The Myth Of Trust/The Trust Of Myth:Shifty.

"She gave away the secrets of the past and said 'I've lost control again'" - She's Lost Control, Joy Division

"There come moments in society when the foundations of power begin to move. When that happens things becomes .... SHIFTY" - Adam Curtis 

Adam Curtis programmes are, to me, major events and Shifty (available on the BBC iPlayer) was no different. I rather miss Curtis's narration (it's been replaced by captions, all in capital letters, in a font whose name people on Reddit hotly debate) but it seems to me he's a little fed up of the sound of his own voice. Or he suspects others may be. The Adam Curtis of Shifty is a more self-reflective, self-critical Adam Curtis.

Not much else has changed though. The programme (or programmes if you're one of those weirdos who thinks of them as individual shows) are made up of archive footage, sometimes familiar, often obscure, that with an astonishingly brilliant, and appropriate, soundtrack (more of which later) ends up tangentially telling a story of how the best laid plans of government, media, and society often don't pan out anything like the way they're expected to.

Shifty is set in Britain from the late 70s through to the millennium so it's an era I'm very familiar with. Covering as it does my life from finishing primary school to my early thirties. As such the story was not as obscure as others Curtis has told and possibly because of this it felt a little bit more like a standard documentary than previous efforts.

Only a little though. This is Adam Curtis! He has a very specific way of doing things. The story he's set out to tell in Shifty is one of how the rise of individualism led to a fractured country and how the rise of privatisation led to obscene levels of wealth flowing towards an ever smaller elite while everyone else ended up worse off. The decline of democracy in Britain. The decline of Britain full stop. It begins, of course, with Margaret Thatcher's rise to power.

A speech powered by anti-immigration rhetoric is delivered by Thatcher in an attempt to win votes in the post-industrial (and soon to be post-industrial) towns of the north and elsewhere - and it works. It helps Thatcher beat Labour's James Callaghan in the 1979 election but does it help the country? Spoiler alert:- it does not.

Dark secrets of post-Empire Britain rose faster to the surface than they already had been. The heroic myth of Britain was proving to be just that - a myth. Yet generation after generation had taken strength from that myth and without it people became scared. They sought refuge in individualism and with the rise of home computing it became ever easier to do so.

Thatcher's experiment with monetary economics as espoused by Milton Friedman (very much a forerunner of Liz Truss's catastrophic mini budget) resulting in the closing down of factories and soaring unemployment. Industrial Britain was beginning to die and many suspected that Margaret Thatcher would not mourn its passing.

Further turmoil ensued. The Brixton riots, sectarian killings in Northern Ireland, the Falklands War, the miner's strike, racist attacks and murders, riot police attacking new age travellers, the Heysel tragedy, the IRA bomb at the Consverative conference in Brighton, and PC Keith Blakelock being hacked to death with a machete during a riot at the Broadwater Farm estate in Tottenham.

Elsewhere, Britain was caught up in the start of the AIDS epidemic, a poll tax that was so unpopular it inspired mass civil disobedience and eventually its own riot, three million unemployed, Private Finance Initiatives, negative equity, the forming of Al-Muhajiroun - Britain's first homegrown Islamist terror group, phone hacking, and more and more privatisation - an idea Curtis informed me that began with the Nazis.

It's not Thatcher, John Major and the Conservative governements of the 1980s and 1990s who are in Curtis's crosshairs. Tony Blair and Gordon Brown don't get off scot-free. We see the early days of data harvesting, the colossal mismanagement of what would be inside the Millennium Dome - Peter Mandelson getting excited about toad in the hole, gentrification, and how, with the YBAs and others, art became far more about commerce than expression. The move from an industrial economy to a service economy (Britain as the world's butler - some say) didn't stop when Thatcher tearfully, and against her will, left Downing Street for the last time.

An enormous number of faces from our not so distant past appear on the screen to tell the story and as I'm in a listy mood I'm going to list some of them (and it won't be the last list here either):- Jimmy Savile (seen with his mate Thatcher right at the beginning - bam), Stephen Hawking, Les Dawson, Winston Churchill, Charles & Diana, Nigel Lawson, Michael Heseltine, Morrissey, John Gielgud, Bernard Manning, Michael Buerk, Alexander McQueen, Edwina Currie, Robert Kilroy-Silk, Paul McMullan, Mohamed Al-Fayed, Dodi Al-Fayed, Lorraine Chase, Ken Dodd, Martin Amis, Joan Collins, Isabella Blow, Frank Skinner, David Mellor, John Major, Norman Lamont, Max Clifford, Trevor Horn, Cecil Parkinson, Keith Joseph, Vicki Michelle, Rowan Atkinson (on Not the Nine O'Clock News), Arthur Scargill, Kate Moss, Derek Hatton, Jerry Dammers, Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson, Keith Harris & Orville (with Gary Lineker), Russell Harty, Norman Tebbit, Denis Thatcher, Jonathan Miller, Frank Bough, Alan Clark, Eric Hobsbawm, Michael Foot, Dame Edna Everage, Antonia de Sancha, Ian McNaught-Davies, Patrick Magee, and, best of all David Bowie who we see, right near the end, making that incredible, prescient, and now infamous speech about how the Internet will change absolutely everything while Jeremy Paxman tries to belittle and pooh-pooh him.

Paxman comes across as grouchy and lacking in imagination. Bowie as a seer. Or at least a hugely intelligent man. Of course his music also features in Shifty and he's in good company. Here's another list:- Joy Division, New Order, The Smiths, Bowie, The Jesus And Mary Chain (during an air guitar/headbanging scene, JAMC aren't a headbanging/air guitar band), Suede, Pulp, Young Fathers, Hawkwind, The Bee Gees, Fats Domino, Professor Longhair, The Bug, Bucks Fizz, Toots And The Maytals, Jimmy Cliff, Yellowman, Culture, Al Bowlly, ZZ Top, Frankie Valli, Atomic Kitten, Yazoo, Tom Jones, Madonna, The Mekons (more than once and not their first appearance on a Curtis film), Frankie Goes To Hollywood, Hot Chocolate, Ozzy Osbourne, and Wham! With a special mention for Kishore Kumar and Lata Mangeshkar's brilliant Disco 82. A new one for me but something of a lost classic.

All of this wonderful and varied music soundtracks a confusing Britain of gay and lesbian discos in Scotland, human remains on the Isle of Sheppey, the Golden Wonder cheese'n'onion crisp production line, South Wales miners, an intersex dog, National Front meetings in Brixton, Midge Ure impersonators singing Vienna, paedophiles in Stoke Newington, the IRA murder of Lord Mountbatten, the Yorkshire Ripper, freemasonry, kissograms, CCTV, glue sniffing, an elephant who attends a Christmas party at a psychiatric unit, Mind Your Language, a ventriloquist whose dummy hates her, seventy-five capsized yachts (and twenty-one dead bodies) at the Fastnet sailing race, the launch of the Turner Prize, J.G. Farrell's Siege of Krishnapur, horses - and bloody loads of them, Rupert Murdoch appointing Kelvin MacKenzie editor of The Sun, and, perhaps most Curtis of all, nuns playing table tennis and ludo in Darlington.

Some of the footage is funny but some of it is eerie and a reminder of some of the most horrifying events and news stories of my life (I'm fairly sure there was a brief clip of the abduction of the two year old Jamie Bulger  - which led to his shocking murder). It's a tale of growing mistrust in almost everything. Mistrust in politicians, mistrust in the police, mistrust in big business, mistrust in the media, mistrust in the army, mistrust in the royal family, mistrust in technology, mistrust in the future, mistrust in the past, mistrust even in our nearest and dearest. Ultimately, mistrust even in ourselves.

None of this is helped by right wing grifters who seek to sow division to increase their own power and wealth but neither is it helped by supposedly progressive, left wing, figureheads who think, and say, that the working class are stupid, greedy, and wrong. Because they don't act the way they want them to act.

It wasn't just Thatcher who believed there was an 'enemy within' but it is her who, more than anyone, comes across as the villain of the piece. Ushering in the age of rampant individualism that would go on to sow the terrible levels of mistrust we are now surrounded by. At one point, and a little heavy handedly for Curtis I thought, the great storm of 1987 is evoked as an analogue. Something that nobody saw coming that nonetheless was able to cause enormous destruction across the country.

As we see our society continue on its seemingly inexorable journey towards further deregulation, further sleaze, further corruption, further division, and further mistrust I'm reminded of one specific Margaret Thatcher quote:- "there's no such thing as society". When she said it, it was patently untrue. It was a wish disingenuously presented as an observation. It hasn't, completely, come to pass yet but it's a reminder that we should all be very careful what we wish for. Change will always come. But it's rarely the change anyone (other than Bowie it seems) saw coming. Time to turn and face the strain.