It’s that voice. The one from The Power of Nightmares (2004) and HyperNormalisation (2016) and Can’t Get You Out of My Head (2021). Emotionally neutral, almost deadpan; those deliberate cadences, the Oxbridge assurance, with something ever so slightly off. And it’s coming from the man in the room with me, Adam Curtis – the BBC’s coolest asset, the cult documentary filmmaker, the critical thinker who inspired an entire generation of YouTube video essayists and hopeful journalists, whose films play like the greatest pop video you’ve ever seen, while telling you stories about power and money and how the world truly is that stay with you indefinitely.
He greets me in a white shirt, blazer, modern cargo pants, and a pair of Converse, like a professor on sabbatical. One room I enter accidentally is empty except for a table stacked with books. In the kitchen, he begins to enthusiastically explain a tray of seedlings he’s raising like botanical children, some of them in the “hospital bed”, suffering. Mid-sentence, he remembers he has to check something and disappears into another room. Loud music starts blaring; it’s The Bug’s “Angry”, an agitated fusion of dubstep and dancehall. “So many tings dat get mi angry and/ So many tings dat get mi mad…” echoes off the tall ceilings of the house. A couple of minutes later, he returns unfazed.
