The Rest Is Entertainment - Adam Curtis on AI, the BBC and Bucks Fizz

Episode Date: June 18, 2025

Adam Curtis is one of the UK's most iconoclastic and followed documentarians. His epic films, spanning decades of cultural and political history have become instant classics and gained him a worldwide following including the likes of Kanye West and Elon Musk. Richard Osman and Marina Hyde interview the BBC journalist about his disappointment at modern television, unique approach to archival material and his thoughts on modern culture at large. The Rest Is Entertainment AAA Club: Become a member for exclusive bonus content, early access to our Q&A episodes, ad-free listening, access to our exclusive newsletter archive, discount book prices on selected titles with our partners at Coles, early ticket access to future live events, and our members’ chatroom on Discord. Just head to therestisentertainment.com to sign up, or start a free trial today on Apple Podcasts: apple.co/therestisentertainment. The Rest Is Entertainment is proudly presented by Sky. Sky is home to award-winning shows such as The White Lotus, Gangs of London and The Last of Us. Visit Sky.com to find out more For more Goalhanger Podcasts, head to www.goalhanger.com Assistant Producer: Aaliyah Akude Video Editor: Kieron Leslie, Charlie Rodwell, Adam Thornton, Harry Swan Producer: Joey McCarthy Senior Producer: Neil Fearn Head of Content: Tom Whiter Exec Producers: Tony Pastor + Jack Davenport Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This episode is brought to you by our friends at Sky. Now they really know how to put on a show and to make it easy for us to enjoy them. Everything is just there, no digging around, no endless scrolling. Absolutely and here's the magic, if you know what you're in the mood for, just say it into your remote. You want something specific, say Sweet Pea and Sweet Pea would appear. If you want something a genre, just say show me horror and your sky will show you horror movies, horror TV shows, anything in that genre.

It really is magic. It's not magic, it's technology, but it feels like magic. It's like having a shortcut to your perfect evening. You speak, it listens, and suddenly you're three episodes in. A feast of entertainment right at your fingertips. Feast, schmoggersbord, banquet. Which makes me very hungry. Yeah. I wonder if you can get snacks from your remote. Feast, schmorgersbord, banquet. Which makes me very hungry. I wonder

if you can get snacks from your remote. Try it. I'm being told you can't. It's just the world of entertainment at your fingertips, the world of food you have to go elsewhere. So if you're ready to dive into top-notch entertainment, just head to sky.com to learn more. Hello and welcome to this episode of the Restless 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 honored 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 I Play 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 one 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, 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. 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, 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 that I'm gonna 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. 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. Yes. 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 call them the ghosts in these films. You have sort of people sitting there who in a way are, in a dramatic way, show you the old world, but also give you a hint of the new one.

I mean, like there's a scene with a 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. 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 comic lightness sorry the dog well I thought I'd do it as a comedy as much and then it gets quite dark towards the end yeah I think that's the trajectory we've all been on yeah um you've got this one his owner sitting next to him very

1970s the colour is all yellow and her hair is, I mean, it's just grey. But what you've got is the dog who is actually changing its gender, literally, and she is describing it and the dog is sort of looking around like this. It's an amazing side eye. It's a daytime sofa, they're being interviewed on a daytime sofa. And this is happening to her rather than because of her, the way she talks.

The way she talks is like 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 was thinking 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 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? Yeah. 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 potentials. Which do you think? Metatosh. Metatosh.

Well, there's a brilliant bit in the very first episode, funnily enough. Is it the first episode? Yeah, in the very first episode. Well, I've seen a million documentaries about that era of the early 1980s and the early years of the Thatcher government. This is not that. And there are clips, as you say, like 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 youth. And things were becoming ghost towns. 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 one of the undiscovered facts of that time. It ends with Land of Make-Believe by Buck Smith. Buck Smith's still a banger. Which I think is an incredibly good song. Yeah. I mean, it's beautiful. Yeah.

And also Pete Sinfield, who wrote it, claim 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 going to play that. I mean, it's honestly, you have me already, but at that point I was like, okay, I'm going to, let's watch all of these immediately. And there's a lovely little caption at the end of that, 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's become atomised, niche-ified, I call it, it's sort of everything's become niche-ified. A lot of dramas and documentaries groom you. They say to you, you're right to think that. You go out and you're kind of like, 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 the 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. I'm making it quite clear from the footage that I show that they ended up, they couldn't

imagine anything. And it was the end. No, no, seriously. Some of those people are the absolute great and good, many of them still of public life. The kind of howling void at the centre of anywhere where there should be creativity or some kind of spiritual or higher dimension 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 Ariel getting very excited that there's a picture of Toad in the hole on the wall in the dome. That's it. And I just thought that sums it up. No, I mean, one of the under examined 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 examined 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 we'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. You can trace from

there that a strict line to that reaction to Brexit when they all turned around and said, they're stupid. But you can also change 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 final area where they became intense about policing culture in the end because that was 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, 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. You read it. 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 read it. It is a really interesting book. Yeah. Because... It's by Christopher Clarke. about the 1840s. I'll say that. You've got me. I'll happily write here either.

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 said.

Richard, you've talked so much, you've talked on this podcast before about how politicians, you say that the map doesn't describe the territory anymore, Adam, but you, Richard, have talked about how politicians, it's like a sort of ancient theater, the way they talk on all of these shows. They're using 20th century weapons.

And the way they talk seems like something, it 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 already, yeah, 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 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 ask me about why I make films like that, in that jumpiness, because I felt that that was a language which was appropriate to 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. The interesting thing about that book about 1848,

he points out that the whole idea of realism in novels emerged in that. It didn't exist before that. And I would argue that every age has its own realism in inverted commas, not what the physical reality is. 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, when they, the moment they left television and sat with their friends in the bar, they would behave like that, but they wouldn't make films like that. But that's the realism.

Did some of that come from being a reality producer, I suppose, from things like That's Live? So you used to work on That's Live, right? Well, I mean, yeah, I have not reflected on that. That I was taught that one week you would go and film a talking dog, and then the next week you'd go off and do some journalism about the corruption of a housing estate built on polluted land. And I began 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, that's unfair to talking dogs. And we mustn't be unfair to talking dogs. It was the idea that 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 organisation? 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 when you're cheating and you're putting in something, when you're putting in ghost town. They know it and they don't like you for it. If they think you're 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 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. 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 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. 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. Because I thought it would be fun. And also by the way it is, 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 be, you would have a documentary, then a sitcom, then a documentary, and so you would have a 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 were, well, people seemed to quite like it.

So they just let me go on. But you are, 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 what 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 back to the present day with an argument that surprises both sides. So if you come back to the present day and say, look, the Islamists who attacked the

World Trade Center were actually inspired by Westernized Arab intellectuals who had read TS Eliot and Western philosophers, as had their enemies, the neoconservatives, which is a highly pretentious argument. 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. 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, I provoke. 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 would you like the sum result of two million people watching Shifty to be? To pull back and go, well, what was that all about? 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 is shift it, is to take you through it in a slightly heightened and funny way. 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. It's to show the tectonic plates 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 to 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. This episode is brought to you by Sky Cinema, the ultimate destination for movie lovers to enjoy the latest blockbusters, with Paramount Plus included at no extra cost. Now, Anura, this year's best picture winner at the Oscars has just landed on Sky Cinema. If you haven't seen it, it follows a Brooklyn dancer, a Russian oligarch family and a Cold War with the in-laws. It's sharp, it's stylish, with five Oscars to prove it. Add Twisters and Wild Robot to the mix, and Sky Cinema doesn't just offer films, it premieres

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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. I think I would have to say we do House of Games up in Manchester and we travelled up on a boiling hot July day. The temperature was in the 80s, everyone was in shorts. We walk into the studio at Dock 10 in Manchester and of course we're filming the Christmas special because that's how TV works. So in the middle of July, someone's dressed as Father Christmas. He's almost passing out and we're filming five shows for Christmas week and we have this amazing

denouement that we've got planned. So at the end of the fifth show up above us in the ceiling there's a huge drop of snow. It's not real snow, it's fake snow. So we've got this huge drop of snow which is going to come down at the very end of the fifth show. So we're all ready to go. Ten in the morning, absolutely ready to film the whole day. The set is spotless. This snow, you're going to know where this is going the second I say it, is operated by a lever which is in the sound booth. And someone is delivering coffees to the sound booth and

put it down and press the lever at the same time. We have not shot a single moment of our Christmas week and the entire studio is covered in this incredible beautiful snowfall that goes on for about three minutes, I would say, the whole place. It is spectacular. This is where all the money's gone for our Christmas week. Ten in the morning, it took us two and a half hours to sweep up every single bit 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 snow drop, but a spectacular snow drop I had already seen at ten that morning. Of course, we all know the real chaos doesn't just happen on production trips. It happens on family ones as well, especially when you're organizing a getaway. Luckily, Voxel's new Frontierra is built to handle it with room for the kids, the dog and whatever your toddler insists on packing, plus built in tech for the whole family. And if you're after something more to get excited about, Voxel have teamed up with Lilo and Stitch,

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and save up to $4,000. Condition supply. Visit your GTA Volvo retailer or go to volvocars.ca for full details. You do it all via the archive and you have a system for grading it while you're watching all the clips and 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 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 is 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. Yeah, and everyone in this these films I like I think do you feel because 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 say the 2000s... The archive's going to get more boring. 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 say, 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. Agile listeners. Agile listeners, 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 center 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 the 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 internalised and you believe that everything you feel is the center 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 whatever, this is 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 attempt to control their own bodies, that 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. Yeah. What was really fascinating about bulimia, which Princess Diana gave a fascinating quote about, is that you can look normal. And I do think that it relates to what we're talking about, about 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 there. 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 believe, I know you believe that people can still come together in groups. But you don't. No, I don't. It's not that I don't, but 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 atomises 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.

I don't think you, this whole idea, it's the HR attitude to life, which is, oh, if phones are bad, we'll get rid of them. Just like you clear your desk, No, I don't. You like building. It isn't like that. Phones are a product, and the way they are structured,

and the 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 gonna 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 of the people like the populists at the moment, Trump or even to a much lesser extent Nigel Farage, who people feel talks more like the times. Or to, you know, the rest is entertainment about it, the Joe Rogans of this world, who

are finding a way through that seems to make more sense to people. But I would argue that they are cosplaying a 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, 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 way 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 just, I think we're too steeped in it to be able to do it ourselves. Towards the end of the series, I try and reconceptualise it and say what originally was a liberating force, findouts and social media has become a force that extracts things from you. And consciously, there is this sense that everyone is trying that extracts things from you. And consciously 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 conceptualise that. What is this new system of power? Now the politicians don't do that. They never step outside their own work. Hard to because they have to be short-termist by their 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 or whether he's actually

something. Oh, he's definitely not. Because politics is a policy. He's part of the 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 he must be stoned or something. I mean, my films are quite trippy. What would you think of Needle and Mustache? The one I was more proud of was when suddenly there was a flurry of tweets. A little while, no, quite a while ago, Kanye West was tweeting on about me and all my friends were texting me saying, Kanye 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 20 minutes. And I thought, okay, exactly

produce it. Put it on the poster. Yeah. Something 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 bought you a totally new audience. Are you very glad you took that decision? It's now a media access and how do you think it's bought a new audience and why? Does it bring one into the BBC? Well, I was asked about 12 years ago by the woman who's 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 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, and it got a massive audience and the BBC were like, Oh, but they,

I don't think they've still understood it. It, the point about iPlayer and anything online is, you know, from yourself that you, 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. 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 are 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 today, and I just went right down to YouTube. It's as simple as that.

TikTok has become formalized now, so it's no fun. Instagram is far too buttoned up and neat. It's the last wow 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. I mean, to be honest, I offer it inside the BBC because I'm incredibly cheap. It's amazing sometimes how much you've told me some of your series,

of course. 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. We pay for little bits, but it's also because I grow as any 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 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 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 the, I'm not being rude here, I'm just, it just feels a bit, 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. And. And I... Yes, but... It's 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... BBC Three 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 wang. I don't know what you think, but I just feel that it... I of, well, there you go. Well, I've got this theory that entertainment

or mass entertainment has become something else. Oh, great. Go on. I'm going to lean forward. Now, I'm part of the problem as well. It's that there's a historian I really like. He's called Eric Hovskorn. Oh, yeah. Very, very good. And he was a populist as well. And he's on Shifty. And I put him on Shifty because I thought he was great. I think it's documented that 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, should you watch. You like it. See, Richard Categrate. Yes, exactly, exactly. He wrote a piece introducing one of his books where he says, I really like the phrase, he says,

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, 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, 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 programmes, that they keep on adding to the fog of experience, and they won't go away. 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 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. Yeah, but it's still playing it all back to you. You know, whether it's 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. But it's a haunting. And I just- 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 their homes, which you hadn'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,

you'd be like, 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 narcotizing the technology in some to some extent has been narcotizing that's what I mean by the fact that yeah that when they people it drugs you it comes from the word narcotic. That's what I mean of having the phone in your hand all the time, is that it sort of anesthetises you from things that 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? I think I'm part of the problem personally. I mean, I'm still doing, I just wonder whether in 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 ring of two dimensional images and sounds all around us and we can't see the internet. And that's what we live with today. And it's sort of like 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,

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 a hundred 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 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 would just be a period of 60, 70 years, which were the entertainment years in the same way 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 back at Victorians and say, oh, they were very conformist. 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, the 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 couldn't conceive of it, could you? Well, I'd do it, but I'd love to do a documentary about it. The brilliant comedian Sean Lock 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? 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. 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. Telling us it's new, but actually maybe keeping us stuck in the past. I mean, as I was saying, we're surrounded by images, dreams, music, films of the past. What AI is doing is taking it 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 server farms are our feelings written down in fragmentary form, little images, little moments, little intense moments of fear 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 have no evidence at all is that AI is not the future it's the final end of the past it's that it's the moment at which the past came for us we will have

to escape from it I think that might be us done. That was so interesting, I could talk to you for absolutely ever. But Shifty is on now, it's on iPlayer and it is a beautiful mix of archive stuff, political stuff, the tectonic plates 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 of things it's funny and it's surprising it is incredibly moving. Trying to capture moments which I found moving. Yeah you certainly did and thank you for being our first ever guest. Thank you so much. Thank you. Yeah, you certainly did. And thank you for being our first ever guest. Thank you so much, Adil. 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. He talked 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 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 listens 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 iPlayer 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 again on our bonus episode. Let me make you think completely differently 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. This episode of The Rest is Entertainment was brought to you by Sky, who've made watching TV feel effortlessly smart. Just use voice control and ask Sky what you want to watch. It's so quick that before you found your snacks you were already halfway through a series.

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