Adam Curtis used to make TikToks but he doesn’t want to talk about them. ‘I did quite a lot of TikTok, privately,’ he says, ‘just under another name. They’re probably out there somewhere…’ His head rests in his hand and his elbow on the chair next to him, the two of us among pink flowers at the kitchen table in the Soho townhouse where he works. He looks at me and repeats: ‘They’re private.’

For 30 years Curtis has been making documentaries for the BBC about how Britain became a sad place, or, in his own words: ‘What happened after the Cold War, mixed in with a deeper sense of… I think melancholy. A sense we were once powerful.’

‘Never trust a liberal’

Shifty is his new film. Outwardly the five episodes chart the breakdown of society’s collective structures from Margaret Thatcher to Tony Blair. Really they are Curtis’s attempt at tracing the origins of a strange emotion that he says has become general in Britain, a feeling that ‘there is a big thing going on behind the surface’. ‘I think there’s something new going on inside people’s heads and no one has got the language to describe it,’ he tells me.

It is this emotion, Curtis believes, that caused ‘Leave’ to win the Brexit referendum and explains Reform’s popularity. He is describing a sort of revolutionary feeling, I think. If you go back and watch previous Curtis documentaries, flick between them, do an Adam Curtis to Adam Curtis, you realise that they mash together quite neatly, and that his work has a single ambition: to hold this anxious spirit to the sun, twirl it around in his hand and observe it from different angles.

So Shifty is an origin story. Curtis says that during the 1980s and 1990s we privatised and financed our way into nasty self-centredness. People felt unmoored and politicians became unable to hold communities together. Curtis leaves it to the viewer to draw the easy line to today’s politics. In one of the final scenes in the series, Peter Mandelson visits the Millennium Dome,........

© The Spectator