Shifty

Shifty BBC, 5 Episodes. Seen on 1st May 2026. My Take on Shifty — Adam Curtis, BBC, 2025 Watching Adam Curtis’s Shifty felt less like watching a documentary about Britain and more like watching an X-ray of the world that formed me. The series covers the last decades of the twentieth century, roughly the period in which my own childhood, adolescence and early adulthood were shaped. I found myself not merely learning history, but recognising the emotional, political and aesthetic architecture of my own identity. What struck me most is how Shifty explains the collapse of an old British settlement: the belief that government, institutions, public culture and social reform could organise society in the service of ordinary people. Curtis presents Thatcherism not simply as a political programme, but as a profound redefinition of freedom. Freedom became market choice, self-interest, personal aspiration, consumer credit, private wealth and individual happiness. The state withdrew, finance expanded, and politicians increasingly seemed unable to control the forces they had helped unleash. The series also helped me understand the distinction between different kinds of liberalism. I had always thought of myself as a cultural liberal: educated, urban, bookish, secular, gay, attracted to museums, concerts, opera, public culture, The Guardian, the London Review of Books and the intellectual atmosphere of Sussex and London. But Shifty forced me to see how that cultural liberal world existed alongside — and was eventually invaded by — economic liberalism: deregulation, privatisation, global finance, luxury consumption and the cult of the self. One of the most powerful threads for me was the old alliance between liberal intellectuals and the working classes. Through learning about the Fabians, I began to understand that British Labour and the welfare state were shaped not only by working-class politics but also by educated reformers who believed in gradual social improvement through institutions, education and public policy. That world was not aristocratic in the narrow sense, but it was patrician: it believed that educated people could help guide society. Curtis shows how that alliance fractured when the working classes no longer behaved as liberal intellectuals expected, and when the intellectuals themselves retreated from politics into culture. Episode 3, I Love a Millionaire, was especially revealing because it dealt with the years around 1987 to 1991, my own formative period. The scenes around raves, ecstasy and the pursuit of happiness made me realise that even emotions I considered universal — such as the search for happiness — were historically shaped. Curtis suggests that a generation began searching not for political transformation, but for personal happiness, intensity and escape. The image of young people partying in the ruins of industry is devastating: collective labour had collapsed, and in its ruins came music, drugs, bodies, pleasure and temporary community. The use of Pulp’s Common People was, for me, one of the great moments of the series. That song suddenly appeared as a perfect summary of everything Curtis had been saying about class, irony, humiliation and style. It is not simply a proud anthem about being ordinary. It is a bitter song about class tourism: the rich can pretend to be poor, but the actually poor cannot escape poverty when the performance ends. Jarvis Cocker’s awkward elegance, his strange dancing, his mixture of glamour and clumsiness, felt profoundly British to me — a way of turning embarrassment, resentment and inferiority into style. Episode 5, The Democratisation of Everything, brought everything together. Curtis shows how luxury, culture, fashion, media, visibility and even self-expression were supposedly democratised. But the darker implication is that what was democratised was often not power, but exposure: exposure to debt, status anxiety, beauty, surveillance, comparison and the demand to become exceptional. The discussion of Alexander McQueen was particularly powerful. McQueen represented both the promise and the terror of democratisation: someone from outside the old elite could enter high culture and transform it, but his work also revealed the violence, fragility and psychic cost of being watched, displayed and consumed. David Bowie’s reflections on the internet were another revelation. He saw the internet not merely as technology but almost as an alien life form — a force that would dissolve shared reality and multiply perspectives until there was no longer one common agreement about anything. In hindsight, this feels prophetic. The internet did not simply give people access to culture; it transformed everyone into performer, viewer, critic, consumer and brand. The series also made me reflect on my own life in Britain. I arrived in the UK in the late 1990s, just after the period Curtis describes, and lived there for ten years. Without knowing it at the time, I entered the remains of a liberal-public-cultural world: Sussex University, London galleries, the Royal Opera House, Queen Elizabeth Hall, the Barbican, blockbuster exhibitions, adult education, books, painting, gardening and newspapers. That world gave me a sense of dignity and belonging. It allowed someone like me — a Mexican, not aristocratic, not born into British high culture — to feel that I could enter a larger intellectual and aesthetic community. But I also remember feeling that something changed after 2003. The second boom felt different to me: more vulgar, more money-driven, more obsessed with luxury brands, property, image and status. What had once felt like access to culture increasingly felt like access to consumption. The democratisation of high culture began to mutate into the democratisation of Gucci, credit, display and lifestyle branding. This is why Shifty affected me so deeply in relation to my current life in Mexico. It helped me understand that my discomfort is not simply nostalgia, snobbery or personal alienation. I was formed by a British liberal-cultural ecosystem that taught me to value books, public institutions, taste, education, pluralism, gay self-invention and cultivated public life. Now, living in Mexico, I often feel that this identity is culturally unmirrored. Outside my house, I can experience the public world as politically, aesthetically and intellectually hostile: dominated by populism, vulgar money, violence, anti-intellectualism or carelessness. My house has become a kind of sanctuary: a British-inspired garden, books, flowers, television, order and beauty. It is the place where the self I built in Britain still makes sense. But Shifty has also made me see the danger in that. A sanctuary can become a prison if the outside world becomes unbearable. The task now is not to abandon that identity, but to rebuild an ecosystem around it: through books, magazines, friendships, cultural institutions, travel, conversation and intellectual community. My overall take is that Shifty is not just about Britain between the 1980s and 2000. It is about the making of the present: the triumph of finance, the collapse of public confidence, the rise of individualism, the transformation of class into style, the democratisation of exposure, and the loss of shared reality. For me personally, it explained why I feel so attached to Britain, why I felt betrayed by what Britain became, and why I now feel so alien in Mexico. It showed me that my crisis is not only personal. It is historical.