Adam Curtis is this brilliantly oddball British documentary maker who’s made a name for himself by stitching together weird archive footage, moody music, and these sweeping, hypnotic voiceovers that make you feel like reality’s been a bit of a scam all along. He started out at the BBC back in the ’80s and has been poking at power, politics, and the madness of modern life ever since. His big breakout was Pandora’s Box, but it’s stuff like The Century of the Self, The Power of Nightmares, and HyperNormalisation that really show him at full tilt – diving deep into how people in charge try (and often fail) to control the chaos. He says he’s not an artist, just a journalist telling stories no one else is, but the end result is always a bit trippy, a bit conspiratorial, and totally addictive.
In this new series, expect Curtis to unravel a tale of how a chance encounter in a Chelsea bar in 1982—featuring comedian Roy Walker, the Soviet cultural attaché in London, and a Yugoslavian ABBA tribute band—somehow set off a chain of events that culminated in the COVID-19 pandemic. Or maybe not. Anywhere here is the trailer:
And the press release:
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.
Stock up on your magic mushrooms now.
Managing Editor of Slugger O’Toole. I help to manage Slugger by taking care of the site as well as running our live events. My background is in business, marketing and IT. My politics tend towards middle-of-the-road pragmatism; I am not a member of any political party. When not stuck in front of a screen, I am a parkrun Run Director.
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