Shifty

I would give this a 7/8 marker but you are not allowed to give ranges.

Of these types of documentaries that I have seen. Ken Burn's one on Vietnam was exceptional. Likewise, Adam Curtis's Hypernormalisation.

Being born in 82, I hoped this would further my understanding of the period of when I was just a child and not interested in politics , up to when I was a young adult.

It did that on some level. Many things were hard to tolerate on an emotional level.

The ghost of greed being ever-present. (who woulda thought that nationalising industries would enable them to be honourable?).

The issue that I truly struggle with is the total lack of a positive narrative.

As a 90s teenager and young adult in the millennia... the advance in tech has been exceptional, perhaps to the point of being detrimental in the long-term.

However, despite all the disparity. There has been a lot of levelling up that could eventually be a positive world-force.

I would not be human if I just lived in despair.

I found the first 3 or 4 episodes a bit confusing. The footage and music are interesting and there is a sense for Britain during that era of time but for me it didnt flow or feel cohesive and i found myself skipping a few scenes that seemed a bit vulgar or indulgent - like whats the point of this? Maybe I didnt get it. Although there are some really good bits too, especially around racial tensions and science with Stephen Hawking - a sense of reality "shifting" in more ways than one. Altogether it was mixed.

The final episode however was excellent. It brought things together and was much clearer and easier to follow. The footage felt more relevant to me and the story felt more deliberate and clear, and it carries you along in that surreal way that adam curtis does.

I absolutely loved this documentary series. I am 65 and felt like my life was passing in front of my eyes. The nostalgia pangs were bittersweet. To me, it felt true to the times.

The treatment of the Thatcher regime challenges the current perception that her works require some kind of sainthood and present the pain and destructoon visited on so many people by her stiff-necked policies. I remember friends having their flats repossessed and the terrible inequalities created by those receiving double figure interest on savings whilst others were having to pay them out on mortgages. The myth that unions destroyed industry is illustrated beautifully. I would love to see more like this.

Although I got quite annoyed at the many music inserts during this series and found some parts either tedious, repetitive or just irritating, overall this series is worth watching. Lots of historical information that with hindsight is proving to be very prescient and accurate. It's pretty clear that politicians, financial institutions and those who benefit from them, and the upper class system is still thriving and becoming even more abhorrent. Today's many issues and problems can be traced back to so many events and characters and players who made headlines during the period this series covers. Not a pretty picture and certainly a warning of things to come. Well made generally but also a bit too chaotic at times.

There is something mesmeric about Adam Curtis, that drags you along, in to the dark crevices of the world, whether you want to go there or not. He finds beauty in grime and filth, humour in loss and torment; he documents our age through the telescopic view of a VTR wielding time traveller, cobbling together what look like random bits of YouTube into an amazingly well researched and thought provoking series of essays that explain where we are today. He is a contrarian and a curator, a poet and a polemicist, and he's damn entertaining too.

Shifty is not for everyone, that is clear from the start, with a fractured narrative strung out across multiple audio visual streams in each episode. But once you come to accept the juxtaposition, and once you allow the sound and imagery to flow over you like some sort of educational psilocybin trip you will get much more out of his unique style than you ever thought.

Curtis seems to do the easiest, laziest form of storytelling, putting clips together like a sixth form media studies exercise. But his immense talent lies in the wit and skill he chooses that archive with, and the dexterity he displays in turning something seemingly innocuous into something profound. The BBC clearly trust Curtis, as he has the full run of its vast, unsurpassed archive, and is allowed to use it to tell long format stories that don't appear anywhere else anymore. Each second of footage has been chosen to mean something incredibly specific, and the power of Curtis is that he can do this while always casting a wry smile over it all. We start with Britain's two greatest villains of the 1980s, former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and the man she made a Knight of the Realm, the very disgraced "Sir" Jimmy Saville, shepherding a group of pre-teen children into a dark room somewhere in Westminster, for God knows what purpose, and then jump to the straightest, most awkward looking exchange of all time while discussing a gay disco that evening, only to next be slam-banged into the communal baths of a long lost South Wales coal mine, that looks like the gayest place in Christendom. And then we meander from there.

It is quixotic and vulgar, shocking and hysterical, understandable and gobbledegook. But it works. Like all of his work, Shifty only gives you the specific Adam Curtis argument that he wants to portray, and it is always left up to you to decide if you agree or whether you want to go away and question it. He will carry on regardless, and drag your cortex off to some other clip only he could find, and only he could use. He is an auteur in every sense. I cannot recommend this enough.

So, why only 8 our of 10? Well, some of this argument is slightly simplistic at times, and doesn't have the Earth shattering wow factor that the Power of Nightmares had (you very much took the red pill during that one), but Curtis still manages to make you think just how did they get away with this. He seems to be a little bit more in entertainment mode during Shifty than in the past, and maybe, just maybe, he knows that he is probably preaching to the converted these days, so why not have some fun while doing it. That said though, there is some harrowing footage in here, that sits very uneasily for a long time afterwards. The sight and sound of poor Thi the elephant being ripped from her family at London Zoo to help cut costs in 1991 is horrific to see, and left me feeling ill. What cruelty we allow in the name of profit. And no, that isn't a spoiler, it's just the way of the world.