet became his blueprint: vulnerable but strong. And from her, he built an army. But McQueen's vision was not nihilistic. His shows were not about crude violence producing low-grade shock value. It was curious; romantic, even. He drew his inspiration from nature – bestial, gorgeous, grotesque: '[It's] a fabric itself.' It was never mere background; it was language, and one that he could mimic. A keen ornithologist, the kestrels he spotted around the block of flats opposite his family home in east London were not just birds – they were emblematic of flight, vantage, predation, and grace. His models wore exquisite outfits made of razor clams, hats of taxidermied birds and corsets made from 97 aluminium coils. McQueen understood the cruelty of nature. In Shifty, Curtis uses a clip of McQueen building a dramatic blazer, made from calf hair. A striking silhouette, it has emphasised shoulders contrasted against a cinched-in waist made; it became a piece in his 1997 collection, 'It's a Jungle Out There'. Evoking the Thomson's gazelle, McQueen elucidated in his adenoidal voice: 'The gazelle is a poor little critter. But it's the food chain of Africa. As soon as it's born, it's dead. And that's how I see human life.' Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe While fragility made half the story, survival made the other. McQueen said about the same blazer, 'You could class this as costume. But it's costume with a deadly meaning.' That's not to say he didn't find a place for hope. In his 2009 show 'Plato's Atlantis', models walked in the now-legendary Armadillo shoe – towering, ten-inch heels. Their heads were adorned in braids, some a foot high, and their bodies bore garments that had used 3D printing to mimic marine features like scales and gills. They emerged onto the catwalk, some nearly eight feet tall, having transformed into something otherworldly. (It's easy to see how one of his favourite painters, Hieronymus Bosch, informed McQueen's fantastical sets.) Under McQueen's gaze, femininity wasn't merely performative. It was adaptive. Time and again he ensured his women were disquietingly chimeric: part-human, part-beast, mythic. They were not dressing up; they were becoming. Even 'Plato's Atlantis' – the designer's last collection, unveiled a few months before his death by suicide in February 2010 – often read as apocalyptic, ends in rebirth. The theatricality of McQueen's shows was steeped in cinema. He understood voyeurism's duality: the pleasure of watching, and the terror of being seen. As Richard Brett, a PR who dated McQueen, once said: 'He wanted partners he could control, but he was attracted to people who were resistant to that.' One of McQueen's favourite films was Paris, Texas, Wim Wenders' ode to estrangement and the erotic pull of memory; a film concerned with how the ghosts of our pasts haunt our present. In it, Nastassja Kinski's character, Jane, is viewed across the partition of a one-way mirror, by a man who watches silently, and who does not speak until it's safe. For McQueen, this was not just fiction, it was life itself. The woman in the box. The watcher and the watched. The parallels to Voss are difficult to deny. In this way, the brutality on display in McQueen's work was not celebratory – it was diagnostic. It exposed how deeply violence is threaded into the performance of femininity. And through fashion, he rewrote the narrative. His women were not killed, they returned. They were not the romanticised victims seen in Alfred Hitchcock films (another influence on McQueen), but something stranger: survivors, ghosts, predators. In a world where fashion sells fantasy, McQueen sold a disturbing reality. His work was not cold – it was infused with romantic idealism. Granted, this was something of a complicated and messy concept to McQueen. Speaking about relationships, he said, 'You do things like put up your defences just to test how much that other person loves you.' For all the strength and power stitched into his brocade, he left space for vulnerability. He made a cuirass – a breast and back plate fused together, like a medieval knight's armour, or bulletproof vest – out of glass. His bumster trousers, with their waistband 5cm below those of the Seventies low-rise, were provocative, but they left one of the most vulnerable and erotic parts of his models' bodies – the bottom of the spine – exposed. His clothes were beautiful, but they were also fragile, and ultimately self-defeating: they left a sliver of a crack for light to break through. McQueen was, by all accounts, generous, funny, childlike. He loved his dogs. He adored his mum, Joyce. His suicide, which came just nine days after her death, was not just the loss of a great designer – it was the collapse of a unique world-view. It's easy to romanticise such an ending, to fold it neatly into the narrative of a tortured genius. But McQueen wasn't interested in being tragic. He wanted truth, even when it hurt. In the world of fashion, life can be constructed around fantasy, but he made the audience look at – and reckon with – pain. Adam Curtis frames McQueen as a man who understood the sickness in Britain's soul. He certainly understood how beauty could become confinement; how spectacle could be an effective camouflage for pain. By the 2000s, market ideology had reordered the British economy, and New Labour's spin culture had decoupled politics from reality. The grainy archive film coalesces to form one picture: behind the allure of financial freedom came inequality; beneath superficial beauty lies something murkier. Or, as McQueen put it, 'There's blood beneath every layer of skin.' But the designer also knew that transformation was possible. 'It wasn't really about fashion with Lee,' said Sarah Burton, who, having joined the Alexander McQueen label as an intern in 1996, succeeded him as head designer. 'It was so much more than that. It was about everything that was to do with being alive. All the difficult parts, and the beautiful.' Because while Alexander McQueen's signature was theatricality, his subject was truth: feral, biographical, unhealed. [See also: How Britain fell into the K-hole] Related
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
2 days ago
- Politics
- The Guardian
Thatcher, Farage and toe-sucking: Adam Curtis on how Britain came to the brink of civil war
The mood is very fragile. There is a feeling of global disorder and growing chaos. The threat of war edges ever closer. Some people are even predicting revolution in the UK. Two weeks ago, Dominic Cummings gave an interview to Sky News prophesying violent uprising, then wrote on his blog that there is 'Whitehall terror of widespread white-English mobs turning political … Parts of the system increasingly fear this could spin out of control into their worst nightmare.' I think something much deeper is going on beneath the surface of Britain today. Two years ago, a historian called Christopher Clark wrote a book that makes you look at your own time in a completely different way. Called Revolutionary Spring, it tells the story of the unrest that swept Europe in 1848. In a few weeks, uprisings spread like ferocious brushfire – from Paris to Berlin to Vienna, Prague and Milan. Thousands of demonstrators stormed national assemblies and kings fled their countries, caught up in a wave of violent upheaval never seen before. Clark's book inspired me to make Shifty, my new series of films, because the world he describes feels so similar to today. One in which 'the political horizon was dark. Neither nations nor governments knew where they were going. 'Everyone had surrendered to doubt and anxiety. All forms of belief were enfeebled, all forms of authority shaken, social bonds had reached breaking point. The political horizon was dark. Neither nations nor governments knew where they were going. There was a sense of being 'on the eve of bloody wars and internal strife'.' All the revolutions failed in their original aim. But out of them came the bourgeois class that was going to run society in the future. Fascinatingly, Clark showed how from that came all the ways of ordering the world that we today accept as eternal – not just the political structures of left and right but fundamental ideas of our time, like social class. But he is clear that they may be temporary. 'They belonged to the world that had not yet encountered the great disciplining identities of modern politics. We belong to one in which those identities are swiftly dissolving.' I wanted to make a series set in Britain over the past 45 years that shows how all our political certainties dissolved. It is built of hundreds of moments that try to evoke what it has felt like to live through this age. The mood is that strange twilight zone between history and memory; fragments that have not yet been fixed into a formal version of the past. From intersex dogs and fat-shaming ventriloquists to avant-garde hair. Leeks by moonlight. Ken Dodd's suitcase. Nuns playing ping pong. Margaret Thatcher's handbag. A scanner from Maplin. Netto. And dark moments – racist attacks, suspicion of others and modern paranoia about conspiracies in Britain's past. Above all, I wanted to trace the rise of the thing that has destroyed the confidence of our age: distrust – not just of those in power, and of 'truth', but of everything and everyone around us and, ultimately, of ourselves. It didn't start like that. Thatcher believed that if you liberated people from state control they would become better and more confident. But to do this, she turned to radical rightwing economic thinkers – some of whom were very odd. About 15 years ago, I went to see a US economist called James Buchanan. I had to drive for hours deep into the mountains of Virginia to his farm. He told me that you couldn't trust anyone in any position of power. Everyone, he insisted, is driven by self-interest. We sat in a darkened room, with a thunderstorm raging outside, as he told me firmly that human beings didn't just follow their own self-interest when they were buying and selling stuff; they were driven by it all the time. So when people in power talked of being motivated by 'public duty', they were lying. He called this 'public choice theory', and it had an enormous effect on the advisers around Thatcher. It explained to them why all the bureaucrats that ran Britain were so useless. The economists invented a system called New Public Management (NPM) to control them. NPM said it was dangerous to leave people to motivate themselves through fuzzy notions such as 'doing good'. Instead, you created systems that monitored everyone through targets and incentives. Constantly watching and rewarding or punishing. It was the birth of modern HR. Anyone who has ever dealt with HR and their monitoring systems knows instinctively that they don't trust you. There is a very good moment that was captured on a documentary about London Zoo in 1993 made by Molly Dineen. The zoo had brought in a new HR expert who explains to the mild-mannered zookeepers how incentives and targets work. 'Once you do that,' he says, 'you've got them in the Grinder.' That's Buchanan's theories at work. And it was a terrible virus that was going to spread. But the roots of distrust didn't just come from the right. The patrician liberals in Britain were completely shocked that large sections of the working class voted for Thatcher. They had always drawn their influence and prestige from the idea that they cared for the 'little people' and the 'less well-off'. Now they turned on them in fury. I found a clip of the novelist Martin Amis promoting his book Money. Dripping with disdain, he says the working class have been seduced by the vulgar allure of money. They are, he said, stupid. It was at that moment the influence of liberal intellectuals began to slip. Power was shifting. There was one institution Thatcher still trusted, though: the security services. Even that crumbled with the case of Geoffrey Prime who worked at GCHQ. It started when Prime's wife came home to find him being questioned about the assault of a local girl. After the police left, he told her that he was the man they were looking for. She asked him if there was anything else she should know. He said yes: he'd also been spying for the Russians for the past 17 years. Thatcher was stunned. MI5 had vetted Prime five times and hadn't noticed anything. Even the Russians knew he was a paedophile. It became clear MI5 was hopeless. And when it failed to prevent the siege of the Libyan embassy in 1984, she ordered the home secretary, Leon Brittan, to reform it. MI5 fought back – spreading rumours through journalists that Brittan was a predatory paedophile, part of a secret ring of paedophile MPs in Westminster. Thirty years later, those rumours would burst to the surface as part of Operation Midland. None of it was true. By the end of the 80s the belief that you couldn't trust anyone in public life, which Buchanan started, finally came round to the politicians themselves. It was basic logic. If you believed public duty was a fiction, and all public servants were lying when they spoke of public duty, weren't the politicians also public servants? Which meant they must also be lying when they proclaimed they were working for the public good. One of the key figures in this process was the infamous publicist Max Clifford. He had picked up on the groundswell of distrust and found a way to monetise it. Clifford specialised in putting two or three of his clients together and cooking up stories from which they all benefited. He started in the late 80s with a famous radical leftwinger called Derek Hatton. He took him to a nightclub – which Clifford also represented. He photographed Hatton next to an heiress of the Baring bank family – whom he also represented – and cooked up a passionate romance between them. Then he turned to the Tories. When a government minister called David Mellor was revealed to be having an affair, his mistress – Antonia de Sancha – came to Clifford. He took her to meet the press in restaurants he represented, then told them stories about Mellor making love in a Chelsea shirt while toe-sucking and spanking. All invented. Sign up to What's On Get the best TV reviews, news and features in your inbox every Monday after newsletter promotion Clifford had opened the floodgates. In the early 90s, MP after MP was revealed to be a sleazy hypocrite who seemed far more concerned with his own weird sex life than governing the country and serving the people. The one I love is the story of David Ashby MP. He sued the Sunday Times in 1995 when they accused him of being a homosexual. He admitted he had shared a bed with another man, but said it was purely to save money on holiday. He admitted that his wife did call him 'Queenie' and 'Poofter', but said that was only because she was lonely in the marriage. He had bought her a dog to make her feel better. But it didn't work. Ashby told the court she threw plates and kitchen knives at him. She threatened to 'kick him in the bollocks to stop him having sex with anyone', and broke his glasses. Ashby lost the case, which put paid to his career. Soon, he was deselected by his local Tories as their parliamentary candidate. He later said of his ex-colleagues, on live radio: 'They're a bunch of shits, aren't they, and we know they are.' The early 90s saw an extraordinary collapse in trust in politicians. Created not just by Clifford, but also by Mohamed Al-Fayed, who said that he regularly paid MPs with cash in brown paper envelopes to ask questions for him in the Commons. It seemed to prove everything Buchanan had been saying: you couldn't trust anyone in public service. After I interviewed Buchanan in the Virginia mountains, I asked him about his life. He told me about how when he was training as an officer in the US Navy, he was constantly patronised by pompous officers from posh Ivy League universities. He was still angry about it – he knew they were all phoneys, he said, you could feel it. As I drove back I wondered if that was his real motivation. Dressed up in academic language, but beneath it was simply revenge. He was going to destroy that smug patrician class. And he succeeded. Big time. By the second half of the 90s, even the politicians came to believe they were bad. And they did the most extraordinary thing: they gave away power. They did it partly because they knew they couldn't fight against the rising tide of public doubt. But they were also persuaded by another force they felt they could no longer fight against: the markets. The first to go was Bill Clinton. His secretary of the treasury, Robert Rubin, persuaded him to pull back from public spending. Instead, he should cut the deficit and allow the markets to create a financial boom. Clinton agreed – and the US boomed throughout the 90s. But it also led directly to the global crash of 2008. ƒ And behind the markets was a whole academic industry that had taken Buchanan's ideas and run with them. They wrote articles that bluntly said the role of politicians in society should be marginalised because so much of what they did was 'sub-optimal'. Journalists picked up these ideas and put them in simpler terms. Fareed Zakaria, editor of Newsweek International wrote: 'What we need in politics today is not more democracy – but less'. In the face of this undermining of politics, New Labour also gave in. The day after their victory in 1997, the new chancellor, Gordon Brown, dramatically announced that he was giving power over the setting of interest rates to the Bank of England. It was an extraordinary move. Labour MPs were aghast. One, Bryan Gould, exclaimed: 'What then is the role of the chancellor? Or more simply, what is the role of democracy?' Brown later admitted the truth: that it was because politicians were now seen as dangerous. We did it, he said, 'not for any fundamental economic reasons', but because we weren't trusted. Born out of a weird self-hate, that single act was largely responsible for the present powerlessness of politicians. It was also helped on by a new phenomenon – because liberal culture too caught the disease. The Thick of It was a comedy series based around a government minister and their advisers. They live in a constant state of self-interested hysteria. Reacting to events and having no control over the real world outside. It was seen as liberal satire – but it can also be seen as a very powerful expression of Buchanan's idea that all politicians are completely venal, driven only by dark emotions. But that wasn't the end of it. Because a new kind of politician rose up, bred in the swamp of distrust. They saw that playing bad in an over-the-top way would give you a great deal of power. Because in a world of disenchantment, where no one believed that politicians could be good, being bad meant you must be authentic. I give you Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage and Donald Trump: pantomime villains who are locked together with us in a feedback loop of shock-outrage-badness repeating endlessly. Outside this theatre, really bad people do really bad things – but we are distracted by the pantomime. Meanwhile, the classes that once made up society fractured. The liberals turned on those who voted for Brexit, using with one voice the word Amis had spat out 30 years before: 'stupid'. It may be that Britain – and much of Europe – is in a similar moment to that described by Clark just before 1848: on the edge of a new kind of society we don't yet have the language to describe. It feels frightening because without that language it is impossible to have coherent dreams of the future. To build a better world, you need an idea of what should change and how. And one of the things preventing that may be our obsession with constantly replaying the past. In the present age, the fog of experience has been thickened by the mass of recorded data that allows the recent past to be endlessly replayed, refusing to fade away. A constant loop of nostalgia – music, images, films and dreams from the past. It is another block to the future. And it is also the way this series is made. My bad. Shifty in on BBC iPlayer from Saturday 14 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
