Shifty and the Curtis Method in Decline

I’ve watched all of Adam Curtis’s films and series. From Century of the Self to HyperNormalisation, from Bitter Lake to The Power of Nightmares, his work has always held a strange kind of allure: part hauntology, part systems analysis, stitched together with hypnotic music and unearthed archive. But something has shifted. Like Traumazone, his previous BBC series, Shifty doesn’t hit the high marks of his earlier work. It meanders. It reuses. And, more frustratingly, it fails to signpost what it’s actually trying to say.

Curtis is still playing with the same materials. The archive footage, long silences, elliptical narrative leaps—but the effect is diminished. Where his best work marshalled chaos into unsettling coherence, Shifty feels more like a self-curated museum: dimly lit corridors, echoes of old triumphs, and displays we’ve seen before. That’s not just metaphorical. He has begun to return to clips from earlier films, and while they’re not always exact repeats, we’re treading familiar ground. The same interview setups, same shaky stock, same sense that history has been run through a VHS machine too many times.

And crucially, Curtis’s voice is absent—literally. There’s no narration in Shifty, none of the guiding monologue that once stitched together his vast archives into something resembling theory. That narration, with its mixture of omniscience, weariness and quiet indignation, was often the only thing holding the chaos together. Without it, we’re left with text overlays to signpost the narrative, but these intertitles often feel more like thematic prompts than arguments. They gesture at meaning without anchoring it. The work becomes more opaque, not more democratic.

There are moments that land. I was genuinely intrigued by the section on water privatisation, particularly the story of aluminium contamination. Curtis revisits the Camelford water-poisoning scandal, where in 1988 aluminium sulfate was accidentally dumped into the water supply of Camelford, Cornwall, affecting thousands. In a chilling echo of institutional evasion, the government brought in Dame Barbara Clayton, a microbiologist, to assess the situation. Her conclusion? That the public’s symptoms were likely caused not by poisoning but by anxiety about being poisoned. Not a physical illness, but a psychosomatic one.

This happened before privatisation, with the government worried that any public alarm might jeopardise the sell-off. Curtis cuts to a farmer whose pigs had to be destroyed after drinking the contaminated water. He describes their erratic behaviour—walking into walls, unable to function. There are also mentions of cashmere rabbits that stopped breeding. These weren’t abstract consequences; they were biological casualties of a system already collapsing before deregulation had even formally begun. And yet, while animals suffered visibly, human health effects were dismissed. The official line. The final say on the matter, is that people were merely anxious. Really? This scene captures something deeper about the British state: its instinct not to protect but to deny.

In that moment, Shifty briefly transcends its archival haze. The series stops gesturing and starts revealing. Showing how privatisation, official narrative, and bureaucratic cruelty collide in the everyday.

Another sequence that works is built around Bernard Manning, a stand-up comic whose racialised humour is presented not as a relic, but as proto–Reform UK ideology: if you want to live here, you have to take it. Even if it’s racist. And if you don’t like it, leave. We even get a North East father giving his son a lecture on Empire, and not in a bad way. Curtis weaves this together with footage of skinhead attacks, resistance in Southall, and funerals for those killed by racists. It’s ugly, and powerful. The edit doesn’t sanitise. He lets the horror breathe.

Derek Hatton also makes a brief appearance—always interesting, even now. This time, it’s via a fabricated tabloid narrative concocted by Max Clifford, who sold a story about Hatton dating a distant cousin of Princess Diana. The photo was staged at an Aldershot nightclub, freshly opened. Giving all three. Hatton, the woman, and the club, the publicity they wanted. The relationship was entirely false. Later, we see Hatton again in a Sekonda advert, where he gets to show off his £6,000 watch, turning down the cheaper Sekonda model. Implicitly suggesting that vulgar flash has replaced style, or that style itself has been redefined through wealth. It’s a telling image: post-industrial Labour swagger recast as consumer pantomime.

In the same stretch, Curtis highlights a News of the World journalist testifying at the Leveson Inquiry, who had used a Maplin scanner to spy on celebrities and politicians. The tabloid surveillance state rendered as DIY electronics. But the journalist makes a sharper political point: his father, a left-wing reporter, had covered the sinking of the Belgrano¹ during the Falklands War and suspected the state was tapping his phone in retaliation. Now the son asks—why should the state have a monopoly on spying? A fair question, and one Curtis allows to linger without resolving. If the state listens in, why shouldn’t the press? The implication isn’t moral equivalence but institutional drift: that mistrust, once mutual, is now universal.

We almost went somewhere interesting when Curtis touched on Acid House and rave culture. There were glimpses of something more vital. Like how state power reacts to pleasure, how collectivity it is policed when it comes not from the ballot box but from pills and basslines. The footage of police attacking New Age Travellers in the so-called battle of the beanfield is shocking even now, and Shifty gives it space, if not context. The Poll Tax is alluded to, but oddly, not connected to the Trafalgar Square riot. A missed moment that might have made the stakes clearer. Instead, the series drifts between the Broadwater Farm unrest of the 1980s and riots in the North East during the 1990s, a history I didn’t know. A woman speaks about being laid off again. She’d started work at a new factory after being made redundant once before. But this time, she says, it was worse. Not because of surprise, but because she knew exactly what was coming, and watched others who’d been there longer go through it for the first time. The economic violence accumulates, but never coheres into a thesis. There’s no clear thread this time. Just impressionistic fragments. And that’s the problem: Shifty keeps circling the wreckage of Britain’s neoliberal experiment but never quite says what it means to show. Is it a lament? A diagnosis? A warning? I couldn’t tell. The montage works, the music works, but the meaning is fogged. For all its provocation, I finished the series wondering: what was Curtis actually trying to say?

Curtis edges close to insight, with the Yorkshire Ripper case. Including a detail I’d never heard before: that Margaret Thatcher was so appalled by South Yorkshire Police’s handling of the investigation. Particularly their failure to protect women—that she threatened to go and run the inquiry herself. She had to be talked out of it. It’s an astonishing moment, not because of any sudden feminist awakening, but because it suggests Thatcher saw the police as failing in their most basic function: maintaining public confidence. That she considered taking direct control says something about her instincts. Authoritarian, certainly, but also opportunistic. Coming from the woman who would later deploy those same police with brutal efficiency against the miners, the gesture reads oddly. It does make you wonder: what would have happened if she had? What kind of political realignment might have followed if law and order had momentarily turned its gaze on itself?

Curtis also lingers on the aftermath of factory closures, not just as economic shifts but as scenes of slow violence. When the gates shut, the real feeding frenzy begins. One man recalls watching the machinery sold off piece by piece, the assets stripped as though the factory were a carcass. A £900 piece of new equipment going for £30. It’s a striking image: deindustrialisation not as transition but as plunder. Not restructuring, but looting.

From there, the focus turns to housing. Damp, peeling interiors. Council estates in decline. And then the turn: council houses sold off, tenants encouraged to buy into Thatcher’s property-owning democracy just as the foundations were being pulled away. First the factory goes, then the job, then the mortgage. Negative equity becomes the aftershock. One promise collapses into another. It’s not framed as betrayal, but the shape of the betrayal is unmistakable.

Before that, though, we’re taken on a tour of the other end of the dream. A journalist in the late 1980s is shown around a new flat. A leasehold, of course. Couple of hundred thousand to buy, plus £20,000 in service charges and hidden costs. A world already slipping into the speculative logic of asset capitalism, and already out of reach for those who would later find themselves trapped in repossession. The footage doesn’t need embellishing: the class gulf was baked into the architecture.

Then we see a Tory MP on Killroy, cold-eyed and contemptuous. The argument? That the people only had themselves to blame. “If you borrow money, those are the terms.” The implication is that debt is a moral failing. That poverty is a character flaw. That if you sink, you deserve it. The crowd bristles but the mask doesn’t slip. Curtis doesn’t need narration here. Just the clip. The cruelty is self-evident.

There’s also a return to the tension between youth and police, though these too feel gestural. A striking archival moment captures a young Black man being stopped and searched by the Metropolitan Police, his car pulled over, searched without cause. A journalist tries to question the arresting officer—what was the probable cause?—but is stonewalled by both the officer and a Superintendent in attendance. The man being searched explains with weary clarity that this is routine: it’s drugs, always drugs. Curtis lets this sequence run longer than most. It segues into riot footage. The burning cars, petrol bombs, police charging, the arrests. Again, the connective tissue is left implied. The tension builds, then dissipates. We know this story already. We know how it ends. But the series doesn’t interrogate what made it start.

Curtis seems to be tracing a familiar arc: from the economic doctrines of Thatcherism to the breakdown of public trust, the collapse of political consensus, and the rise of a culture where image and individualism rule. It’s a diagnosis he’s hinted at before. That power has shifted from institutions to markets, from collective stories to personal brand management. Shifty wants to show how that shift hollowed out British political life, leaving behind a society governed more by suspicion than belief. But if that’s the aim, the execution falters. The themes are gestured at. We get acid house, PR men, water poisoning, drunk posh kids, tabloid perverts, ending with the Millenium Dome. I’s always that bloody dome. But it’s never quite drawn into a coherent whole. There’s no line between diagnosis and indictment, only an atmosphere of curated despair.

He remains sharp on the madness of the rich. The Duke of Westminster, for example, earnestly explains that laws which inconvenience him cannot possibly be in the public interest. It’s pure class delusion, laid bare. Elsewhere, Curtis shows an assortment of cars—not just luxury models—being towed for illegal parking in London. The montage of excuses is astonishing. One female driver insists it’s unsafe to walk at night in London, which is true. A policewoman advises her to get a panic alarm, a paternalistic gesture that casts her not as entitled but as fragile. Another man complains that the tow truck will damage his expensive car’s electronic suspension. If that happens, the robotic policeman replies, he has the right to lodge a complaint. In a separate scene, a young man shrugs off a fine, calmly stating, “The fine means nothing to me.” That simple sentence. Smug, indifferent, consequence-free. Is perhaps the most honest thing said in the whole series.

Yet where Curtis sharpens his focus on the elite, he often reduces working-class people to caricatures. He’s always had a tendency to frame the working poor as either tragic or grotesque—passive recipients of the story, rather than agents within it. It’s as if the editing logic demands contrast: the deluded rich, the degraded poor, with nobody else in the frame. There is a brief exception: a sequence on Alexander McQueen, the working-class lad turned fashion designer turned cultural icon. For a moment, class mobility is shown not as myth or betrayal, but as artistic ferocity, rage turned into form. But even here, the limits are framed by money and access. Before McQueen hits the heights with Louis Vuitton, a young upper-class woman becomes his patron, buying up his early designs. We see him at her country house, falcon on glove, flanked by rolling hills and heritage wealth. This isn’t Kes. The bird is not a symbol of working-class longing or wild defiance—it’s an accessory, part of a world McQueen enters but never quite transforms. Curtis almost challenges his own framing, but then moves on. And that’s the problem. Reality, particularly now, demands more nuance than that.

What’s frustrating is that Shifty isn’t bad television. It’s still leagues ahead of most documentaries on offer. It has style, a sense of deep time, an implicit critique of power. But Curtis once offered more than atmosphere. His work used to unpick ideological assumptions, connect seemingly disparate systems, and show how the present is constructed. Shifty offers fragments. It gestures, but doesn’t dig. It wants to haunt, but ends up drifting.

There’s a moment watching Shifty when you realise that Curtis’s grip on the form has loosened. The atmosphere remains, the editing rhythm is intact, but the clarity is gone. It’s hard not to compare him to the new breed of documentary maker. Unfairly, perhaps—to someone like John Wilson, whose How To with John Wilson offers none of Curtis’s historical sweep or structural ambition, but consistently lands more politically. Wilson walks the streets, not the archives, and yet in observing the everyday with awkward sincerity, he manages to say something quietly devastating about modern life. There’s no voiceover, no montage, no lecture. Just accumulation, accident, and the subtle horror of American absurdity.

Likewise, The Rehearsal, Nathan Fielder’s absurdist masterpiece, carries more truth about power and control in a single episode than Shifty manages in five. Its conceit, staging ever-more elaborate simulations of real life to prepare people for difficult conversations—ends up exposing the pathology of contemporary selfhood, the commodification of emotion, and the alienation at the heart of modern performance. Both Fielder and Wilson achieve something Curtis seems increasingly unable to: they trust the material. They don’t need to hammer a thesis into it. The story emerges not from clever juxtaposition, but from the world itself.

Perhaps Curtis doesn’t trust the world anymore. Or perhaps he trusts it too much to change, and has resigned himself to filming its ruins.

Footnotes

1. There is a great LRB podcast called The Belgrano Diary that covers aspects of this. ↩︎