Shift-Y For Reload
Jun 29, 2025 · 7 minute readA long time ago, there was a Children’s BBC show called Boxpops.
Music, newsreels, drama, and comedy, all linked together via text captions and exploring a different theme each episode. To be fair, the theme was normally something like “travel” rather than “Margaret Thatcher conjures up an imagined British history, obtains power and then finds herself trapped in the limited power of that vision”, but that sort of thing is more Doctor Who’s job anyway. But there is a line from Boxpops to Adam Curtis that I never really see mentioned. The other interesting thing about Boxpops is that they went to quite some length to show clips that children wouldn’t normally see. It was the first time I’d seen anything from Not The Nine O’Clock News, The Young Ones, or Monty Python. They even had clips from _Kevin Turvey: The Man Behind the Green Door _. Obviously, you weren’t going to see what you can get up to with an American Express card and Pamela Stephenson, but to go through all that effort to find things you can transmit on a children’s show going out at 11am on a Sunday…that’s quite an effort, and I’m very grateful to them for showing me such a variety of different things every weekend. And I think they deserve a little more credit.
Anyway, Shifty. Despite what Curtis is saying in interviews about how this series has been sparked from reading a book about 1848 (and, sure, the book in question seems to be a great read so far), the series goes over ground Curtis has covered before; all the way back to Pandora’s Box and as recently as Can’t Get You Out Of My Head. Individualism, neoliberalism, failed systems, conjured visions of the past, and lots of clips of people dancing. Other large chunks of the series, including the star turn from Francis Beveridge, The Civil Service Man Waiting For His Wooden Box, appeared on his blog during the early 2010s. The blog is pretty much defunct now, but you can still find all the clips, some in versions that are significantly expanded from the edits in Shifty.
The Beveridge section highlights something that often goes unmentioned - Curtis actually has a great sense of humour that often comes out in his editing (as pointed out by Hatherley). The part where he gleefully talks about Stephen Knight’s “the Royal Family were behind Jack The Ripper” theory over a bed of clips of Diana — obvious, yes, but grimly amusing. And of course, the audacity of opening the series with Jimmy Saville leading a bunch of children into Margaret Thatcher’s hands. That’s a bold choice, and it gets bolder as Curtis then gives credit to an interview Thatcher did on immigration for giving the Tories a polling turnaround in 1979…instead of…the Winter of Discontent. A claim like that demands compelling evidence and John Curtice (Britain’s polling mastermind) rips the idea to shreds around thirteen minutes into this Radio 4 broadcast.
But Curtis is infamous for this sort of thing, where you can just about forgive him for stretching a point as the vibe is mostly right. Up until midway through Shifty’s second episode where he heavily implies ZTT invented the remix. Just, no. I draw the line at historical 12” mistakes. And why was Morley missing? After my first viewing, I joked about not standing for Paul Morley erasure, but now a fortnight has passed, I’m even more mystified. The Trevor Horn clips were taken from a Newsnight segment about ZTT, and Horn, his wife, and Morley are all prominent in the feature, so why cut him out? Plus Frankie’s notoriety was pretty much all masterminded by Morley. Who said “Frankie Say Arm The Unemployed”, after all? I’m not expecting I Love 1984 but it is such a weird omission, not least because Morley has so many incredibly pretentious and wonderful interviews from this time period.
(the ghost of Anthony h. Wilson stalks the footage)
There are other roads not taken. Golden Wonder is shown in the first episode but then never mentioned again. Was there a strand of their late 80s crisp factory fire and the rise of American-backed Walkers that got left on the cutting room floor? Katie Baring is shown with Derek Hatton, but we’re not treated to any of the great Curtis/Nick Leeson interview clips about the downfall of Barings? John Major barely registers a presence, and the fall of monetarism isn’t even mentioned, despite it being a big part of the early episodes. I will say, though, that the series does a good job of pointing out that the ‘boom’ years of the 80s were really quite short, bookended on either side by grim industrial decline and negative equity. But there’s some weird time-jumping going on every once in a while, where, for example, the text narration is talking about events in the early 90s but you can plainly see a mid 90s-period Take That poster on the person’s wall on the clip being shown. It’s very much just ‘if you know, you know’, but if you do it throws you out of the narrative.
And then there is the ending.
OR IS THIS JUST ANOTHER FEEDBACK LOOP OF NOSTALGIA?
REPEATING BACK SOUNDS AND IMAGES OF THE PAST.
WHICH IS THE WAY THE SYSTEM CONTROLS YOU
AND IS THE WAY THIS SERIES WAS MADE.
Curtis is certainly aware of the limits of the form he inhabits, expressed in large point Arial1. It’s also pointed out a with a little more humour during the Remix part of episode 2, which comes shortly after repeating an entire segment of Pandora’s Box, and the many old interviews from other Curtis documentaries that litter the series — Curtis himself becoming part of that historical edifice. But I’m wondering if this is signalling a larger end. There are limits to strip-mining the past2, and again in interviews he indicates that footage beyond 1998 or so seems to lose the hauntological power that earlier clips have, signing up to Mark Fisher’s “Slow Cancellation of The Future” hypothesis3, where the replaying of the past is keeping us from establishing a new future. There’s a clip towards the very end which is clearly a phone video from the 21st century of two girls singing along to The Smiths4 which highlights this5. Meanwhile, Curtis himself tries to remove himself from the documentary, continuing his lack of vocal narration in the same manner as Traumazone6.
What intrigues me though is that his frustration here is a large part of his first foray into fiction, The Way, where at the end, the old stories are explicitly rejected in favour of forging new ones. And while that series definitely had its flaws, maybe it’s time for him to explore that future than mining the past…
Still, you have to love a BBC series that has a caption saying:
PRIVATISATION WAS AN IDEA INVENTED BY THE NAZIS
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Imperial Phase Curtis uses Helvetica, obviously. ↩︎
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I say, despite having 18 gigabytes of Centre Play editions on my hard drives to watch. ↩︎
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One curious omission across all of Curtis’s post-2015 output is Corbyn. Curtis’s politics are a little opaque, but it’s fair to say while he’s not Old Labour, he’s not not Old Labour. So the lack of Corbyn is odd, especially given his repeated mantra of ‘no politicians on the left can tell stories or believe in anything any more’. My feeling is that Curtis was sympathetic to Corbyn, but didn’t believe that what he was offering was new enough to represent a breakthrough. Big fan of David Graeber, though… ↩︎
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No Paul Morley, No Tony Wilson, but Joy Division/New Order are front and centre…while Morrissey’s dismissal of new builds of course includes ‘foreign’ used as an epithet. He was telling us exactly who he is all the time. ↩︎
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I’m also guessing he just likes Push The Button so it went in and the timeline can go hang itself. ↩︎
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If I’m going to be a little more cynical; not adding a vocal track probably made the series even cheaper than usual, considering it’s basically Curtis and a copy of Final Cut Pro. Which makes it even more strange that A24, of all people, are co-producers of this series… ↩︎