Adam Curtis on AI, the BBC and Bucks Fizz

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Hello and welcome to this episode of the Restus Entertainment Questions and Answers Edition.

I'm Marina Hyde.

And I'm Richard Osmond.

Well done remembering your name.

You nearly let it go because today is a very different episode.

I am thrilled and excited and honoured to say that we have our first ever guest on this podcast.

And it is the documentary maker and in my view, Maverick genius Adam Curtis, who has got a new series of films out on BBC iPlayer Now called Shifty.

Adam, welcome.

Thank you, and thank you for inviting me.

Listen, we love having a Maverick genius on the show.

That's what we like to do.

It is the first time we've ever interviewed someone, though, so it may not go great, so do forgive us.

Well, only our side of things, but many, most of you will be familiar with Adam's work.

But if you haven't seen his work, he works often with archive footage.

I think his films fall into a category of one.

It's almost a genre of one, it's a genre of one.

That it's sort of funny, surprising, dreamlike.

They're a way of kind of reinvigorating the archive.

And I think it's right to say that you're very interested in social history this is really a social history isn't it

this is really I suppose shifty is about the past 40 years in British life

from the 1980s till now and there were all these sort of forces of finance unleashed by the politicians which rather like Mickey Mouse and Fantasia went out of their control but it also shows the shift which is linked to it to a kind of new kind of individual consciousness you're very always interested in your films about what it felt to live through a certain time well if you live in an age where feelings are the dominant thing then they become a very powerful force in society you know they they just they guide us as much as being told what to think and what to feel we always feel it comes from inside so yes that i wanted to trace how it felt as much as what actually happened at the higher levels.

And do you start with a thesis if you're thinking, I'm going to start in 1979, which is when I was eight years old.

So I had a lot at stake from the very beginning of this

of Shifty, which is such a brilliant piece of work.

But do you have a thesis?

Do you kind of think back to what you imagined?

Do you watch clips and your mind is changed?

How does that process work?

I think with this one, I started with a sort of feeling at the back of my head is that we might have come to the end of something.

That there was this pervasive feeling in society, which I felt as well, is that nothing makes sense.

Those in charge have no idea what they're doing, it seems.

Everyone dreads the future.

They're frightened of it.

And there is a sense that all the culture of the past is sort of coming in towards us, like into a station and piling up and piling up and blocking us from the future.

And I thought, well, if that's the end of something, I want to take you back to where it began

and come back to try and understand why all that uncertainty and why all that fear and why that dread of the future, which I think is really big now.

And your take on the beginning of the end was somewhere around 1979, the end of that Labour government, the start of Maggie Thatcher's government.

And so you started there.

That's where your clip search began?

Sort of.

A little earlier, because I was very intrigued in the 1970s that i i call them the ghosts in these films you you have sort of people sitting there who in a way are

in a dramatic dramatic way show you the old world but also give you a hint of the new one i mean like there's a there's a scene with a um dog the bbc insists i call it an intersex dog oh my god this is this scene there's two scenes with the same dog it's but by the way this is why this film is so brilliant because you're learning stuff but also there's just

well as always there's moments of great yes comic lightness sorry the dog well well i thought i'd do it as a comedy as a map and then it gets quite dark towards the end because i think that's the trajectory we've all been on yeah um you've got this woman his his owner sitting next to him very 1970s the colour is all yellow and and and her hair is i mean it's just grey yeah but but what you've got is the dog who is actually changing its gender literally um and she is describing it and the dog is sort of looking around like this

it's a daytime sofa they're being interviewed on a daytime sofa

and if this is happening to her rather than because of her, the way she talks.

The way she talks,

she's in control of things and she wants to be in control.

But the dog is just going like that.

And you sort of think the dog can see the future.

You know, things are going to change.

Things are going to get fluid.

And my master or my mistress doesn't know this.

You've managed to do something which is so unusual, which

to take what I think you have described to me before as pretentious metatosh and turn it into something that's very entertaining.

You can make it entertainment.

Your films are very entertaining and yet they're about actually often very, very highbrow things.

But that's what I, and actually I was thinking of this when I was coming here, that's what I set out to do really from the early 90s onwards, which is that I'd worked out in my head that me and all my friends spent our time talking about things that jumble.

We talked about politics, we talked about low culture, we talked about high culture, we talked about psychological theories about why I feel as I do or why my friend is behaving to me like that.

When you used to to talk in bars at night, it all became jumbled up together.

And I thought, well, that's sort of like the language of now.

So I'm going to try and make films like that.

Because you made quite conventional documentaries.

Was there that moment where you felt you found your voice?

I suddenly thought I could actually take the things that my friends and I talked about, the music.

for example, and fuse it with high-end pretentious.

Well, there's a brilliant bit in the, in, in the very first episode, funnily enough.

Is it the first episode?

Yeah, in the very first episode, where I've seen a million documentaries about the era of the early 1980s and the early years of the Thatcher government.

This is not that.

And there are clips, as you say, just people speaking that's not about the subject matter, but the feelings that they

invoke in you make you think about what you're talking about.

But every single documentary about that would always end on...

Ghost Town by the specials, right?

We understand that.

That's the thing because that was about alienation.

It's about inner city.

It's overcoming ghost town.

Unemployment.

It was a ghost town.

Yours doesn't end with ghost town what does yours end with which one the first one yeah oh well actually yeah it ends with one of the great it's it's one of the undiscovered facts of that time it ends with land of make believe by uh bucksfields with still a banger which i think is an incredibly good song yeah i mean it's beautiful yeah um

and also pete sinfield who wrote it uh claimed and actually if you look at the lyrics that it's an attack on mrs thatcher for summoning up the ghosts of the past and it is and i just thought well i'm gonna play that I mean, it's so, it's honestly,

I mean, listen, you have me already.

But at that point, I was like, okay, I'm going to, let's watch all, let's watch all of these immediately.

And there's a lovely little caption at the end of that, which is, which is a beautiful kicker on it.

But it's things like that.

It's juxtaposing things we haven't seen before.

I think you've said before that television will sometimes tell you what you already know.

And you're trying to do the opposite.

Yeah, it grooms you.

I mean, I think as everything has become atomized, nicheified, I call it.

It's sort of everything's become nichified.

A lot of dramas and documentaries groom you.

They say to you, you know, you're right to think that.

And you go out and you come out, you're going, oh dear, it's awful, isn't it?

But somehow it's reinforced your feeling of awfulness.

And I don't want to do that.

No, I want to, so like at the end of Pete Sinfield, so I've portrayed him as a hero because he's actually written secretly a vicious revolutionary attack on Mrs.

Thatcher.

Then I reveal at the end that he went immediately went off to Spain and lived as a tax exile.

And I think the underlying message in these films is never trust a liberal.

Never.

I think they're very interesting on

how you say in these films that liberals felt that they felt betrayed by the working classes for voting in a different way, in an unapproved way for Thatcher, and therefore they sort of slightly retreated from politics in many ways.

I think you think that liberals don't believe in anything.

When I say the films get dark, towards the end, I do a whole section on the committees that tried to design what was inside the dome.

This is so epic.

It's quite clear from the footage that I show that they ended up, they couldn't imagine anything.

and it was the end yeah no no seriously some of those people are the absolute great and good many of them still of public life yeah the kind of howling void at the center of anywhere where there should be create creativity or some kind of spiritual or higher dimension is is extraordinary they couldn't come up with anything except you'd have a shot of Peter Mandelson ringing Tony Blair on a phone with a Ariel getting very excited there's a picture of toad in the hole on a wall in the dome that's it and i just thought that sums it up no i mean one of the underexamined areas of our society is what happened to the liberal classes.

Partly because the liberal classes run the world that tells you about things.

So they never really examine themselves.

But I've had this theme throughout it, which is that you're right.

They got really upset when the nice working classes, who they referred to, and you've got this in the archives, the little people, the less well-off, who they always thought as patricians, as it was called, they were going to care for.

Suddenly, large sections of these people voted for Mrs.

Thatcher and they could not believe it.

Or forgive.

Or forgive.

And you can trace from there

a strict line to that reaction to Brexit when they all turned around and said, oh, they're stupid.

But you can also trace the 10 years since Brexit, as it were, or the nine years, where they became intense about policing culture in the end, because that was the part of the final area where they retained any form of control and they policed how people spoke and how people talked about things.

And there has been a sense, you're talking about how things feel really different.

I definitely think since the Trump victory, which by the way reflected it and didn't cause it, there's been a sense that there's been a total unmooring, hasn't there?

And that people, and we're looking for something.

That book you made me read, Revolutionary Spring, that's really good.

It is really good.

Yeah.

Yeah.

About the 1840s and how these kind of huge things happened.

I don't have anyone in my life who makes me read books about the 1840s.

I'll say that.

You've got me.

I'll happily make you read it.

It is a really interesting book.

Yeah.

It's by Christopher Clarke.

It's by Christopher Clarke.

It's about the revolutions of 1848, which swept through Europe.

But what's really fascinating about it is, as a good historian, he draws parallels gently with today, that it was a time when everything felt unmoored.

That's exactly right.

Everything was just fluid.

No one could see the future.

Everyone was anxious.

There was growing inequality.

And above all, no one had a language to describe that to people.

That's the key thing he says.

Richard, you've talked so much you've talked on this podcast before about how politicians you you say that the the map doesn't describe the territory anymore Adam but you Richard have talked about how politicians it's like a sort of ancient theatre the way they talk on all of these shows they're using 20th century weapons and the way they talk seems like something seems like archive footage in itself even while we're living in it it's interesting so Adam you spent some time as an academic a long time ago or you've a little bit of time and a lot of the things that you talk about are essentially theses If you had stayed as an academic, would you have the impact, do you think, that you'd have as a television producer?

As a television producer, of course, you need slightly less rigor, but do you have a much greater impact?

What do you think the difference between the two fields might be?

Imagination.

Yeah.

I mean, what academia refuses to allow people to do unless they're really good is to be imaginative.

What television allows you to do.

I mean,

you asked me about why I make the films like that in that jump-iners.

Because I felt that that was a language which was appropriate to how how people were feeling in the way they navigate their lives because it was how I felt.

So I just thought, well, I can try and create that.

Now the interesting thing about that book about 1848, he points out that the whole idea of realism in novels emerged in that day.

It didn't exist before then.

And I would argue that every age has its own realism in inverted commas.

Not what the physical reality is.

Yes.

The language that describes and connects and dramatizes for people how they feel in the back of their heads as they go about their everyday lives.

And when I started making films like I do today,

I didn't think that many of my colleagues had connected with that idea.

I mean, the moment they left television and sat with their friends in the bar, they would behave like that, but they wouldn't make it films like that.

But that's the realism.

Did some of that come from being a reality producer, I suppose?

From so you started, you used to work on that's life, right?

Well, I mean, yeah, I have

reflected on that, that I was taught that one week you would go and film a talking dog.

Yeah.

And then the next week you go go off and do some journalism about the corruption of a housing estate built on polluted land and i did i'd begun to realize you could put the two together of course you can you could have you know pretentious ship and trash yeah i mean talk and it's that's unfettered talking dogs it

and we mustn't be unfairly talking dogs it was the idea you could bolt high end and low end and just get rid of the middle which is the bit that when i was growing up and in television i thought was so boring so what is that behind the scenes if you're in a current affairs department or a documentary department or a news department in a big organization, is that a cultural thing?

Are there people there who are not interested in low culture who don't understand that people like both of those things?

Is it a personnel thing or is it a historical thing that we've always made things that way?

Why are you the one that makes things differently?

I think it's a category thing.

I think one of the things is that when a society gets what's rigid, its categories get very, very rigid.

And they just go...

What was astonishing when I started making films is that I would just put, and this is really key.

the music you use has to be the music you like because the audience know it when you're cheating when you're putting in something like when you're putting in ghost town

they know it and they don't like you for it but if but if they think your real true inner DJ is coming out they will like it the people I knew in television and still know when they would leave television would sit and talk about the music they liked and I and they were really good but when they got into those categories they felt oh I have to have money money money when I'm dealing with banks what it's like for me that would be puns on voiceovers on daytime TV.

You think you don't need to do it.

We're watching people.

We like watching people.

I'm watching someone buy a house.

I don't need you to say, there's a chicken coop at the back.

What an excellent property this is.

And I don't need you to do it.

Just show me the house.

Yes.

Because if you actually convey

your feeling about the story, I've always had, I call it mood.

You convey the mood you have about something.

That's...

probably how people would also feel other people would feel about it so you connect with them yeah and that's all i really tried to do was to take what you referred to as high-end pretentious shit and make it fuse it with something not cynically to entertain just because I thought it would be fun but it and also by the way it is I'm I have come from a certain class I'm now in a completely different class and I like to watch both of those things next to each other in the same way what the BBC used to be would would be you would have you know a documentary then a sitcom then a documentary and so you would have a sort of sandwich of culture which of course we can't do anymore because we're so siloed but you can do that in an individual film.

Yes, you can.

That's what I worked out.

And some of the BBC were quite shocked by it, but others worked, well, people seemed to quite like it.

So they just let me go on.

I think you're like the last maverick at the BBC.

How do you manage to do it?

It's hard sometimes.

It's sometimes hard, yeah.

What the BBC have always asked me to do is to actually provoke people to look at things in a different way.

That's when it's been articulated to me.

That's what they want me to do.

And that's what I actually genuinely try and do.

But to do that, what you have to do is pull back a bit come come back to the present day with an argument that surprises both sides yeah so if you if you come back to the present day and say look the islamists who who attacked the world trade center were actually inspired by westernized arab intellectuals who'd read ts eliot and western philosophers as had their enemies the neoconservatives which is a highly pretentious and argument They don't know the people who you are criticizing don't know where you're coming from.

And if they don't know where you're coming from, then the BBC doesn't get that worried right the bbc only gets worried if you're perceived as left-wing or right wing or like that but if you are actually coming at it doing what they want which is to try and look at things fresh yeah just i provoke yeah that's what i do i felt watching these things that i was not being lectured to and often i do feel i'm being lectured to what do you want the response of an audience to be what what what would you like the the sum result of two million people watching shifty to be to pull back and go, well, what was that all about?

You know, to get a sense that what you might have lived through

was quite extraordinary.

Because when you've got your nose up against the glass, it just, well, it just comes and it goes.

And all I was trying to do with Shifty is to take you through it in a slightly heightened and funny way.

Yes.

to make you come out the other side and go, well, that was really quite wild.

It was quite extraordinary.

And it seems to have...

What was that all about?

Because we seem to be stuck now.

That's what I wanted people to do.

is is to show the tectonic plates that were that were happening underneath the everyday and then underneath that i wanted to put an argument that people like christopher clarke have which is that the real problem of our age is that those in power do not have a language to describe to us what we are experiencing and the fears and the anxieties and the sense of dread and the melancholy which i think is very deep in our society and in the film yeah i try and bring it out i mean you try and evoke the mood and the mood of now towards the end is melancholic thank you so much, Adam.

Hold fire for one second because we've got to go to a break.

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Our sponsors, Voxel, who are all about embracing a bit of chaos on a family adventure, loved our last round of stories, and they want to hear more, Richard.

So what is another gloriously chaotic moment you've had on a production trip?

Welcome back to What a Stitch.

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of snow and put it back where it belonged just so when you started watching it you were not why is there this white stuff all over the floor So yeah, we ended two and a half hours late that day with a spectacular snowdrop, but a spectacular snowdrop I had already seen at 10 that morning.

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You do it all via the archive, and you have a system for grading it while you're sit watching all the crypts of very, very, very, very, very good or whatever it is.

But you once said to me that you think that since the smartphone, you can't, people are too conscious now on camera.

It is really interesting this, because for this series, I spent a lot of time going through documentaries, news footage in the BBC going through the 90s.

At about 1998, people stopped being real.

I can't explain it any more than that.

You know, well, you know this from television.

When you are watching someone on television, your radar knows almost immediately whether they are really, I know they know they're there being filmed.

Of course, that's that self-consciousness.

But you know whether they are truly being themselves to an extent or whether they are just performing.

And somewhere about 1998, it's before the internet, they begin to recede.

I couldn't really do it because to do that you would have to be rude to people.

You'd have to say, look, this person is performing.

And I don't like doing that at all.

And everyone in these films I like, I think.

Do you feel because of what we've just been talking about, that people stop being able to be authentic or whatever, that in future it's going to become harder and harder to make these kind of films because the more you move into the now or even to the last, to the say the 2000s.

The archive's going to get more.

The archive is less.

Because so much of what you do comes from like the start of an interview or the end of an interview,

you know, when people think the cameras have stopped rolling.

Well, I mean, I just got the sense that what you were watching, or what I was watching as I looked through all this stuff, was you saw the genuine self just receding.

It was almost like it was going down a tunnel into the distance and being replaced by something else which felt quite two-dimensional.

A lot of those, as you see, the older clips of people talking, not only by the way, the accents we don't hear anymore,

there is a lack of self-consciousness that we don't see and hear anymore.

A guilelessness.

What stopped it?

A guilelessness.

Yeah.

What stopped it?

I don't know.

I think it's something to do.

If you have a society where you are encouraged, as Mrs.

Thatcher did, but it was there before, to feel that what you desire and what you feel is the centre of your world.

When things are going well, that's great.

And I would argue, and I tried to show this in the films, that it was quite a wild and quite frightening time, but it was also exciting, up until the end of the 90s.

And it is very interesting that actually that very moment that I see the self beginning to recede down that tunnel,

it's the very moment at which the Labour Party, what was called New Labour, give away their last bit of their power, which is the control over the economy, over interest rates, to the Bank of England, which you could argue is one of the great reasons why we have such problems today economically.

And I think it's to do with the fact that if you're internalized and you believe that everything you feel is the centre of the world, when things start to go wrong, it's frightening.

And if the people outside, the politicians, the journalists, people like us, haven't got an explanation for why you are feeling as you do, you retreat.

And I think what, well, this is just a hypothesis.

I felt that what I might be seeing was the retreat of people into themselves because they were anxious and alone.

And I would argue that is a genuine big feeling now.

And the attempts to control their own bodies.

It's interesting, the stuff on bulimia and anorexia that features in the films.

I thought it was important to separate out bulimia and anorexia.

What was really fascinating about bulimia, which Princess Diana gave a fascinating quote about, is that you can...

you can look normal.

And I do think that it relates to what we're talking about, about the the retreat of the self.

Everything looks normal now, but in a strange, heightened, almost pantomime way.

And it makes you suspect that there's some other maelstrom going on inside millions and millions of people's heads that no one's got the answer for out that.

No one, including us journalists.

We have got no language to describe it.

And if there is a revolution happening, it's beginning to brew inside people's heads.

Do you think it's possible for a revolution?

You talk, you you you believe, I know you believe that people can still come together in groups, but I you don't.

No, I don't.

It's not that I don't, but I think it's, I do believe it, but I think it's hard, and I think that the thing in their hands is preventing them.

The phone in their hands is preventing them.

It atomizes them.

And I think that some reaction against the technology must be

the precursor to coming properly together in groups.

I think that you need something that is so powerful in its imaginative response to the way people feel that it overwhelms that.

Yes.

This whole idea, it's the HR attitude to life, which is, oh, if phones are bad, well, we'll get rid of them.

Just like you get, you clear your desk

building.

It isn't like that.

Phones are a product, and the way they are structured and this way the feedback systems in social media are a response to us.

And they are responding to the mood that has grown up in our society.

I don't believe in technological determinism.

I think it's us.

who are creating the way phones are.

So if you really want to get rid of what you've been talking about, you've got to change society.

And that's going to happen when someone comes up with a language to actually make sense of why people feel this strange relationship with the phone people who have come up with that language to some extent are the people like uh the other populists at the moment are the are trump or even to a much lesser extent nigel farage who people feel talks more like the times or or

to to to you know be rest as entertainment about it the joe rogan's of this world who are who are who are finding a way through that seems to make more sense to people but i would argue that they are cosplaying on nostalgia.

Yeah.

I mean, in a funny way, Trump is cosplaying old 1960s radicalism sometimes.

He sometimes feels like that.

It doesn't feel like the future.

It feels like they've receded into a, I'm trying not to use the word performative, but just a sort of a two-dimensional world.

And what we're waiting for is that sort of where someone,

a new form of collectivism will happen.

if it actually explains to you why you're feeling as you do.

Do you think that would come from, to bring it back to media, do you think that would come from an individual, as you say, imagination is the thing you needed, and often imagination is a solitary thing.

Do you think it comes from somebody making a leap or do you think it comes from a generation who grow up watching everybody taking selfies of themselves next to statues, pouting the same pout and thinking, I wonder if there's something different?

This feels like the ancient.

I always, I sometimes feel when I look at people with their phones, I feel like I'm living.

in the past.

I feel like this is going to look so old one day when we've worked our way through it.

Do you think this new generation, the way they look at media and the way they watch things and the ridiculousness of the media environment they've come into, do you think their reaction to that might be the thing that saves us?

Yeah.

Don't you?

I always think that.

I think any reaction has an equal and opposite reaction.

But I think we're too steeped in it to be able to do it ourselves.

Towards the end of the series, I try and reconceptualize it and say what...

originally was a liberating force, finance and social media, has become a force that extracts things from you.

Unconsciously, there is this sense that everyone is trying to extract something out of you.

They want to extract money from you.

They're going to see Lana Del Rey.

They want to charge you absolute fortunes.

At the same time, they're trying to extract anger out of you in order to monetize that.

Everything is just being played back, played back, played back, and extracted out of you.

The first step is to conceptualize that.

What is this new system of power?

Now, the politicians don't do that.

They never step outside their own world.

It's Hard to because they have to be short-termists by their by the very nature of politics.

As you say, self-consciously made themselves front of house people to power, having completely divested themselves of meaningful powers.

I mean I sometimes wonder whether Trump is really a politician any longer, whether he's actually something.

Oh, he's definitely not.

Because politics is a part of the distraction, extraction machine.

What does it feel when you hear things like that Elon Musk is a big fan of your documentaries?

How does that make you feel, Adam?

Well, this was quite a while ago.

Yeah.

I was a bit baffled, really.

I mean, I always thought you must be stoned or something.

I mean, my films are quite trippy.

What would you think of Neil Musset?

The one I was more proud of was when

suddenly there was a flurry of tweets.

A little, no, quite a while ago, Kanye West was tweeting on about me, and all my friends were texting me saying, Kenny, Kenya West is texting about you, texting about you.

And I was like, that's good.

And then his final text is a real flurry.

She said, well, it was really good.

I mean, quite frankly, he could have taken this three-hour series and done it in 20 minutes.

And I thought,

okay.

Executive producer.

Put it on the poster.

Yeah.

Something that I think is interesting that you've done is that you worked out very quickly that you weren't so interested in channels and you wanted to put all of your work straight onto iPlayer, which is, and it's brought you a totally new audience.

Are you very glad you took that decision?

It's now immediate access.

And how do you think it's brought a new audience and why?

And does it bring one into the BBC?

Well, I was asked about 12 years ago by the woman who was running iPlayer at that point.

And it was just completely a repeat channel.

She said, well, I've got a small amount of money.

Would you like to make a film for me?

So I I went and made this thing called Bitter Lake, which was an hour and 75 minutes long.

I ran shots for two and a half minutes.

Which is about Afghanistan and is amazing.

Yeah.

And it was completely experimental.

And it started with everyone dancing over lots of ages to burial.

It was quite odd.

And it got a massive audience.

And the BBC were like, oh, but this.

I don't think they've still understood.

The point about iPlayer and anything online is you know from yourself that you go to it with a completely different sensibility than you do when you watch something live.

Even if it's just a repeat program, you have a much more open, relaxed attitude to it.

And I still don't think my colleagues in the channels fully get that.

Yeah.

And if you do have that more open sensibility, then you can experiment and make things that are more open.

And that's all I tried to do.

Yes, I'm very glad to go there.

It's such an interesting thing that well, because again, like politicians, they have a 20th century language that doesn't work again if you're a legacy broadcaster it's very very hard with the DNA of an organization like that to understand where culture is going and all the things that have always worked for you and all the things that have always protected you

are no longer working.

It's very, very hard to change that sort of culture within an organization where everyone was mentored by the person above them, by the person above them, by the person above them.

Do you feel there is a shift in our terrestrial broadcasters?

They're beginning to understand that people are watching and consuming things in very different ways and that they need to bring more people up like you who might have quite odd ideas about how to use the bbc to do things well someone asked me what i would do if i was 23 yesterday and i just went well i'd go to youtube it's as simple as that yeah uh tick tock has become formalized now so it's no fun uh instagram is far too buttoned up uh and neat uh it's the last wild west so i'd go there i wouldn't go to the bbc now and who would you ask to fund you or would you not you'd do it cheaply yeah i mean to be honest i operate inside the bbc because because I'm incredibly cheap.

It's amazing sometimes having you've told me some of your series have cost.

It's sort of amazing that you can do it.

Well I edit it myself.

Yes.

That's it.

And that's really all it is.

And all the footage is free because it's BBC.

Most of it is free.

And we pay for little bits.

But it's also because iClair is only UK.

It doesn't cost very much.

Can I talk about a slightly more prosaic thing, which is just documentaries in general?

And it seems these days the easiest way to get a documentary made is to have a celebrity-led documentary, some of which are terrific, some of which bring new audiences into it.

What's your take on that?

Yours are obviously archive-based, but the broader world of presented documentaries and celebrities getting

first billing.

I take your view of the same.

Some of them are really good

and some of them you just think, well, this is cynical.

And

the sense I get with television is that people are flailing around.

And every now and then they hit it right.

And quite a lot of the times they get it completely wrong.

Just like life.

yes just like life but i do get a sense that well this is what i was saying is that they haven't yet found a way of

if they feel a bit old is is the i'm not being rude here i'm just it just feels a bit yeah a lot of stuff feels quite dated i think you were saying that earlier on it just feels like we've gone past all that yeah and i've yes to be brutal that's what i feel about celebrity presented documentaries they were really good in the early parts of this century there was a whole bbc3 was really good at some of them yeah They're an old language.

They're an old language because they are based on this idea that celebrity is important.

And I have this lurking theory that maybe celebrity is on the wing.

I don't know what you think, but I just feel that it...

I hope not.

It's sort of, well, there you go.

Well, I've got this theory that entertainment or mass entertainment has become something else.

Oh, great.

Go on.

Well,

I'm going to lean forward.

No, I'm part of the problem as well.

It's that there's a historian I really like.

He's called Eric Hofskold.

Oh, yeah.

very good.

And he was a populist as well.

And he's on the, he's on Shifty.

And I put him in Shifty because I thought he was great.

It's documentary.

I said he's in Shifty.

Okay.

I'm light entertainment, so I say he's on Shifty.

I'm sorry.

He's on that show Shifty.

So you watch, you like it.

See, Richard Category.

Yes, exactly.

Exactly.

He wrote a piece introducing one of his books where he says, I really like the phrase.

He says, there is this...

what he called it's the twilight zone between memory and history.

And what he's talking about is in the most recent past, the past is contained in millions and millions of fragments of experience inside people's heads.

That's where it is.

Taken together, it means nothing.

It's just like a giant mess.

And then he says that what happens is those millions of fragments, most of them just fall away.

And those that remain settle into a pattern, which becomes history.

And I've got this theory that because we are continually replaying the past,

all the time on our technology.

Because there's so much recorded data.

So much recorded data there's so many old recorded programs that they keep on adding to the fog of experience and they won't go away yeah which means that actually we are stuck forever in that twilight zone we can't put a narrative on experience we can't impose order on it we can't do what he was describing we can't let it all fall away and then something emerge which gives it a shape out of it which is actually means that we are blocking the way to the future that actually entertainment and people like me who continually replay songs, images, music from the past.

But you have tried to put an artistic or impose an artistic order on that kind of formless tide of experience of the last 40 years.

And I think you have.

Yes, but it's still playing it all back to you.

You know, whether it even bucks Fizz or not, it's still

playing back.

And someone pointed out to me the other day that when you watch, I don't know, comedy shows on YouTube, you're listening to the laughter of the dead most of the time.

It's a haunting.

And I just want to say that.

That's like whenever I see a cat or a dog on an old drama, I'm like, oh no,

that cat's no longer with us.

Like Bruno.

Like Bruno.

Like Bruno.

But is that a function of the fact that we are quite old?

Is that a function of the fact that we sort of came of age at a time where actually this extraordinary wave of culture was coming at us?

Films, TV programmes, people being filmed in the homes which we haven't seen before.

Pop music, all of this was new.

And we're the generation who has gone back over it and over it and over it.

Whereas if you were coming to the generation now,

that is just a part of the culture, which is our generation's attempt to constantly rehash our own culture.

I think that's probably true, but I think what we created is a monster embracing everyone.

It's narcotising.

The technology,

to some extent, has been narcotising.

That's what I mean by the fact that, yeah, that when they people,

it jogs you.

It's lovely.

Narcotising, I like that.

It comes from the word narcotic.

Oh, yeah, okay.

That's not a lot of people.

Yeah, yeah.

And that's what I mean of having the phone in your hand all the time is that it sort of anesthetizes you from things that you might in previous eras you might have rushed out and grabbed.

Would you like to be the person who cracks the code and brings us into the next bit of the future?

Is there something in your work that you think?

I wonder if I could help you.

I mean, I think I'm part of the problem personally.

I mean, I'm still doing...

I just wonder whether in, I don't know, 50 years time, they'll look back and they say they just wanted to stay with the dead.

You know, they were frightened of the future.

That's what I think people will say.

I go back to that thing I spotted in the 90s.

Everyone was mixing and jumbling everything up it wasn't just what you were saying about there was this mass of things it was the way everything got jumbled up way before the internet and that's what we live with today and it's sort of like a a ring of two-dimensional images and sounds all around us and we can't see the future that's what i feel i mean but it may be a generational thing yeah i wonder if my brother often talks about um he's a musician he often talks about classical music how there is a canon At the time, that was all new music.

And after 100 years, 200 years, we agree on the things that we now play.

and i feel like the second half of that 20th century that will be the entertainment decade and that will be what it's remembered for and of course all those all those acts will live forever because it'll be ai generated and all those films will be watched forever and people hopefully will be able to move on to something else and that that will just be a period of 60 70 years which were the entertainment years in the semi-classical music was the 18th and 17th century but it may be even deeper than that that actually some of the underlying belief systems that underlie that entertainment age like self-expression self-expression is now seen as the god Everyone wants to be self-expressive.

Maybe that's the conformity of our time.

Like we used to look, we look back at Victorians and say, oh, they were very conformists.

Maybe the conformism of our time is, oh, everyone has got to express themselves.

What if we don't?

What if we actually surrender ourselves to something else?

Maybe that will.

What if we stop expressing ourselves?

Yeah, a great

believer in tamping down the feelings and not talking about them all.

Listen, listen to our podcast on that subject next week.

But imagine you came out of your house, walked around the world by yourself and didn't tell anyone.

Yeah.

You you couldn't consume it could you well i i'd do it but but i'd love to do a documentary about it sean the brilliant comedian sean lock um once said he did a joke on eight out of ten cats and he said what they should do with big brother they should send everyone in there tell them they're filming but not film it and everyone's laughing and he goes the trouble is i'd really like to see that yeah and so generative ai and your thoughts on that is that

where's that taking us where's that taking us somewhere positive well i'm extremely suspicious of all the theories about whether ai is good or bad because i don't think anyone knows and they're just projecting their own fears or their optimism onto it.

It just, you don't know.

What I think about it is let's look at how it works.

It's the ghost of our time because what it does is it goes back and scrapes all our past.

I was talking about the fragments earlier on.

The fragments of our past.

It takes them up and it mashes them up into this complex thing, which then feeds itself back to us.

They are actually taking our own past and haunting us with it in a strange...

Telling us it's new telling us it's new but actually maybe keeping us stuck yeah

much further it's actually going back to our own past it's going back to our own images our own language the words we wrote the phrases we did our own emotions because

out there in the the

server farms are our feelings written down in fragmentary form, little images, little moments, little intense moments of fear and and love and it's just scraping it all putting it all together in some strange almost like cubist form and playing back to us a world built out of that and if i was going to write a ghost story of now i did about that that we are haunted it's it's the haunting which makes me suspect for which i had no evidence at all is that AI is not the future.

It's the final end of the past.

It's the moment at which the past came for us.

We will have to escape from it.

I think

that might be us dying.

I think that might be a dynamic.

That was so interesting.

Adam could talk to you for absolutely ever.

But Shifty is on now, it's on iPlayer, and it's a beautiful mix of archive stuff, political stuff, the tectonic plate shifting, but just beautiful moments, as you say,

of ghosts and of people.

And the one thing that I took from it all the way through is we have not changed.

When you see kids dancing at discos, all of these things, you think we are...

all the same it's just more stuff is being thrown at us it's incredibly moving and as well as being sort of as i as always view things, it's funny and it's surprising.

It is incredibly moving.

I tried to capture moments which I found moving.

Yeah,

you certainly did.

And thank you for being our first ever guest.

Thank you so much, Adam.

Thank you.

That was our first ever interview.

That was fascinating.

I mean, he doesn't make it hard for you, does he?

Yeah, that was amazing.

Talk for quite a long time in a very interesting fashion.

Yeah, I absolutely love doing that.

It's really interesting to sort of get behind it all, even though it's part of that series really gets behind some other things things as well.

I find it because he's such a genre of one, it's interesting talking about how he sees himself as fitting into entertainment.

Yeah, and where we've been and where we're going was fascinating.

Yeah, I enjoyed that so much.

I hope, listeners, that you enjoyed that.

I thought it felt like an awful lot to think about.

And if you haven't watched Shifty, I'd really, really recommend it.

It's a real, listen, it's a mood.

And go back, if you haven't watched all of his other films, they all remain on iPlayer.

He is a BBC, as he put it, a sort of current affairs journalist in lots of ways at heart.

And all of his films are on iPlay and everyone is completely compelling and sort of disruptive of any sort of thought patterns you might have fallen into, I think.

He always makes me think completely differently about something.

Doesn't he, Just?

Talking of which, we're talking about Jaws

on our bonus episode.

Let me make you think completely differently.

Talking about dragging up about the shoot of

about the shoot of Jaws, which we did the preamble to the shoot of the first ever summer Blockbuster.

And we're now going to talk about the shoot, which was quite troubled, Richard.

It was.

but every time we do any episode now I'm going to be thinking but yeah but what would Adam Curtis say?

Thank you so much Adam.

Thank you Marina.

See you next Tuesday.

See you next Tuesday.

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