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Speaking to the FT in 2022, Adam Curtis reflected on the parallels between the collapse of the Soviet Union — the subject of his outstanding series Russia 1985-1999: TraumaZone — and modern Britain. “This also feels like a place in the very final days of empire,” the documentarian remarked. “The same strange nostalgia. The same dark pessimism about democracy. And that feeling the ground is now starting to move quite rapidly under our feet.”

This, as it turns out, was no passing observation, but an early teaser for his next project. Shifty is an engrossing account of life in Britain at the end of the 20th century. Set during Margaret Thatcher’s premiership, Curtis documents the tensions that emerged between the old establishments and new money, media and technology, misty-eyed imperialist myths and hyper-individualism.

The five-part series is the filmmaker’s first to centre entirely on domestic matters. Otherwise, it is signature Curtis. The show is crafted from a montage of unseen news reports, political profiles, celebrity interviews, home videos, vox pops, music videos and more. Like TraumaZone, Shifty dispenses with narration in favour of captions that guide us through hours of curated clips. Points about “shadowy” self-serving political systems, the “ravenous machine” of finance, and the “shape-shifting fluidity of reality” will seem compelling to his admirers — and reductive to his critics.

Key moments, policies and crises are boiled down to cherry-picked extracts or diluted amid a tide of seemingly unrelated tangents. But this is not a history documentary: it is a kaleidoscopic immersion in time and place that captures a turbulent era through epochal turning points and individual perspectives. The end of the 20th century, Curtis observes, was defined by destabilising economic experiments, deindustrialisation, privatisation, mass unemployment and cultural clashes.

The hypnotising array of scenes and images take us from Downing Street to Sunderland shipyards, the Tate to The Haçienda, tabloid offices to sewers. What’s consistent is the sense of a nation riven by irreconcilable contradictions and differences. The inspired juxtapositions tell a story about Britain: a disco in Belfast cuts to bodies in the street; footage of riots is followed by Thatcher talking about pearls; an aristocratic property owner watches coverage of the miners’ strikes from his country estate.

Curtis leaves it to us to draw comparisons to the present day. But so much of what we see — politicians talking tough on migration; water companies failing; protests about policing; concerns over surveillance — could be in today’s news cycle.

Shifty is also wickedly funny. Curtis rarely misses a chance to undermine with a deadpan caption or bathetic cut, and he has a great eye for the absurd. An earnest TV interview about a bulldog’s gender identity is one of many delightful clips that balance pessimism about Britain with a genuine fondness for this curious country.

★★★★☆

On BBC iPlayer from June 14