On my radar: Adam Curtis’s cultural highlights

The documentary film-maker Adam Curtis was born in Dartford, Kent, in 1955. He studied human sciences and then taught politics at Oxford, and joined the BBC in the 1980s, working on programmes such as That’s Life. Over time he became known for his sweeping, collage-based documentaries, including The Power of Nightmares and HyperNormalisation, that explore sociocultural and political developments to get under the skin of our times. His latest series, Shifty – now available on BBC iPlayer – is about the alliance of extreme money and hyperindividualism in Britain over the last 40 years.

The Flea at The Yard Theatre, London

I never go to the theatre, but I was dragged along to this lovely place in east London for a play called The Flea, by British playwright James Fritz, and it was extraordinary. It’s set in the late 19th century and it starts with a flea biting a horse, and spans corruption and deception in the British establishment. It’s wild and imaginative and messy and chaotic, but done in a really good way. My experience of theatre is that it’s always a bit buttoned up, a bit neat, but I was taken by this.

Chaldon

I like finding strange places that have been forgotten. This one is in Surrey. You get off the train at Coulsdon South and walk to Chaldon, where there’s a church with a 12th-century mural of the Last Judgment. Then you walk to the edge of the North Downs and you’re overlooking the Home Counties. Down there you have the headquarters of Scientology, Opus Dei, the Rosicrucian order, the Mormons and the Universal White Brotherhood – and the shed where Keir Starmer grew up.

Eddington (dir: Ari Aster, 2025)

A lot of political films say to the groups they’re aimed at, “You’re absolutely right to feel this”, and the audience come out going, “Oh dear, yes, terrible isn’t it?” Eddington is not like that. It will make everyone angry. It’s set in southwestern America during lockdown and it’s about how different groups get trapped in their own version of reality. The anger amplifies, and no one is spared. It’s just brilliant.

Emily in Paris

The point about Emily in Paris is that it has absolutely nothing to do with reality and it’s unashamedly its own thing: super-high-camp pop. It’s about a bratty posh girl from Chicago who lands a job  in a Paris advertising company, so it’s about the clash of American and French cultures – Henry James for the modern world – done in a very trashy way, with the most obvious choices of music. But it plays with the types of our age. There is a secret world of people who like Emily in Paris and I thought I’d break that omertà.

Banksy

There’s something about Banksy that people haven’t fully appreciated. When politics went to the right in the 1980s, the liberals gave up and went into culture. Banksy went there with them, but he pointed out the weakness of that move. He did a thing in London in 2011 that said: “If graffiti changed anything – it would be illegal”. Art is brilliant at describing a world but it doesn’t change it. The other thing I like is that he’s romantic. The lighthouse he did recently in Marseille is lovely.

A Glastonbury Romance by John Cowper Powys

I’m reading this again and finding it so refreshing. It’s a novel written in the 1930s that’s more than 1,000 pages long – a real big woofer, but extraordinary. It’s set in Glastonbury. The mayor wants to return the town to its medieval roots. His enemy is an industrialist obsessed with modern technology. Against that, you have Marxists forming a trade union; the sun is a character. It’s completely weird but you have to read it. It’s gigantic and romantic, and it has a real energy to it.

Photographs by Netflix, Marc Brenner, Alamy, A24 Films, AFP/Getty