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Spectator
01-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Spectator
Adam Curtis can see your future
Adam Curtis used to make TikToks but doesn't want to talk about them. 'I did quite a lot of TikTok, privately,' he says, 'just under another name. They're probably out there somewhere…' His head rests in his hand and his elbow on the chair next to him, the two of us among pink flowers at the kitchen table in the Soho townhouse where he works. He looks at me and repeats: 'They're private.' For 30 years Curtis has been making documentaries for the BBC about how Britain became a sad place, or, in his own words: 'What happened after the Cold War, mixed in with a deeper sense of… I think melancholy. A sense we were once powerful.' Shifty is his new film. Outwardly the five episodes chart the breakdown of society's collective structures from Margaret Thatcher to Tony Blair. Really they are Curtis's attempt at tracing the origins of a strange emotion that he says has become general in Britain, a feeling that 'there is a big thing going on behind the surface'. 'I think there's something new going on inside people's heads and no one has got the language to describe it,' he tells me. It is this emotion, Curtis believes, that caused 'Leave' to win the Brexit referendum and explains Reform's popularity. He is describing a sort of revolutionary feeling, I think. If you go back and watch previous Curtis documentaries, flick between them, do an Adam Curtis to Adam Curtis, you realise that they mash together quite neatly, and that his work has a single ambition: to hold this anxious spirit to the sun, twirl it around in his hand and observe it from different angles. So Shifty is an origin story. Curtis says that during the 1980s and 1990s we privatised and financed our way into nasty self-centredness. People felt unmoored and politicians became unable to hold communities together. Curtis leaves it to the viewer to draw the easy line to today's politics. In one of the final scenes in the series, Peter Mandelson visits the Millennium Dome, which is then under construction. 'It's marvellous, absolutely marvellous,' he tells Tony Blair on a phone call. 'You'll think it's incredible, believe me. There's a zone with lots of emblems of Britain in it. I suddenly saw a photograph of a plate of toad-in-the-hole. I loved toad-in-the-hole when I was little!' The Blair government, and every government since, keeps giving us more toad-in-the-hole. Curtis's films are always about the past because he, like the politicians he describes, is unable to define the present. 'There are certain aspects of modern power that you cannot illustrate,' he says. 'And they make me cry, sometimes literally. I'm scrabbling for shots. I'll tell you what they are. They're computers. They govern our lives, but nothing happens. And that expands to things like HR because that's just men and women in glass offices doing keystrokes which will govern your life and destroy your life or whatever. But there's nothing there. Finance. I've gone mad sometimes looking for shots. The normal solution for a television journalist is to have a reporter gazing at a screen with the glow on their face musing to themselves. And I would not do that. You have to find another way.' 'This really gets me,' he continues. 'I feel like so much of the modern world is just not being recorded, got at.' I ask if he really cries about it. 'Out of frustration, yeah. Just like… 'Oh for fuck's sake! How do I illustrate this?' I can't do another shot of a server farm. I just can't.' Curtis says that as 'modern power' has become unillustratable, so has 'the self'. He says that in the BBC archive footage, somewhere in 1997 or 1998, people start to speak and carry themselves in unnatural ways when they know they are in front of a camera. This is before social media and reality television. He can't explain it. We also, obviously, spend a decreasing amount of time interacting with the physical world. 'Isn't that fascinating?' Curtis says. 'In the age where people are exposing themselves more and more and more and more, it's… [he's referring to 'the self'] not there.' I am aware that all of this talk of emotions and feelings and stories and the self sounds mysterious and perhaps overthought, but something in it is true when it comes from Curtis. 'You know that's not right, you know it from yourself,' he will say in conversation. Curtis used to narrate his documentaries, but doesn't anymore. His voice actually got deeper with every new series, until it vanished completely in his 2022 film Russia 1985-1999: TraumaZone, which is about the end of the Soviet Union. In his films and in person Curtis does not make arguments, he summons moods. He also refuses to use the word 'vibe'. A still from TraumaZone (Adam Curtis / BBC) 'Dominic Cummings got in touch with me after my Russia thing,' Curtis says. 'He was in Russia during that time. I just found him very funny. I like his snark, and I like the fact that he realises that the bubble is not good. I respect him for that.' I ask whether politicians have asked him to help them portray their vision of the country to the population. He says he has been contacted by politicians, and that they 'are always after something', but that 'no one has ever asked me to help them.' People speculate about Curtis's own politics, and he makes it very clear to me that he is not a liberal. 'Never trust a liberal,' he says. 'The one thing the patrician liberals can't examine is themselves. They really cannot do it. I find it absolutely astonishing. After Brexit, they didn't examine their role in it. They did not examine any role they might have played.' Curtis says his views on politics are born out of north Kent, where he comes from. 'It's… What's the word… Independent,' he says. 'That's the polite way of putting it.' Can you explain that a little more, I ask. 'No,' he replies. Fair enough. 'I challenge anyone to say what my politics are,' he says later, 'because quite frankly I haven't got any. I'm a completely modern creature, like you I'm sure, and a lot of my friends. I react to events as they come along. You are aware that power is unequal and you shouldn't cry about that fact.' 'We might be living through a revolution, but we don't know it' We go to the study where Curtis edits. There is some Lana Del Rey merch, two monitors and a mess of hard-drives. (The townhouse is not his, by the way. It is owned by a bohemian lady. She lets him work here.) 'Every now and then, I wonder whether it's going to crash,' he says, nodding at the mess. 'Well, I mean, it does crash… But it's going to properly crash. And then I'm fucked.' He says that the hard part of his job is coming up with 'the idea and the stories'. It took him about nine months to come up with the introduction to Bitter Lake, which is the best sequence of any of his films, and ten minutes to make it. Curtis finds editing is easy and satisfying, and does it late at night. 'There's a whole tradition, and it goes so deep, of editors, probably because they're not really in control and they want their bit of control, they go: 'We've got to cut a frame off… here'. I know that no one notices that. What they really notice is whether it's drawing them in, whether they're going along with you for the ride.' Because he edits his documentaries himself, he costs the BBC very little. Shifty cost £17,500 to make. Curtis's next documentary might be about America, he says, but it could also be about 'living in a society where a lot of things look normal but actually behind them they're not.' We are currently, he says, 'in a sort of cosplay of everything. And behind it, there's this seething mass.' 'We might be living through a revolution, but we don't know it because it's happening already inside millions of people's heads. It'll suddenly burst through to us: 'OH MY FUCK!''
Spectator
25-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Spectator
The vicious genius of Adam Curtis
In an interview back in 2021, Adam Curtis explained that most political journalists couldn't understand his films because they aren't interested in music. Having known a fair few political journalists, I can say with some certainty that he was right. Most politically motivated types are – not to be unkind, but it's true – total losers. This cuts across left and right, all ideologies and tendencies, from Toryism to anarchism to Islamism and back: whatever you believe, if you believe it too strongly you were probably a weirdo at school. The other kids went out clubbing; you stayed at home, drawing pictures of Lenin or von Mises on your satchel. The other kids were in bands, you were in a reading group. When political freaks grow up a bit they often get very performatively into social binge-drinking, as if to prove a point, but it's all hollow. The joy isn't there. There are important things about the world that will always be closed off to the political obsessive, because political obsessives don't understand music. Adam Curtis considers himself to be a political journalist, and he definitely used to be one. His BBC documentaries from the 1990s and 2000s are thorny and thematically dense attempts to grapple with the condition of the present. Pandora's Box (1992) was about how human reason bumps up against the inherent messiness of reality, and how projects for rationally governing the world end up collapsing into bizarre forms of unreason. Over six episodes, Curtis talks about von Neumann's game theory, Milton Friedman's Chicago school of economics, Kwame Nkrumah's dream of African self-sufficiency, the cult of Taylorism and how it overrode Marxism in the early Soviet Union, nuclear physics, insecticides, and the way our social biases are repackaged for us in the form of a supposedly neutral science. There are a lot of words in there. Plenty of interviews with experts and significant figures, but also Curtis's clipped, precise narration, set to a collage of footage dug out of the BBC archive. Street scenes, offices, factories, politicians getting out of cars, but sometimes more abstract shots of industrial infrastructure and spaceships exploding in the sky. According to Curtis, most of that footage was there because he needed to finish the film on time and couldn't find anything else. But since then, this stuff has become his stock in trade. You know you're watching an Adam Curtis film when you hear someone talking about how plans to rationally control society fell apart to a Burial track and lots of black-and-white archive footage of people dancing at Butlin's. He was convinced he was simply illustrating his ideas. But this was a fantasy. In fact, he was unleashing forces that he could neither control nor understand. And then something strange happened. His style has become very easy to parody, which might be why Curtis has spent the last few years steadily paring it down. Shifty is his most abstract, imagistic film yet. His narration has now vanished entirely; instead, there are a series of sparse title cards that flash up over the archive footage, saying things like 'The Concept Of Privatisation Had Been Invented By The Nazis' or 'Underneath There Was Nothing.' All in all, over five episodes and five-and-three-quarter hours, Adam Curtis gives us significantly fewer of his own words than are contained in this review. They are sparse and stony, less like an argument than propaganda signs glowing in the night. The story he tells with them is – if you've seen any of his previous work – a familiar one. Every episode begins with the same words. 'There come moments in societies when the foundations of power begin to move. When that happens things become SHIFTY.' In Britain, that moment came at the end of the 20th century. Before Thatcher, Britain was about strong communities, solidarity, labour unions, and a productive industrial base. But during the Thatcher and Blair eras, all of that was emptied out, and we became a society of cynical, self-interested individuals, trapped in a fantasy of the past, and led by politicians who no longer believed in anything at all. This story is not necessarily untrue, but it's also not really groundbreaking. To the extent that this country does still have a unifying national myth, it's this one – about how Thatcherism tore all our unifying national myths apart. But it doesn't really matter, because Curtis is doing something different to ordinary political journalism. His constant rummage through the BBC's archives has yielded a lot of good stuff, and he has a real vicious genius for putting it together. At the start of the very first scene, we see Jimmy Savile ushering a group of angelic blond children into Thatcher's office. Once they're inside he gives a chortling thumbs-up to the camera, and then closes the door. Alongside the stories of monetarism and shots of fox hunters riding in front of huge hazy steelworks, there are weirder threads. A dog owner is concerned that their pet seems to have spontaneously switched sex. At the London Zoo, which can no longer rely on state financing, zookeepers now have to be personable and cheerful, play-acting for a public who have become the only source of income. A kid plays with the effects pedal on his guitar. A woman shows off her designer handbags. In the planning meetings for the Millennium Dome, they try to pin down the values of modern Britain, but discover that they don't really have any. In the 'Spirit Zone,' instead of endorsing any particular religion, they've decided to fill the room with fog and write the words 'How shall I live?' on the wall. They're very proud of it. 'I think the question 'how shall I live?' is anything but banal. In fact, I think it's the biggest single question, probably, that's begged in the entire dome.' None of this really coalesces into a single point, but trying to make things coalesce into a single point is part of the rationalist, sense-making project Curtis has been critiquing his entire career. Our world is shifty now, and things will not make sense. You won't understand them with facts, but music. There's far less actual music here than in any of Curtis's previous films. Instead of Kanye or Nine Inch Nails or Aphex Twin, a lot of the shots of decaying industry are set to the sounds of static or howling wind. But music is one of the threads here. In one episode, we're introduced to the Farlight CMI digital sampler, a machine that can take any sound, convert it into data, and digitally reproduce it. The first song to be recorded entirely using samples was 'Relax' by Frankie Goes to Hollywood, which is then banned from the BBC for being too flagrantly gay, but it's already self-replicating around the world. People start using the Farlight CMI to switch out samples in the track and create their own remixes. Which is, of course, what Curtis is also doing. Later, we meet a bedroom producer called DJ Fingers, playing around with turntables in his south London home. 'Basically you're just making music out of other people's records. You know the record inside out when you're cutting up this break.' Once again Curtis has found a vision of himself in the archives. But it's not exactly celebratory. He was one of the first people to point out that in recent decades newness seems to have vanished from the world: we just repeat old fashions, old music, old fantasies about how to live. What does it mean, then, when one of our greatest and most popular documentarians does nothing but rearrange the past? At the end of the final episode, there's a kind of Adam Curtis auto-parody, of the type I just did above. A Bowie song, paired with clips from old films. 'Will People Come Together As They Did In The Past And Fight Back?' his stark title cards ask. 'Or Is This Just Another Feedback Loop Of Nostalgia? Repeating Back Sounds Dreams And Images Of The Past, Which Is The Way The System Controls You, And Is The Way This Series Was Made.'
The Guardian
21-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Shifty to 28 Years Later: the week in rave reviews
BBC iPlayer; full series available now Summed up in a sentence In his signature kaleidoscopic style, celebrated documentarian Adam Curtis looks back at Britain over the past 40 years … and how it has come to the brink of collapse. What our reviewer said '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.' Lucy Mangan Read the full review Further reading Thatcher, Farage and toe-sucking: Adam Curtis on how Britain came to the brink of civil war BBC Two/iPlayer; available now Summed up in a sentence The celebrated chef opens up with searing honesty about being sectioned by his wife 18 months ago. What our reviewer said 'A conversation with his son Jack, also a chef, is one of the most dreadfully honest and painful things I have seen on television in years. Pent-up emotions pour forth from Jack as he remembers 'just wanting relaxing conversation with our dad and not being allowed to have one … You didn't want to know anyone's thoughts. I just didn't think you gave a shit.' Lucy Mangan Read the full review Further reading 'It's part of who I am': Heston Blumenthal on the bipolar diagnosis that saved his life ITV1/ITVX; full series available now Summed up in a sentence The veteran presenter returns to show us his woo woo life in New Zealand in a show that is surely destined to be a cult classic. What our reviewer said ''All we are is body energy systems,' he … is 'explains' the word? 'They touch everything around us. Which is how you move into the bigger matrix, the universal energy system.' You know what? I loved Noel's House Party. And nothing has ever made me cry happier tears than Noel's Christmas Presents. He's earned this.' Lucy Mangan Read the full review Further reading 'I am Jesus!': the TV brilliance of Noel Edmonds BBC iPlayer; all series available now Summed up in a sentence The worst Motherland mother gets her own spin-off – and the gag rate is so high it fizzes with the energy of perimenopause. What our reviewer said 'The gags – about Gloria Hunniford, the Just Seventeen problem page and Sinn Féin – are very British and aimed at a very particular audience, namely strung out middle-aged mums longing to laugh until they wee a bit at jokes about wellness supplements. Too rarely do we get the chance.' Chitra Ramaswamy Read the full review In cinemas now Summed up in a sentence Powerful documentary following six former inmates revisiting their old cells in the former women's prison to reflect on childhood trauma and domestic abuse. What our reviewer said 'The film producers explain at length in notes provided that their process involved working with the six women, who had a say in the final edit and were given access throughout to a psychotherapist. Their collaborative documentary feels like essential viewing for policymakers.' Cath Clarke Read the full review Further reading 'Prison was the first place we felt sisterhood': six women return to the ruins of Holloway In cinemas now Summed up in a sentence Danny Boyle's horror threequel brings back the sprinting zombies as an island lad seeks help for his sick mum on the undead-infested mainland. What our reviewer said 'The film takes a generational, even evolutionary leap into the future from the initial catastrophe, creating something that mixes folk horror, little-England satire and even a grieving process for all that has happened.' Peter Bradshaw Read the full review Further reading 'You'd never make Slumdog today': Danny Boyle on risks, regrets and returning to the undead In cinemas now Summed up in a sentence Pixar's latest offers Spielbergian twists and an aggressive, deal-oriented alien in a story about a lonely boy who finds friendship in space. What our reviewer said 'Elio may well indeed do the business. It has charm, likability and that potent ingredient: childhood loneliness and vulnerability.' Peter Bradshaw Read the full review Further reading Raspberry scented weirdness: will Elio be Pixar's wildest ride to date? In cinemas now Summed up in a sentence Michael Haneke's stalker drama, rereleased as part of a retrospective season, Complicit, is a compelling tale about the denial and guilt mixed into the foundations of western prosperity. What our reviewer said 'There is no dramatic musical score, none of the traditional shocks or excitements, just an IV-drip-drip-drip of disquiet leading finally to a convulsion of horror.' Peter Bradshaw Read the full review Further reading Michael Haneke films – ranked! Netflix; out now Summed up in a sentence Bleak, enraging documentary combining first-hand accounts of the disaster with an appalling record of official our reviewer said 'With the very considerable help of the housing-issues journalist Peter Apps, the film shows how the horror was created by a perfect storm of incompetence, mendacity, greed, and (that heartsinking phrase) systemic failure.' Peter Bradshaw Read the full review Further reading 'Grenfell should make us all uncomfortable': Olaide Sadiq on making Grenfell: Uncovered Reviewed by Kathryn Hughes Summed up in a sentence An ambitious meditation on the power of stories in an age of migration. What our reviewer said 'Over the past 50 years of her distinguished career as a cultural historian, Warner has immersed herself in fairytales, playground chants, lullabies and fables. Now she suggests using these folk forms to forge connections between arrivants (a term she prefers to 'migrants') and their often hostile hosts.' Read the full review Reviewed by Amy-Jane Beer Summed up in a sentence From buzzards in Oxfordshire to cranes in Kent – how once common birds left their mark in British placenames. What our reviewer said 'Warren's wordcraft is sublime … his style textured and generous, weaving fascination, family life, and lightly carried expertise.' Read the full review Reviewed by Fiona Sturges Summed up in a sentence The daughter of the Fear of Flying author on being neglected as a child – and dealing with her mother's dementia. What our reviewer said 'The writing veers between punchy and meandering, with moments of deep sadness leavened by a sardonic humour.' Read the full review Further reading My mother was a famous feminist writer known for her candour and wit. But she was also a fantasist who couldn't be bothered to spend time raising me Reviewed by Sam Byers Summed up in a sentence A polyphonic portrait of contemporary Belfast digs into the faultlines of class and money. What our reviewer said 'In her first novel, this acclaimed short-story writer revels in the possibilities of an expanded cast, yet controls the pace and framing with all the precision of a miniaturist.' Read the full review Reviewed by Toby Litt Summed up in a sentence A standup takes revenge after a hatchet-job review. What our reviewer said 'Is giving an artist a one-star review an act of abuse? That's the starting point of this entertaining and very timely debut novel.' Read the full review Reviewed by Joe Moran Summed up in a sentence A brilliant history of a weaponised mantra. What our reviewer said 'He wants us to think of free speech as being not just about the content of words but about which voices are heard most loudly and which are marginalised.' Read the full review Further reading The big idea: what do we really mean by free speech? Out now Summed up in a sentence Family, fatherhood and friendship fill the British rapper's fourth album – along with, for the first time, his singing voice. What our reviewer said 'Whenever Carner slips into his low-pitched, totally unaffected croon, it cuts through any over-sweetness like a squeeze of lemon.' Rachel Aroesti Read the full review Out now Summed up in a sentence These New Yorkers made one of our favourite rock albums of recent times with 2023's Cartwheel. This follow-up broadens out their sound. What our reviewer said 'The way bandleader Will Anderson weaves acoustic and distorted guitars and blasts of needling feedback into something as beguiling as Julia's War is evidence of a unique talent operating in a crowded field.' Stevie Chick Read the full review Further reading The bands saving shoegaze, from Deafheaven to Feeble Little Horse Out now Summed up in a sentence This Estonian duo utilise runo song, a form of oral poetry specific to the Baltic Finnic languages, and play the kannel (an Estonian zither). What our reviewer said 'These songs are rhythmically complex and have solid, ancient roots, but fans of ambient, Balearic dreaminess and the softer sides of indie pop and psych-folk will find woozy comforts here.' Jude Rogers Read the full review Out now Summed up in a sentence Conductor Klaus Mäkelä leads the Orchestre de Paris, performing Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique and Ravel's La Valse, having blown minds with their rendition of the former at last year's Proms. What our reviewer said 'It's all played with consummate skill by an orchestra who are clearly responsive to their conductor's every move.' Erica Jeal Read the full review Further reading Prom 58: Orchestre de Paris/Mäkelä review – electrifying music-making from an elite team Out now Summed up in a sentence Currently on tour across the UK, this Chicago indie trio channel the Raincoats, the Feelies and the Velvet Underground on their second album. What our reviewer said 'The album feels almost clockwork: every element machine-tooled, a place for everything, and everything in its place. But there's no coldness here, the poignancy only accentuated by the poise with which these songs are delivered.' Stevie Chick Read the full review
The Guardian
20-06-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Film-maker Adam Curtis on why this moment feels so weird
Adam Curtis is a journalist who delves deep into the BBC archive to make films about the ideas and feelings that define our times. In his latest series of films, Shifty, Curtis charts how Margaret Thatcher and her government transformed Britain by transferring power to the world of finance and by promoting a radical individualism. In conversation with Michael Safi, Curtis discusses the way his films try to capture what an idea feels like, how the ideas of the 1980s have led us to feelings of powerlessness and melancholy, and how new ideas are the key to a different future. Support the Guardian today:
Times
16-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
The ‘end of history' was the source of our ills
All the best scenes in Shifty, Adam Curtis's new documentary about Britain in the late 20th-century, concern the Millennium Dome. With skilfully spliced footage of its gaping interiors and weirdly looming riverside bulk, the dome is transformed into an almost gothic symbol of fin de siècle spiritual vacuousness. A planning committee decides that it is to have a 'spirit zone', but nobody can decide what religions should be represented there. In a drab conference room a man with an uninspiring powerpoint enthuses that the phrase 'HOW SHALL I LIVE?' should be projected onto a blank wall instead. Isn't that a bit 'banal', wonders Simon Jenkins. He is quickly shouted down. You don't have to buy all of Curtis's arguments — was Margaret Thatcher really the sole author of modern hyperindividualism? — to appreciate his refreshingly eerie and desolate portrait of that much-mythologised period, the 'end of history'. To many today, the late 1990s and early 2000s are a lost Edwardian summer of stability and peace. The endless trend pieces about 'Nineties nostalgia' are more than mere fluff. The undying popularity of Friends, Harry Potter and Bridget Jones among those not alive to see them first time round, and the lucrative resurrections of Oasis and Pulp, represent something real. For people my age and younger, the vanished era of post-Cold War tranquillity is as psychologically significant as the Second World War was to some baby boomers; it is the same painful sense of having just missed a glorious cresting wave in the tide of history. But rather than envying the heroism of our fathers, we covet their low house prices and political stability. To many Gen Zers (almost half of whom tell pollsters they wish TikTok didn't exist) the last years before iPhones have an archaic charm. Apparently banal clips of Noughties life acquire viral currency as artefacts of an innocent time before digital corruptions — the latest TikTok phenomenon is footage of the band MGMT performing dorkily at Yale to a conspicuously non-smartphone waving audience. According to the popular story, a series of earthquakes shook us out of paradise: 9/11, the 2008 crash, social media, mass migration. But as Curtis shows, our unhappy age is a natural evolution of, not an aberration from the 1990s. History doesn't rupture, it mutates. The myth of the blissful end of history is just as bogus as the myth of the long Edwardian summer (in the years before the First World War, readers will recall, Britain was on the brink of civil war over the question of Home Rule for Ireland). The seeds of our present discontent were already germinating in that lost Eden at the end of history. The world Curtis portrays in Shifty is quite spookily familiar. The sleazy politicians of John Major's decaying government (the Starmer administration fleetingly strikes the viewer as almost attractive) have lost both public trust and the capacity to direct events. In the furious eyes of miners filing grimly out of shuttered pits in County Durham you glimpse the first sparks of the populist conflagration soon to engulf western democracies (and, perhaps, a foreshadowing of the AI-driven white collar deindustrialisation to come). Above it all, the unaccountable barons of high finance perch in their glittering silver towers. Off screen in America, political polarisation was already carving ideological rifts down Thanksgiving tables. Newt Gingrich had long since resolved that politics was a 'war for power' and embarked on his attritional battles over the budget with Bill Clinton. The scandal over Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky and the Republicans' subsequent impeachment campaign split the country with almost Trump-era vitriol. In elite universities a movement known as 'political correctness' was campaigning to jettison pale stale writers from the canon, prompting one of the great public intellectuals of the age, Robert Hughes, to warn against the politicisation of art and a burgeoning cult of 'victimhood'. There were no smartphones, true. But the advent of 24-hour news represented a media revolution nearly as important. One of the most effectively jarring moments in Curtis's series juxtaposes the hectic, adrenalised tone of 1990s TV news with a clip showing the staid formality of the BBC in the 1960s. The contrast is almost as stark as that which divides Newsnight from TikTok. By the 1990s, television was fragmenting into an infinity of cable news channels. Anybody who has read Neil Postman's polemic Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985) knows that his criticisms of TV — its inanity, its lack of deep context, its weird juxtapositions of the trivial and the serious — precisely anticipate the smartphone. Screens were already isolating us in the 1990s. Curtis supplies tragicomic footage of an elderly couple sitting side by side in morose silence, hypnotised by a documentary about turtles. Membership of clubs and churches declined, and television was rated the most popular leisure activity. The five hours a day the average person dedicated to TV in 1990 seems restrained compared with the virtually constant smartphone use that characterises many modern lives, but it's also hard to argue that it represents the quasi-Amish technological continence of Gen Z mythology. Though the romanticisation of the 1990s is not exactly baseless — I would rather live in an age before inflated house prices and the automation of the written word — it is overdone. The crises of the present age have helped expose a cultural and spiritual hollowness that was already evident at the turn of the millennium. Perhaps a country that chose to celebrate itself by constructing a huge and vacant white space was always going to end up in trouble
