IF YOU TAKE MY ADVICE - I'D REPRESS THEM

Adam Curtis 11/05/2012 15:02

Bahrain, along with Syria, has become a symbol of the failure of the Arab Spring to deliver real democracy and freedom across the Arab world. The media in Britain portray a rigid, oppressive almost feudal elite who are stubbornly holding out against the inevitable wave of modern freedoms and political justice.

But what is hardly ever mentioned in the press and TV reports is that this very system of oppression, the rock against which the dreams of democracy are being dashed, was largely created by the British. That, throughout most of the twentieth century, British advisers to the Bahraini royal family, backed up by British military might, were central figures in the creation of a ruthless system that imprisoned and sometimes tortured any Bahraini citizen who even dared to suggest the idea of democracy.

The same British advisers also worked with the rulers of Bahrain to exercise a cynical technique of divide and rule - setting Shia against Sunni in a very successful attempt to keep Bahrain locked in an old, decaying and corrupt system of tribal and religious rivalries. The deliberate aim was to stop democracy ever emerging.

The Bahrainis know this, practically everyone else in the Arab world knows this - the only people who seem to have forgotten are the British themselves.

So I thought I would tell the story of Britain's involvement in the government and the security of Bahrain over the past 90 years. Especially as the present King of Bahrain is coming to have lunch with the Queen on May 18th.

It began in the summer of 1925 when a young administrative officer in the British Colonial Service called Charles Belgrave read an advertisement in the middle of the "Personal Column" in the Times. It said:

Belgrave answered the mysterious advertisement and was then summoned to an interview in a West End hotel. His interviewer turned out to be one of the heads of the India Office - the government department which ran that part of the British Empire.

What Belgrave was offered was the job of being the British "adviser" to the new ruler of Bahrain, Sheikh Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa. The precise nature of the job was a bit murky (a murkiness that was going to run through this whole story). On the surface Belgrave would be completely independent of the British government - but what was also clear was that he was being sent there to deal with growing demands for reform and modernization that might threaten Britain's interests.

Ever since 1820 the British had dominated Bahrain. The Al Khalifa family ruled, but in reality it was protectorate whose affairs were "guided" by the British. In 1923 the previous ruler had gone berserk and started terrorising his people - so the British had removed him and installed his son. It was clear to Belgrave what his job was - to create a more centralised form of control in Bahrain and to manage the instability created by the previous ruler's reign of terror.

Belgrave took the job. And here is a picture of him sitting happily in "the Adviserate drawing room"

Belgrave soon became very powerful - and by the 1930s he was in effect running the government of Bahrain. The thing that gave him a supreme ability to manage any dissent was the fact that he ran the courts. Bahrain had no legal code - which allowed Belgrave as judge enormous power. Belgrave described it in his autobiography:

"I found that there was no written code in Bahrain so judgements had to depend on common sense alone. It was rough and ready justice, but it had the advantage of being speedy.

I sat three days a week with a minor Shaikh who was deaf, dull and averse to making decisions. When I asked his opinion he invariably replied, 'I think the same as you Excellency; I agree with whatever you say."

Many Bahrainis soon became convinced that Belgrave was using his power to make sure that the status quo was maintained and to prevent a modern, democratic political system developing. And in the 1950s this anger with Belgrave burst out in a dramatic and violent way - a popular revolt and demands for democracy uncannily like the events unfolding in Bahrain today.

It started in 1953 when a Shia religious parade was stoned and then a Shia neighbourhood attacked by groups of Sunni fanatics. Many believed that it was a deliberate provocation - to create sectarian divisions. People noticed that among the attackers were members of the ruling family including the brother of the Sheikh.

If it was a provocation - then it succeeded. For two years Bahrain was torn by Sunni vs Shia violence. In private Belgrave sympathised with the Shias, but as the public face of the Law in Bahrain he was ruthless. He handed down sentences that were far tougher on Shia rioters than on their Sunni counterparts. And this in turn led to even more rioting.

A group of leading middle-class Bahrainis set up the Higher Executive Committee. It was composed equally of Shias and Sunnis - and it called for Belgrave to go. He was helping foment religious hatred and imprisoning innocent people, they said, in order to keep Bahrain as a tribally controlled regime. They demanded instead democracy and a code of law.

Here is a picture of the Committee.

Things came to a head when in 1956 the British foreign secretary, Selwyn Lloyd, flew to Bahrain for a visit. There was a large, violent demonstration with hundreds of Bahrainis trying to tell Lloyd to remove Belgrave - because he was standing in the way of making Bahrain a modern democracy.

The riots and the demonstration made the news in Britain - and Panorama came out to investigate. The report - by Woodrow Wyatt (later to become one of Rupert Murdoch's closest advisers) - is really good.

Wyatt interviews Belgrave who has a great quote about the demonstration - "it's anti-British, anti-Sheikh, and anti-me." But Wyatt also goes and talks to people on the street, almost all of who want Belgrave to go. One of them standing on the back of a truck sums it up neatly: "Belgrave is not just an adviser - he is the judge, and when he goes to the court he is also the police commandant. He is everything in Bahrain, he is not an adviser."

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Faced with this instability the British government moved troops in at the end of 1956 and crushed the revolt. Three of the leading members of the committee were put on a Royal Navy ship and taken and imprisoned on the island of St Helena in the middle of the South Atlantic. The same place that Napoleon had been dumped in 1815. One of them was Abdul Aziz Al Shamlan who is the committee member interviewed in the Panorama film.

This is a picture of their prison, plus a map - the purple blob shows where St Helena is.

But Belgrave had also outlived his usefulness - and the same year he too was dumped by the British (and by Sheikh Khalifa). He came back to Britain and wrote a self-serving autobiography which ends up suggesting that the Arabs aren't "ready" for democracy yet.

And things quietened down in Bahrain.

Until 1965 when another popular uprising began. It began in the oilfields but quickly spread to general strikes. Again the British sent in troops to crush the revolt - and many of the leaders were yet again deported.

But it didn't do much good for the British government - because both press and television in Britain began to ask what exactly was this weird feudal state that we were supporting? And why?

Across the Arab world people had been inspired by the new ideas of Gamal Abdel Nasser, the President of Egypt, and they wanted freedom from the corrupt old Shaikhs and Kings who were propped up by the west. And in 1966 the BBC went out to Bahrain again and made a Panorama programme that tore into the hypocrisy of what Britain was doing in that country.

It didn't pull its punches - the reporter, called John Morgan, says to the camera at the end:

"If one of the tests of a society's health is a citizen's willingness to speak his mind freely in public then Bahrain belongs in the class of a Communist or a Fascist country - and we are deeply implicated in order to preserve our oil and foreign policy."

In the face of this the British government decided the only solution was to find another "adviser". The idea was that on the surface he would appear to be a freelance mercenary who was employed by the ruling Khalifa family. But in reality he would be chosen and placed there by the British Foreign Office to manage the internal security of Bahrain. His job was to prevent the instability that political change would inevitably bring - and the consequent threat to British interests.

The man the British chose was called Colonel Ian Henderson. He had been a colonial police officer in Kenya in the 1950s and had played a major role in suppressing the Mau Mau rebellion. The Kenyans were convinced that Henderson had been involved in ordering both torture and assassination during the rebellion - and the moment the country achieved independence in 1964 its new leaders threw Henderson out.

Here is Henderson being interviewed at Heathrow the day he flew back. I think you can get a very good sense of what he is like - especially in his slightly frightening matter-of-factness. Speculating on the reasons for his expulsion he says, with a faraway look in his eyes:

"What I did many years ago as a police officer during the emergency is today not seen as something very desirable."

Well - yes.

A little while ago a Scottish journalist called Neil Mackay uncovered secret Foreign Office documents that show that the senior British diplomat in Bahrain in 1966 - Antony Parsons - worked on the ruling Sheikh Khalifa to persuade him to appoint Henderson as head of what was called the Special Branch - and to give Henderson a free hand to reorganise it into an efficient, modern covert surveillance "anti terrorist" organisation.

To begin with Henderson presented himself a a new breed of security chief. He freed all the prisoners from the 1965 uprising and announced that the country would now be ruled by proper law, not arbitrary detention. He also persuaded the Khalifas to welcome back militants from protest movements like the Bahrain National Liberation Front and the Popular Revolutionary Movement.

It was all very nice, but many Bahrainis now believe that what Henderson was also doing was building up an intricate system of infiltrators and double agents inside the protest movement - in preparation for the day when Britain pulled out of Bahrain and gave it independence.

That came in 1971 and for a moment ordinary Bahrainis had a modern political system of democracy. In 1973 the ruling Amir - Isa bin Salman al-Khalifa - approved a constitution for the country, and the first parliamentary elections took place.

But then something very sinister happened. Within a year Colonel Ian Henderson proposed a new law he called the State Security Law. It said that any Bahraini could be held for three years without charge or trial on just the suspicion that they might be a threat to the state. It was known as 'the precautionary law'.

It caused an outrage - because it meant that anyone could be imprisoned just on the imaginative suspicions of Colonel Henderson and his State Security acolytes. Parliament rejected the bill in June 1975 and there was a standoff with the regime, and with Henderson.

The Amir solved it in the simplest way - he suspended those articles of the Constitution that guaranteed freedom to the people, and he suspended parliament.

And in August 1975 Henderson went to work. His men began to fill up Bahrain's jails with activists - and among them were members of the now deceased parliament. And for the next twenty five years Henderson ran a ruthless system of repression that kept the al Khalifa family in power and stopped any movement towards democracy.

Opposition activists and human rights groups have repeatedly alleged that this repression has involved widespread torture, the rolling imprisonment without trial of thousands of people, deaths and assassinations. Henderson denies this. In the face of the charges Ian Henderson has repeatedly said that he has never been involved in torture nor has he ever ordered his officers to torture those who have been arrested.

One of the key questions is whether this repression was still in Britain's interest? On the one hand you can argue that it protected the flow of oil, that it kept Bahrain as a bulwark first against communism and then from the 80s onwards against Shia Islamist revolution - plus that Bahrain also became the home to the American Fifth Fleet.

But you can also argue that by inserting Ian Henderson into the Bahraini system of power and security in 1966, the British created an infernal machine that just kept on running after they left in 1971. That machine had been told to prevent any political protests that might destablise the country - and that's what it proceeded to do. The Al Khalifas loved the machine because it kept them in power - and as a result hundreds and thousands of Bahrainis were left stuck with a vicious ghost from the failure of the British empire.

And true to form the British in the 1970s ignored the repression and the torture going on around them. Here are a selection of films the BBC made about Bahrain in the 1970s

First is an extract from a film made about the town of Awali - where all the British oil workers lived. It is an extraordinary place because in the middle of the desert the British have created a copy of a Surrey suburb where they live in blissful separateness from the rest of the country.

Except at the end - when a British couple being interviewed suddenly start describing how strange it is - they say it's like "living in a cotton wool world. I think it is really bad to live here in a world without responsibility. This place steals your life away"

And here are some extracts from one of the oddest arts programmes the BBC has ever shown. It follows a musical composer called David Fanshawe (and collector of Arabian folk music) as he creates his new work called "Arabian Fantasy" in various locations around Bahrain.

He does this by banging oil pipes and machinery in the oilfields, by assembling lots of oil tankers and signalling them with flags to blow their hooters, all interspersed with helicopter shots of him playing his synthesizer in a prog-rock kind of way in all kinds of locations around the island state.

It's made even odder by the appearance of Fanshawe's sidekick who had built his own very complex synthesizer that treats and distorts all the noises. He's called Adrian Wagner - and is a descendant of the famous composer.

Fanshawe is doing all this because he grew up in Bahrain as a boy when his uncle was the naval commander of the British fleet there in the 1950s - and there are bits of him wandering nostalgically round empty expat swimming pools. He's quite annoying - and he seems to like funk music as well.

Then in 1979 the Queen of England came to visit Bahrain - and I've stumbled on the unedited rushes of her visit. Here are some of them. I've listened through to all of her and Prince Philip's overheard conversations with the ruling Amir - and she doesn't seem to mention any of the repression, imprisonment without trial, or killings.

But she does have to suffer a rather strange dance which is apparently expressing how the rights have women have been progressing in Bahrain. At least that's the only thing she had to suffer - unlike many Bahrainis.

And Bahrain had other uses for Britain in the 1970s. In 1979 the BBC made a very creepy documentary film about how Bahrain had become a central hub for the new supersonic jet - Concorde. The truth was that at that time practically no other country wanted Concorde because of the very loud sonic booms it made - and the Al Khalifa family stepped in to save British Airways.

This is a section from the documentary where the British Airways manager Tim Phillips goes to see the Amir at the regular Majlis - where people come to petition and lobby their ruler. Phillips seems to be convinced that the Majlis is almost a better form of democracy than we have in Britain. It is followed by the very creepy scene when he gets to talk one-to-one with to the Amir, and the scene sums up in a nutshell Britain's relationship with this weird state.

Ian Henderson soon became the Dr Evil of Bahrain. He was hated because he was seen as the man whose security law had helped destroy the Constitution and democracy in the country.

In response a new protest movement began to grow which united the secular left and Islamists around the simple, dramatic demand that the constitution and parliament should be restored. It grew slowly at first - but in 1994 it emerged as The Constitutional Movement - and it set out to confront Henderson.

It was the biggest revolt yet seen in Bahrain and it had widespread popular support that crossed across the Shia - Sunni divide. Henderson and his security forces responded viciously. The opposition accused them of using the same tactics of divide and rule that had been seen in the 1950s, deliberately fomenting sectarian hatreds. Henderson's forces were also accused of imprisonment and torture on a scale not seen before.

And - just as in 1956 - at the very heart of the Constitutional Movement's demands was the removal of the British "adviser" who they said was the mastermind behind the terror that was engulfing the country. In the words of the opposition:

"Security and special branch chief General Henderson, along with a bunch of British mercenaries who are in control of the security apparatus bear full responsibility for the deterioration of relations between people and regime and for the festering political crisis - by their policy of sectarian discrimination, by waging large scale arrests and killing campaigns, and by fabricating plots designed to alienate the masses from the movement."

And finally the British noticed. Here is a really good report made for the BBC in 1996 by the brilliant reporter Sue Lloyd Roberts. She uses secret filming and blurred interviews to show what was really going on and evoke the fear that the rolling repression was creating for hundreds of thousands of Bahraini people.

And just like in the 1950s the publicity became too much. In 1999 a new member of the Al Khalifa family took over the leadership of Bahrain - and he decided to finish with Ian Henderson's services.

Henderson returned to Britain where various human rights groups and MPs persuaded the Home Secretary to get the police to investigate whether Henderson could be prosecuted for ordering torture. But the police found that the Bahrain government refused to give them any evidence. So they gave up.

The new Amir also abolished Henderson's hated State Security Law - and announced there would be elections to parliament. At first it all seemed to be a genuine return to the democratic dreams of 1973. But it wasn't. By 2010 it had become clear that the new parliament had practically no real power.

Then came the events in Tunisia at the beginning of 2011 - and it reactivated the opposition in Bahrain. They occupied Pearl Roundabout in Manama - but on the night of the 17th of February the protestors met the full force of the Bahraini security forces.

Ian Henderson might have gone away - but the ferocious system that he helped build hasn't and it haunts the Gulf still today.

WHITE NEGRO FOR MAYOR

Adam Curtis 01/05/2012 15:11

This Thursday Londoners will vote to elect a new city mayor, and I thought it would be a good moment to put up a great documentary about how Norman Mailer stood for Mayor of New York in 1969.

It is a lovely film - directed by a brilliant documentary maker called Dick Fontaine, and beautifully shot in the fluid way of cine-verite back then. But more than that it captures the rise of a phenomenon that has come to dominate (and possibly strangle) western metropolitan society today. It is the rise of the hipster. By this I don't mean the present cliche of the ironic moustaches that live in Hoxton and Hoboken - but a new cultural elite that was beginning to emerge at that time, the rebellious, stroppy bohemians who looked to culture rather than politics to define their identity - and above all their difference from others.

In the film you can see them peeking through in the backdrop of many of the scenes, for Mailer attracts them. In his perverse individualism and rebelliousness - one of his slogans is "We're no good, and we can prove it" - Mailer captured a new sensibility. This was because he combined a revulsion against a tired old culture together with a distrust of the political system, and the hipsters loved it.

But Mailer was a complicated man - and as well as embodying many of the hipster values he was also a perceptive and vocal critic of the new sensibility. Back in 1957 he had written an essay for Dissent magazine called The White Negro. In it he had described how fears of nuclear annihilation had begun to produce a new kind of young alienated being in America. These hyper-individualists trusted only their own feelings and desires and refused to be part of any group or organisation. And in black culture, Mailer said, they found their identity - the culture of the dangerous outsider.

This outsider culture had originally been created, Mailer wrote, by blacks in response to racial oppression and violence. But for the "white negroes" that culture was then co-opted in order to give a meaning and grandeur to their psychopathic narcissism:

"In such places as Greenwich Village a menage-a-trois was completed - the bohemian and the 'juvenile delinquent' came face to face with the Negro, and the hipster was a fact in American life. If marijuana was the wedding ring, the child was the language of Hip for its argot gave expression to abstract states of feeling which all could share, at least all who were Hip. And in the wedding of the white and the black it was the Negro who brought the cultural dowry.

So there was a new breed of adventurers, urban adventurers who drifted out at night looking for action with a black man's code to fit their facts. The hipster had absorbed the existentialist synapses of the Negro, and for practical purposes could be considered a white Negro."

Mailer also pointed out that this new breed of "psychic outlaw" could be equally a candidate for the most reactionary or the most radical of political movements. And in the film there is a fascinating scene where Mailer takes on the trades unions on one of the avenues in New York. He tells them that in the past they were a heroic movement - but that now they have become a repressive, stultifying force in society - in particular in the way they are refusing to allow blacks and hispanics to move up society. It is an odd moment because as you watch you realise that it was elements of this rebellious individualism that both Thatcher and Reagan would later harness. And that possibly, if the left had got hold of it earlier, then the history of the West might have been very different.

In the 1970s the phenomenon that Mailer had identified grew massively. And as it did the new cultural bohemians co-opted another outsider culture to give themselves further identity - the gay culture that had risen up in response to homosexual discrimination. Then in the 1980s that bohemian individualism became the driving force that permitted consumer capitalism to reinvent itself - because it offered the ever-multiplying hipsters the objects through which to express their rebellious difference.

Today it is possible to argue that we have all become gay white negroes. We all listen to "edgy urban" music, spend our time in the gym, go shopping and groom ourselves, take lots of drugs, have sex and then spend the rest of the time talking to our friends about the impossibility of finding real love and connection in the world.

Far from an expression of rebellion it has become the conformity of our age. And if Mailer was right - that it was a sensibility originally born out of the existential fears of nuclear holocaust - then it lost its real radical purpose when the cold war ended.

Instead the white negro hipster has actually become one of the central conservative pillars of our time - because their real function is now simply to prop up an increasingly shaky system of credit and rolling consumption.

And one wonders where are the real outsiders of out time? Who are the new "white negroes" of our age?

RUPERT MURDOCH - A PORTRAIT OF SATAN

Adam Curtis 25/04/2012 13:06

Today the Rupert Murdoch story has finally reached the issue that has been lurking in the shadows of this whole saga - and what has always made people most uneasy about him. It is the true nature of his relationship to politics and power in Britain and how he may have used that to create his vast empire.

A year ago I published the story of Murdoch's rise to power in Britain over the past 40 years - as told through the BBC's coverage of him. I thought it would be good to republish it today.

I notice that Lord Justice Leveson brought Woodrow Wyatt's diaries with him into the enquiry today. As you will see from the end of this story he might learn something very interesting about Rupert Murdoch from one of Wyatt's last entries in those journals.

RUPERT MURDOCH - A PORTRAIT OF SATAN

Rupert Murdoch doesn't like the BBC.

And sometimes the BBC doesn't seem to like Rupert Murdoch either.

Following the principle that you should know your enemy, the BBC has assiduously recorded the relentless rise of Rupert Murdoch and his assault on the old "decadent" elites of Britain.

And I thought it would be interesting to put up some of the high points.

It is also a good way to examine how far his populist rhetoric is genuine, and how far its is a smokescreen to disguise the interests of another elite.

As a balanced member of the BBC - I leave it to you to decide.

Murdoch first appears in the BBC archive in a short fragment without commentary shot in 1968. It shows him ambling into the City of London on his way to see Sir Humphrey Mynors who was head of the City Takeover Panel

Murdoch was going to ask Sir Humphrey for permission to take over the News of the World. Then he is interviewed afterwards.

The News of the World was a salacious rag, but it was run by Sir William Carr who was a member of an old establishment family. He had already received a hostile bid from the publisher Robert Maxwell. Carr hated Maxwell because he was not British (he was Czech).

Then Murdoch arrived. He wasn't British either, but he told Sir William he would buy the paper but they would run it jointly together.

Maxwell warned Sir William not to trust Murdoch. He told him - "You will be out before your feet touch the ground".

Sir William replied - "Bob, Rupert is a gentleman"

But Lady Carr began to worry. She took Rupert Murdoch out to lunch in Mayfair. She reported that he had little small talk, no sense of humour and that he had lit up a cigar before the first course.

The BBC got interested in Murdoch - and they put out a profile of him. It was shot with him at work and at home in Australia. It has a great interview with Murdoch's secretary about what a sensitive man he is - and how upset he gets when he has to fire someone.

The News of the World battle ended at a showdown at the shareholders meeting in January 1969. The BBC had a camera inside. Here are some of the shots - again without any commentary.

The shareholders were being asked to accept Murdoch's offer.

It has great bits with Robert Maxwell huffing and puffing about how Murdoch hasn't played by the rules. Murdoch's response - "Yesterday Mr Maxwell called me a moth-eaten kangaroo. I'd like to point out that I haven't yet got to that stage"

Robert Maxwell would go on to become one of the greatest criminals in British business history. And then he would fall off a boat in the Atlantic and drown in 1991

But Robert Maxwell was right in his warning. Within three months Murdoch forced Sir William Carr out - and took over complete control.

Carr died in 1977. Murdoch offered to pay for a memorial service. But a proud Lady Carr refused.

The British establishment decided Murdoch was not a gentleman. And then he did something much worse. He announced he was going to publish the memoirs of Christine Keeler in the News of the World. Keeler was a "model" whose liaison with a government minister John Profumo in 1963 had ruined Harold MacMillan's government.

But since then Profumo had redeemed himself in the eyes of the establishment by going off to work for a charity in the east end of London. So when the News of the World published the sordid details of the affair, the whole of London society was scandalised. Murdoch was unearthing a scandal that should have been dead and buried, and destroying one of their own.

And, they said, he was doing it with the sole interest of lining his own pocket. Murdoch was seen as sleazy and destructive.

And this is where his monstrous image began. The man who had first taught Murdoch journalism on the Daily Express in the 1950s summed it up:

"The trouble is - Rupert was regarded as the Supreme Satan"

And he had also just bought the Sun.

So the BBC decided to make a longer, more probing profile. And to do it they sent a key member of the broadcasting elite - David Dimbleby.

The film is surprisingly fair - given the outrage. Dimbleby puts the accusations to Murdoch, but he also flirts with him, and with Murdoch's wife Anna. It is fascinating to watch Murdoch's face as Dimbleby does this. You can see him beginning to realise just how the British establishment really operates.

The Canadian in spectacles who appears first is Lord Thomson of Fleet - head of a global newspaper empire. He owned the Times in Britain.

The man chairing the editorial conference with Murdoch is the News of the World editor Stafford Somerfield. He was a legendary Fleet Street figure. A few months later Murdoch would sack him.

Somerfield then went off and edited a magazine about pedigree dogs - and became a judge at Crufts.

This rejection by the British establishment was one of the main reasons why Murdoch decided to leave Britain in 1973. He took his family and went to live in New York while still running the News of the World and the Sun in Britain. He talked about his reasons in an interview he gave to a left-wing journalist called Alexander Cockburn in 1976 in the Village Voice.

Although, as the consummate newsman, Murdoch turns it round and portrays it as him rejecting them. And you can see his guiding myth beginning to take shape here - the revolutionary outsider against the decadent British system.

Then in 1981 Rupert Murdoch returned to Britain and took his revenge. He bought the Times.

It was an act that united both the liberal elites and many old Tories in shock and outrage. This got worse when Mrs Thatcher's government allowed the takeover to proceed without it being referred to the Monopolies Commission. Under law this should have happened, but the government excused it with the flimsy excuse that neither the Times nor the Sunday Times actually made money.

There was a growing sense that Murdoch was now manipulating British politicians for his own personal gain. So the BBC decided to investigate Murdoch's business and personal background.

A Panorama was made called "Who's Afraid of Rupert Murdoch?" It was in two parts. First is a film which tells the story of Murdoch's rise to power in Australia, Britain and America. And then he is interviewed live in the studio by yet again - David Dimbleby.

The film is tough. And Murdoch is made to sit and watch it in the studio as he waits for the interview. It lays out and reports all the accusations that would become the foundation for future criticism of the way Murdoch both built and ran his media empire.

-That he takes over intelligent newspapers and turns them into trash. As the ex-editor of the New York Post says - "he took it towards a readership we believed didn't exist"

-That his critics say he turns the news reporting in his newspapers into a propaganda wing of his chosen editorial line, and then uses that to destroy politicians he doesn't like and help elect those he does.

- It describes the scandal in America when Murdoch got a massive favourable loan from the US government just after he had endorsed Jimmy Carter in the New York primary. Murdoch denies there was any connection.

- And it reports the outrage in New York over the sensational way his newspapers reported the serial Killer Son of Sam. Headlines personally overseen by Murdoch that seemed, it was alleged by other journalists, to turn a brutal killer into a celebrity.

- And it gave the American liberals a chance to reveal that they too now hated Rupert Murdoch as much as the British elites. "He is a force for evil" says the head of the Columbia Journalism review rather smugly.

And then Murdoch is given a chance to respond. Here are the parts of the interview where Murdoch takes on those allegations and responds with what was now his central argument.

That he is engaged in a war on elitism - both on journalism in America and the "typical piece of slanting and elitism" that he has just had to watch. Made by the BBC.

It now became his mantra. Anything that was "elitist" could be a legitimate target.

In 1986 Murdoch moved all his operations out of Fleet street to Wapping. The print unions went on strike - only to discover they had fallen into his trap. Murdoch promptly sacked them. The unions, he said, were another part of the decadent elites that were preventing Murdoch performing his proper role - making sure the market system served the people properly.

There was massive TV coverage of the outrage. But the BBC made an interesting programme that looked beyond Murdoch's rhetoric and linked the move to Wapping to what Murdoch was doing in America.

Murdoch had bought Twentieth Century Fox and then, in the months before Wapping, a chain of TV stations called Metromedia (they would become Fox TV). He was massively in debt, and the only way for his empire to survive, it was alleged, was to get more money out of his original purchases - the News of the World and the Sun.

The BBC programme was made by Robert Harris. He went and interviewed one of the American bankers involved in the deal - from Drexel Burnham Lambert - who says that the move to Wapping immediately increased the value of the British papers by over 300%.

Or as one of the union men says in the programme - "British workers are being forced to lose their jobs to fund his investments in America"

In 1989 - on the 20th anniversary of buying the Sun - Murdoch helped write an editorial that trumpeted his vision of himself as a revolutionary:

'The Establishment does not like the Sun. Never has

There is a growing band of people in positions of influence and privilege who want OUR newspaper to suit THEIR private convenience. They wish to conceal from readers' eyes anything that they find annoying or embarrassing.

LIVING LIES AND HYPOCRISY ON HIGH CAN HAVE NO PLACE IN OUR SOCIETY

IT IS THE STRUGGLE OF ALL THOSE CONCERNED FOR FREEDOM IN BRITAIN.'

But the liberal elite were already fighting a counterattack. It had begun with the chat-show host Russell Harty the year before as he lay dying in a hospital bed from hepatitis.

Harty was a homosexual who had been hounded by the News of the World. With his illness this had turned into a media frenzy - with reporters from all the tabloids pursuing him in hospital, posing as junior doctors demanding see Harty's medical notes, and photographers renting a flat opposite his hotel room.

At Harty's funeral in 1988 the playwright Alan Bennett publicly accused the tabloid press of accelerating his friend's death. "The gutter press finished him"

The Sun chose to reply:

'Stress did not kill Russell Harty. The truth is that he died from a sexually transmitted disease.

The press didn't give it to him. He caught it from his own choice. And by paying young rent boys he broke the law.

Some - like ageing bachelor Mr Bennett - can see no harm in that. He has no family.

But what if it had been YOUR son Harty had bedded?'

The BBC decided to quiz Rupert Murdoch. And they chose not David Dimbleby but their main attack dog.

Terry Wogan.

Murdoch was agreeing to interviews at the time because he was promoting his new Sky TV.

It is a very odd episode. Wogan starts off in an embarrassed way - asking Murdoch "is it difficult for you to keep a grasp of reality?". Then he attacks him in a chat show way about his behaviour towards "other chat show hosts" and he manages to get the audience to boo Murdoch.

The only other guest on the programme was someone from the very heart of the British establishment. The Duke of Westminster. Wogan interviews him in a creepy way about the Duke's good works for charity.

A balanced programme.

Here are some parts of the Murdoch interview.

And then came the Sun's distorted reporting of the Hillsborough tragedy which disgusted even some of Murdoch's most fervent supporters .

All this was a disaster for Murdoch the revolutionary. When the 1992 general election began Labour announced that if they won they would introduce new cross-media ownership rules - and force Mr Murdoch to break up his empire.

This would mean he would either have to give up his new dream - the satellite TV station Sky - or he would have to sell his newspapers.

One of Murdoch's biographers says that no other company in Britain stood to lose so much from a Labour victory in 1992 as News Corporation.

And the Sun launched a massive campaign against Labour. Ending on the day before polling with a famous cover. While inside on page three there was an overweight old woman in a swimsuit with the caption - "Here's what Page Three will look like under Labour"

When Murdoch heard the news that John Major had been re-elected he was on the lot at Twentieth Century Fox. He said two words:

"We won"

The key to Murdoch is how you interpret the word WE. Did he mean "We the people" - and that he truly is a populist revolutionary?

Or did he mean by "we" the new financial elite that had risen up in the 1980s that was using debt and junk bonds to break into the old corporations and businesses?

One man who thought he had the answer was one of Murdoch's closest allies who a few years later would come to believe he had been ruthlessly betrayed by Murdoch.

He was the journalist Woodrow Wyatt. Wyatt had been very close to Mrs Thatcher throughout the 1980s and he had become what he proudly called "Rupert's Fixer". But secretly Wyatt was writing a diary every day recording not just his life within the establishment but also his day to day dealings with Rupert Murdoch.

The diaries are wonderful. And in them Murdoch is a dark, silent figure - always listening on the other end of a phone somewhere in America or Australia as Wyatt tells him the inner secrets of the powerful people who run Britain.

But then - in 1995 - Murdoch begins to change. He decides he likes Tony Blair and tells Wyatt he may support him at the coming election. Wyatt can't believe it. He had thought that Murdoch would always support the Conservatives.

And then Murdoch does something worse. He tells the editor of the News of the World to cut back on the column that he had allowed Wyatt to write every week.

Wyatt is in despair. There is a wonderful moment in the diaries when Wyatt sleeps all night on the floor of his study next to the phone waiting for Murdoch to ring.

He never does.

And then - towards the end - Wyatt pours out the truth (as he sees it) about Murdoch. It is in a diatribe to one of Murdoch's American advisers, the economist Irwin Stelzer.

Wyatt cannot believe the treachery. He was the man who fixed it so Mrs Thatcher wouldn't refer the Times purchase to the Monopolies Commission. And now Murdoch is betraying him and turning to Blair.

Like a flash of lightning on a dark night Wyatt believes he sees Murdoch's true relationship to power.

And then in 1997 when Murdoch comes out for Blair, Wyatt has only one line.

BODYBUILDING AND NATION-BUILDING

Adam Curtis 27/03/2012 20:27

At first sight the search for peace and stability in Iraq, and the search for physical and mental fitness in the extreme contortions of modern Yoga seem to have absolutely nothing in common.

But curiously they do.

Both the terrible structural problems and distortions that underly Iraqi society today, and the strange, contorted poses that millions of people perform every day in things like Bikram's Hot Yoga, actually come from the fevered imagination of the British ruling class one hundred years ago.

As they felt Britain's power declining they wanted desperately to go back into the past and create a purer and more innocent world, uncorrupted by the messiness of the modern industrial world - a new Eden forged both by strengthening and purifying the human body and by inventing new model countries round the world.

And we are still suffering from the consequences of that terrible nostalgia.

At the end of the nineteenth century a fanatical craze for physical fitness swept through Britain. Millions of men and women took up gymnastics, body building and other physical exercises.

Such a thing had never happened before - and it was given a name - Physical Culture.

The craze had an almost religious intensity because those who promoted it said that it was the only way to prevent the British nation - and its Empire - from collapsing. Behind this was a powerful belief that the modern world of the 1890s - the teeming cities with their slums and giant factories - was leading to a "physical degeneracy" in millions of people.

It was a fear that had started with the elite who ran Britain's public schools. Matthew Arnold warned of "the strange disease of modern life" with its "sick hurry" and "divided aims". Out of that came a movement called "Muscular Christianity" which wanted to recreate the kind of heroic human being that existed before industry and the modern world came along and corroded everything.

It was a vision of a restored physical and moral perfection in the young men who were going to run the empire. And it involved doing lots of exercises in new things called Gymnasiums. Then liberal reformers got worried about the working classes - convinced that the slums were leading to a "physical degeneracy" . So they persuaded lots more people to do exercises.

Then a figure rose up who united all of this dramatically into a mass movement. He was called Eugen Sandow.

Sandow came from Prussia, he started as a circus and music-hall performer. But then in the late 1890s he invented something he called "body-building". It caused a sensation throughout Europe and America - and he became a massive celebrity because he was seen as the leader of a crusade of Physical Culture that was going to stop the degeneracy that was plaguing Britain.

Here is some film shot by Thomas Edison - showing Sandow in action.

Sandow said that building the perfect body was a way of reconnecting with a pre-industrial time of virile physical perfection. He was very good at PR - and he told a story of how he had gone with his father to see the Greek and Roman statues in Italy. He asked his father why there were no more such men?

His father replied that in those days the rule of the survival of the strongest had not yet been corroded by the dangerous, cushioning effects of "civilisation". There and then, Sandow said, he resolved to lift from himself - and the world - "the stigma of weakness".

And to do that you had to "build" your body to look like this

Sandow also started a magazine called Sandow's Magazine of Physical Culture - to promote what he called The Gospel of Strength. It became the centre of a worldwide movement that incorporated bodybuilding with all sorts of physical exercises.

It was the start of the modern idea of fitness - and at its heart was an almost spiritual vision of restoring a lost wholeness to both human beings and to the world. The American promoter of Physical Culture, Bernarr Macfaddden wrote in 1904

"Our ancestors were strong, virile and conquering because they lived close to Nature and so absorbed her inexhaustible vitality. But we are losing our inherited vitality, slowly perhaps, but none the less surely."

In 1905 Sandow set up "The Empire and Muscle Competition", and then went off on a tour of the world. When he arrived in British India he became a sensation - thousands came to see him in his giant tent.

He had arrived in India at a time of rising tension. There were growing protests against Britain's rule, and Sandow's gospel of strength now began to get mixed up with another ideology - Indian nationalism. In the next twenty years, as Britain's hold over India weakened, the culture of physical fitness that Sandow had brought to the country would re-emerge in a strange mutated form as a way of fighting against British rule.

And in a further mutation this would lead to what we now know as modern Power Yoga.

After the First World War the territories of the old Ottoman Empire were divided up amongst the European powers, and Britain got three provinces in Arabia that would become the new country of Iraq.

Britain had created new countries within its Empire before and it had always started by surveying in extraordinary detail the societies they were ruling - compiling censuses and records of property boundaries and a mass of other details. Out of all that they then built a new administrative system.

It wasn't often very fair or democratic - but it bore some relationship to the reality of existing power structures.

But by the 1920s Britain was bankrupt after the war and couldn't afford such elaborate preparations. Instead a small group of elite administrators were allowed to create a new society out of their imaginations.

And their imaginations were influenced by exactly the same yearning for a return to a pre-industrial rural idyll that had created the Physical Culture movement in Britain.

What the British administrators did was take a romantic vision of a long lost Britain run by feudal landlords and project it onto Iraqi society - where the tribal Sheikhs were seen as being like the British landed aristocracy.

A historian called Toby Dodge has written an absolutely brilliant book called Inventing Iraq. It lays out in clear and very persuasive detail how this group of British Civil servants in Iraq built something that looked like a modern nation - but was in fact a facade. Behind it was really a weird nostalgic myth about Britain.

At the heart of this group was the legendary Gertrude Bell. She wrote the key "Review of the Civil Administration in Mesopotamia" in 1920, and Dodge shows how she, like many of the men working with her, comp

WHO WOULD GOD VOTE FOR?

Adam Curtis 06/03/2012 16:45

When you bring God into politics very strange things happen. You can see this now in both America and Iran - in their elections and also in the growing confrontation between them. But it wasn't always like this - in fact for most of the 20th century fundamentalist religion in both America and Iran had turned its back on the world of politics and power.

But in the 1970s everything changed. For that was the moment when religion was deliberately brought into politics in both countries with the aim of using it as a revolutionary force. And those who did this - Khomeini in Iran, and right-wing activists in America - were inspired by the revolutionary theories and organisations of the left and their ambition to transform society in a radical way.

I want to tell the forgotten story of how this happened - and how in the 1980s both the Americans and the Iranian idealists came together in a very odd way - with disastrous consequences.

In the early 1970s in Washington a small group of young conservative activists came together to try and change American politics. They called themselves the New Right and they were convinced that unless they did something drastic, the liberals and the left-wingers in America were going to take over the country.

One of the leaders of the New Right was a man called Paul Weyrich, and in the wake of the student revolts of 1968 he infiltrated the meetings of left-wing grassroots organisations. He was astonished by the amount of planning and tactics that he saw and he realised that the conservative movement in America was completely unaware of all this. The right, he said, were still trapped by the belief that people would simply vote for them because they were right.

So the New Right set out to organise a new grassroots movement that could counter the left's success. They had all sorts of discussions and during one of them Weyrich pointed out that there were millions of Americans who were socially and culturally very conservative but who never voted. They were the religious fundamentalists and the evangelicals - a vast segment of the population who believed that they should never get involved in politics.

Weyrich realised that if you could activate the fundamentalists and the evangelicals then the New Right could create an incredibly powerful force. But the problem was how to persuade them. The fundamentalists were driven by pietism - the belief that a true Christian should not only devote their life to god, but also turn their back on the secular political world. They should live the good life through their own actions - and forget about politics.

Ironically it was the liberal left that offered Weyrich the way to activate the fundamentalists. Since the late 1960s the left had pushed through reforms on all kinds of moral issues - gay rights, abortion, sexual discrimination. This had shocked the Christian heartland of America because it was politics attacking and undermining the very beliefs through which they lived their private lives.

The final straw came when President Carter abolished the charity status for the fundamentalist religious schools. This really hurt because they thought Carter, an evangelical, was one of them. But Carter was of the old school - he believed that religion should be separate from politics.

So in May 1979 Paul Weyrich and four other young activists drove to the Holiday Inn in Lynchburg Virginia to meet one of the most powerful evangelical pastors in America, Jerry Falwell. Like a number of other pastors, Falwell had his own television network and millions of followers. What happened at that meeting would shatter the pietism of millions of fundamentalist Christians and bring them - and their beliefs - into the heart of American politics.

I interviewed Paul Weyrich and another of the New Right group, Morton Blackwell, about that meeting. Here they are - describing what happened. It begins with Weyrich telling how he infiltrated the left. Weyrich was a fascinating man (he died in 2008) - a conservative revolutionary.

At the same time - in early 1979 - the Ayatollah Khomeini led a revolution that toppled the Shah in Iran.

Khomeini did this by completely transforming Shia Islam. It was a religion that for hundreds of years had taught its millions of followers to turn their backs on politics and power. Khomeini had turned this upside down - and had brought Shiism into the heart of politics.

Back in 1963 Khomeini was just another conservative cleric living in the City of Qom, but then the Shah launched the White Revolution which was supposed to modernise Iran. Khomeini was horrified because the programme was going to emancipate women, swear in elected officials on any holy book - not necessarily the Koran, and worst of all it threatened to take away the clergy's very large landholdings.

Here's an image of the future of the Shah's revolution. Girls running nuclear power.

But the problem was how to challenge the Shah? Shiite Islam had a quietist attitude towards politics. One of its main ceremonies is "Shiite lamentation", where the faithful ritually flagellate themselves. Throughout Shiite history the clergy have made this the symbol of a retreat from the world - and above all from politics and power. The people must wait in a world full of shadows and evil - for the return of the twelfth imam. This meant that political power was evil and debased, and you must have nothing to do with it.

Khomeini decided to overturn this - and to do it, like Paul Weyrich in America, he turned to the ideas of the political left.

In the 1960s an Iranian sociologist called Ali Shariati had become fascinated by the writings of the Third World revolutionary, Franz Fanon. And when Shariati translated Fanon's writing into Persian he used the language of Islam - so marxist terms like "the oppressors" became "the arrogant" while "the oppressed" became "the weak" or "the disinherited".

For Khomeini this was the key - and in 1970 he gave a series of lectures that took Shariati's attempt to fuse revolutionary Marxism and Islam and used them to portray a new vision of Shia Islam. Your duty, Khomeini said, was no longer to remain passive but to seize power and drive out the wicked and corrupt ruler. It was an extraordinary move, because Khomeini was exploding one of the fundamental ideas of his religion.

You don't just sit around waiting for the Messiah. You fight - and you take power now. Led by the clergy.

Khomeini lifted a lot from Shariati, but it was also driven by his powerful personality and his brilliant use of the media. Here is is film of Khomeini in exile in Paris in 1977 as his ideas were taking hold in Iran. It is followed by some film rushes of the extraordinary mass demonstration that happened in Tehran on the 29th March 1978 - the slogans on the banners show the fusion of left wing revolutionary ideas and Islam. As the Shah says in the film, Khomeini had combined "the red and the black".

A few weeks later violent revolution began - and I have included in the rushes some great and very brave reporting in the midst of the fighting by the BBC reporter Richard Lindley.

In America the politicisation of religion had taken off in a big way. Throughout 1979 The Revd Falwell travelled the country contacting, he claimed, 72,000 pastors. He showed them how to mobilise their millions of followers and how to register them to vote. Falwell also worked with the New Right to use Direct Mail to dramatise the moral issues - and to provoke.

When gays were allowed to lay a wreath on the tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Washington, Falwell sent out a warning to the Moral Majority followers:

"That's right - the gays were allowed to turn the tomb of the Unknown Soldier into:
THE TOMB OF THE UNKNOWN SODOMITE!"

But the question was - who should the newly radicalised fundamentalists support in the 1980 presidential election? The Religious Right prepared a Presidential Biblical Scorecard which was sent out to millions.

It scored all the candidates on the great moral issues - abortion, homosexuality, national defence, and many others. Jimmy Carter didn't do very well.

But the question was really decided at a dramatic mass meeting in Dallas. It was called The National Affairs Briefing and was sponsored by the Religious Roundtable - a coalition of religious groups. All the candidates for President and other political figures were invited to come and explain their views on religion - but only one turned up, Ronald Reagan.

The meeting's other aim was to show just how many leading pastors now believed that evangelical religion should become involved in politics. Along with Falwell, leading televangelists like James Robison and Jimmy Swaggart whipped up the 17,000 strong crowd in the Dallas Arena - in front of 50 million television viewers.

Other leading pastors, like Billy Graham, refused to come. They hated what was happening. One of them, a Baptist called James Dunn gave a brilliant quote:

"We've got a bunch of TV preachers who want to establish a theocracy in America, and each one of them wants to be Theo."

And then Reagan made his speech.

Here is James Robison at the meeting followed by Reagan, a moment that many in the movement say was the turning point. I have also included Jimmy Swaggart attacking those who say religion should not be involved in politics - because it is really funny and shows just how powerful and confident this movement was back then.

But as all this was happening in America, the battle that was taking place in the Iranian revolution over religion and politics spilled over into American politics - and things began to get very complicated.

And its victim was the hapless President Jimmy Carter.

Unlike previous US presidents, Carter didn't like the Shah of Iran. The CIA had told him horror stories of what the Shah's secret police were doing to Iranian dissidents. And Amnesty were publiciising the same thing - like the use of bacon slicers to cut off prisoners' hands bit by bit. Carter didn't like this, he believed that America should promote human rights around the world and he publicly criticised the Shah.

But not very strongly. Carter said that criticism of the Shah's secret police was "perhaps sometimes justified", while he continued to give Iran vast amounts of weapons.

In 1977 the BBC were making a sycophantic documentary about the "life of Washington's first lady" - Rosalynn Carter. They were filming in the White House when the Shah of Iran came to visit. Carter had promised he was going to tell the Shah he should try and liberalise his country. Unfortunately thousands of Iranian exiles didn't think this was enough and they turned up outside the White House to protest, and Rosalynn's plans started to go wrong

When the Iranian revolution happened, President Carter tried to contact what he believed were "the moderates" in the revolution. The embassy in Tehran opened a dialogue with the liberals who had allied themselves with Khomeini - and who now wanted to transform Iran into a democracy. The most important was the new Prime Minister Mehdi Bazargan.

But Khomeini wanted to get rid of these liberals because they were opposed to his idea of the new political structure of the Islamic Republic of Iran - where absolute power would be given to "the Guide", which meant Khomeini himself. The liberals saw this as the restoration of a dictatorship.

So Khomeini and his supporters manufactured a crisis. On November 4th 1979 500 "students in the line of the Imam" (ie followers of Khomeini) stormed the American embassy and took the diplomats hostage. There are stories that a young Ahmadinejad was one of the students, but no one has proved this and he denies it.

There is a great book written by Massoumeh Ebtekar who was one of the invaders of the embassy. She describes how when they began to explore, the students found tons of shredded documents lying discarded on the floor and in the barrels of the shredders. One of the invaders, an engineering student called Javad thought that the shreds from each document must have fallen together - and so it might be possible to rebuild the documents.

"He was a study in concentration - bearded, thin, nervous and intense. These qualities combined with his strong command of English, his mathematical mind and his enthusiasm, made him a natural for the job.

One afternoon he took a handful of shreds from the barrel, laid them on a sheet of white paper and began grouping them on the basis of their qualities.

"After five hours we had only been able to reconstruct 20-30% of two documents. The next day I visited the document centre with a group of sisters. 'Come and see. With God's help, with faith and a bit of effort we can accomplish the impossibe', Javad said with a smile."

A team of twenty students then went to work to reconstruct all the papers - in the end they published 85 volumes of them. The documents revealed the deep and cynical involvement of America in supporting the Shah throughout the 1970s. They were the Wikileaks of their time, for they showed how the CIA had worked closely with SAVAK - the hated and vicious Iranian secret service.

The students renamed the embassy "the nest of spies" - and quite a lot of the hatred and distrust of America that has pervaded Iran ever since comes from those reconstructed documents.

And what's more the documents also helped Khomeini destroy his liberal allies, because they revealed that, since the beginning of the revolution, President Carter had been talking to "the moderates". Khomeini seized on this and used it to force out and arrest all those in the new government who wanted a democracy. They were traitors because they had been corrupted by the Great Satan.

Khomeini then used the embassy crisis - fuelled by the hatred of America - to build his vision of a radical theocracy in Iran. It had an enormous effect on the Presidential campaign in America because it made Carter look impotent, especially when his mission to rescue the hostages failed dramatically with helicopters crashing and burning in the Iranian desert.

To give a sense of the drama and uncertainty of that time - here are some sections from the BBC News Comp tapes of the time - 1979-80. They were the 2-inch video tapes onto which raw material coming over satellite from Washington and Tehran was first dumped. I have kept them as they are - and they give a very good sense of the complexity and dislocation of what was happening. They include footage the Iranian students shot as they invaded, and then some video of what they found inside the embassy - the secret communications equipment, and then they find the shredders.

In November 1980 Ronald Reagan won the presidential election. Millions of newly radicalised Christians voted for him. Reagan would have won without their votes, but the New Right had awoken a powerful force that now came into Washington - an evangelical conservatism that wanted to change the world, not just keep it the way it was, as traditional conservatives always had.

By 1980 the idea that left-wing politics could change the world was finished and over - throughout the western world. And in a strange way these new conservative radicals were the last spasm of twentieth century revolution - created out of left-wing tactics borrowed by the New Right - and then fused with fundamentalist anger.

But the problem was that almost immediately Reagan ignored them. Although in speeches he paid lip service to their fury over subjects like abortion - he did almost nothing to remake America into the morally good country they sought. And the religious right and their supporters were frustrated and angry.

But they still had hope in foreign policy. Like the fundamentalists, Reagan saw foreign policy not as realpolitik, but as a global battle of good against evil - and he backed the idealists in his administration who wanted to support what they called Freedom Fighters in countries like Nicaragua.

But this would lead the American religious idealists into a very weird situation - they would become the allies of the religious revolutionaries in Iran.

Because Khomeini's revolution was also having problems. The country was facing an economic disaster and the millions of poor people who had created the revolution were finding that their prospects hadn't really changed. While the intellectual leftists who had supported Khomeini had turned against his idea that he should be in charge.

So Khomeini simply annihilated the left. He killed them - or forced them to confess to treachery on TV from prison.

Then Iraq invaded Iran - and hundreds of thousands of the most devoted and active revolutionary militants were sent off to become cannon fodder. They were giving their lives to defend the revolution - but their deaths also removed the growing threat from this group as Khomeini's revolution failed to solve the economic and social problems.

And by 1984 Iran had become a very dark and strange place. Any idea of using religious energy to change the world was gone - and faced with the appalling butchery in the war, Iranian Shiism found it's way back to the old idea of martyrdom, but in a horrific way.

The historian of modern islamism, Gilles Kepel, described what happened to that young revolutionary generation.

"The appalling butchery of the war against Iraq gave the younger generation of poor Iranians an incentive to return to the former tradition of martyrdom.

No longer at issue was the transformation of the world, for the revolution had clearly failed to satisfy that expectation. Rather the young men developed a new desire - a longing for death - as a response to the failure of Iran's revolutionary utopia and the pressures of the war with Iraq.

The Shiite death wish took on massive dimensions with the sacrifice of the bassidjis at the front. The colunteers wrote letter and last testaments to their families, asserting their longing for death. What these tragic documents describe in religious terms is no less than the political suicide of the young urban poor of Iran in the 1980s."

In 1984 the BBC made a two-part documentary recording this dark, strange Iran. It is a brilliant film - it shows just what Kepel describes, hundreds of young men being bussed off to the front every day, welcoming the fact that they are all going to die.

The giant fountain in the mass war cemetery spouts blood-red water. While in cool, white offices, very young children are taught to embrace the idea of martyrdom by a spooky cleric - and are given toy models of the US space shuttle to reward them. And the revolutionary guards spend their time driving around policing their neighbours' morals, and hunting down ill-veiled women (bad hejabi).

Here are some sections from the film. I really like the way it is made - refusing to bow to the normal hysterical news style. Its calmness evokes the growing darkness brilliantly.

And into this weird, dark world came an equally weird American - called Colonel OIiver North. He was a radical Christian fundamentalist who wanted to save his, and Reagan's, global revolution through an audacious and, in retrospect, completely crazy plan.

North was high up in the National Security Council and had been running a secret programme to help the Contra guerrillas in Nicaragua - it was part of what he saw as an epic battle of good vs evil all around the world. But Congress had found out about it - and stopped him.

So in 1985 North, began to build an amazing scheme. He knew that the Iranians were desperate for weapons in their war against Saddam Hussein, so he proposed to sell them thousands of missiles, then take the Iranian money and use it to secretly fund the Contras. The Iranians would also persuade the Hezbollah guerrillas in Lebanon to release American hostages.

North, along with the National Security Adviser, Bud McFarlane, told Reagan that this would also be a way of opening a dialogue with "the moderates" in the Iranian regime. And out of this North built an epic vision whereby this would allow America to defeat the extremists in Iran, end the Iran-Iraq war, and root out all Islamist terrorist networks in Europe and around the world.

A journalist called Ann Wroe wrote a fantastic book in the 1980s about the Iran-Contra affair. What she describes is an incredible comedy - somebody should make a drama about it.

North gave everyone and everything code names:

Missiles were "dogs"
The airport was "a swimming pool"
Iran was "apple" - so Tehran airport was "apple swimming pool"
But confusingly in another code sheet Iran was "tango"
Israel was "banana"
The United States was "orange"
Hostages were "zebras"
So a typical message in North's notebook was:
"IF THESE CONDITIONS ARE ACCEPTABLE TO THE BANANA, THEN ORANGES ARE READY TO PROCEED"

But it got more confusing because North kept on giving himself different code names. Initially he called himself "Wagner", but then he began sending messages about the plan signed "Steelhammer". Then he called himself "Colonel Goode", while his right hand man, General Secord was codenamed "General Kopp". And then he started calling himself "Mr Green".

Here are two orange zebras:

At times North got confused about who he was. When he boarded planes he couldn't remember what name he was on the passenger list - and had to go through all of them until he got it right.

North and McFarlane started meeting with representatives of the Iranian regime in great secret in places like Frankfurt. They were convinced they were dealing with "moderates", but no one could define what a moderate was in Iran - especially when it began to seem that "conservatives" in the theocratic regime were also "radicals".

The Iranians got thousands of missiles - and three hostages were released. But then Hezbollah kidnapped three more hostages - and the Americans were back at zero again.

But North was convinced that it would work because it was the meeting of two groups - from America and Iran - who both devoutly believed that their political aims had a grander, religious purpose. He flew to Tehran to try and solve it. North sat listening to his Iranian contact talking emotionally about Martyrdom. North replied

"Because I am a Christian, I understand and believe that when one dies in faith he will spend eternity in a far better place"

The Iranians got lots more missiles, North got more money for the Contras - but no more hostages released. He got desperate and arranged another meeting with the Iranians in Frankfurt. North took a bible with him in which he had persuaded President to write an inscription - and he gave it to the Iranians saying:

''We inside our Government had an enormous debate, a very angry debate inside our Government over whether or not my President should authorize me to say 'We accept the Islamic Revolution of Iran as a fact. He (the President) went off and prayed about what the answer should be and he came back with that passage I gave you that he wrote in front of the Bible I give you.

And he said to me, 'This is a promise that God gave to Abraham. Who am I to say that we should not do this?' ''

At one of their meetings, an Iranian came up to North's right-hand man, General Secord, and said:

"What's with this guy North? We just left a country full of mullahs, and what do I find here but another goddam mullah."

Then - at the end of 1986 - North's mad scheme was exposed. There was an enormous political scandal that nearly brought Reagan down. And the revolutionary visions of the religious right were finished.

The Iranians made great play of how mad Oliver North was. The then speaker of the Iranian parliament, Rafsanjani, held up North's bible for the world to see:

But the religious right in America didn't go away, instead - just like in Khomeini's Iran - it has mutated since the late 1980s into a rigid moral police force that has become an iron cage that possesses American politics and stops it progressing.

And that is what someone like Rick Santorum is. He's no revolutionary. He's just a conservative. But whatever happens to his campaign, the religious right is an active force in American politics. In particular they are among the keenest to bomb Iran.

Meanwhile in Iran there are parliamentary elections - but it's a contest between different factions of conservative religious fundamentalists, with the opposition excluded.

Forty years ago, in both America and Iran, religion was brought into politics as a revolutionary force - fuelled by a vision that it could be used to transform the world. But now, in both countries, that power has mutated into a backward-looking and hysterical conservatism that is doing its best to remove both countries from the dynamic force of history.

And look what happened in 1987 to one of the great leaders of that revolution in America - Jimmy Swaggart. But even when he faced his downfall, he was a great performer.

A MILE OR TWO OFF YARMOUTH

Adam Curtis 24/02/2012 16:58

Both individuals and societies tell themselves stories to simplify and make sense of the messy chaos of reality. It is naive to think that it is possible to live without the protective bubbles these stories create. But sometimes the stories can become terribly limiting and trap us, and prevent both individuals and whole societies from moving on into another kind of future.

One September night in 1945 three British mathematicians and astronomers went to see a new film at a cinema in Cambridge. It was called Dead of Night. It was a series of ghost stories told by a group of people gathered together in a farmhouse. The stories are linked by a device of a central character who is convinced that he has experienced the whole situation in the farmhouse before. In the end he murders another of the group - but then wakes up from this terrible dream.

That morning the telephone rings, he is invited down to the farmhouse, and the whole story, or dream, starts all over again.

The scientists loved the film, and they sat discussing its circular structure. One of them suggested that it could be the model for how the whole universe really worked. That, although the universe was expanding, it was also constantly renewing itself - to maintain itself in a steady state.

Out if this came what was called the "Steady State" theory of the universe. It was going to dominate scientific thinking for the next twenty years, and it would also make one of the three scientists very famous.

He was a very difficult and argumentative man called Fred Hoyle - and the story of what happened to him and his idea is odd and funny - and also shows how science can often add a spurious certainty to the stories that modern societies tell themselves.

I also want to tell the story of two of the men behind the film Dead of Night - because both of them were convinced that the certainties of the post-war years had trapped Britain in a narrow bubble that was preventing it from seeing the world as it really was.

And we may still be in that bubble.

Fred Hoyle was one of the first scientists to become famous on television and radio. It was because he told a dramatic story about the universe - about how amazing it is, and the extraordinary discoveries that astronomers like him were making.

Ever since the 1920s scientists had realised that the universe wasn't static - it was expanding. There was a furious dispute about what this meant. One group of cosmologists said it meant that the universe had begun with an enormous explosion. Hoyle thought this was ridiculous, and he derisively gave his opponent's theory a name. He called it "the big bang" on a radio programme in 1949.

Hoyle thought this idea was silly because it meant that everything that now exists in the universe would have had to have been created in that one explosive moment. Hoyle believed that the universe had no beginning and no end - and that fiery stars throughout the cosmos were continually creating new matter that filled up the universe as it expanded.

And in 1948 Hoyle published a paper that was more than just a piece of scientific theory. It amounted to a new philosophical description of the universe, and it captured the public imagination. Two years later the BBC invited Hoyle to give a series of lectures on the radio, and millions listened to his dramatic vision.

Underpinning it was Hoyle's belief that mathematics has an objective truth to it - but that truth is something that we as humans can only dimly perceive. What astronomers were starting to find, Hoyle believed, was just a tiny part of something truly awesome. A giant mathematical plan to the universe that we will only ever understand a tiny part of.

Here are bits from a couple of films the BBC made about Hoyle and his ideas. He is obviously a very difficult character, but he has a great way of expressing himself. I love his description of what human beings are like when faced with the mathematical plan of the universe. They are, he says, like "fish a mile or two off Yarmouth". They can glimpse Yarmouth, but they will never come near comprehending it properly.

The most dramatic part of Hoyle's theory was the way it challenged our concept of time - that all things must have a beginning and an end. Hoyle dismissed his opponents' belief in the big bang as being a simple reflection of the deep human desire to see everything in the world as stories.

In another BBC programme he put it bluntly:

"The reason why scientists like the "big bang" is because they are overshadowed by the Book of Genesis. It is deep within the psyche of most scientists to believe in the first page of Genesis"

And the reason that the film Dead of Night had such an effect on Hoyle was because it too has no beginning and no end.

Behind that structure were two fascinating men in the British film industry of the 1940s and 50s who consciously wanted to challenge the happy stories that post-war Britain was telling itself.

They were Robert Hamer and Alberto Cavalcanti. Not only in Dead of Night, but in other films they made, Hamer and Cavalcanti both set out to puncture what they saw as a naive, simplistic vision of human beings, and of society, that had emerged in post-war Britain.

Both Hamer and Cavalcanti were intellectuals of a generation that had been profoundly shocked by the second world war. Not the second world war that we remember today as a simple story of the triumph of good over evil. But something profoundly chaotic, a moment in history when all the comforting stories fell away and millions of people faced a dark and frightening chaos. What that generation learnt was that when that happens anything is possible. It is terrifying because it leads to unimaginable horrors, but it is also exciting because there are no boundaries and you can do whatever you want.

Much of that complex view of human beings was forgotten or hidden away at the end of the war. But I think it came back in some of the films - those made in America in film noir, and in Britain above all with the films of Robert Hamer.

Robert Hamer was a sardonic, disillusioned man who worked as a director at Ealing Studios. In contrast to the happy, naive output of Ealing - like Passport to Pimlico - Hamer was blunt about his ambition. He told the wife of Ealing's head of publicity:

"I want to make films about people in dark rooms doing beastly things to each other"

Hamer directed the section of Dead of Night where a man is given an antique mirror by his fiancee. When he looks into it he sees another, older, room that begins to possess him. It turns him into a violent, depraved man, and he tries to kill his fiancee. It is the story of the overwhelming power of madness and destructive passion. And order is only restored at the last moment.

But Hamer's masterpiece was a film he made two years later in 1947 - called It Always Rains on Sunday. It is a wonderful, powerful film. The central character is Rose, she had been a barmaid in a pub in Bethnal Green, but now she is married to an older man. Then suddenly her old lover Tommy turns up. He is on the run from prison and he pleads with Rose to shelter him.

Rose loves Tommy and she deceives her family - hiding Tommy in the upstairs bedroom.

The film's power comes from the intense mood it creates. Rose, played by Googie Withers, beautifully expresses the feeling of numbed desire that then breaks out in the dark, claustrophobic rooms of the east end house when she smuggles Tommy in. Passion that smashes through all the naive fantasies of post-war Britain.

But Tommy is not good - he loves Rose, but he is also brutally interested in his freedom, and Rose finds herself betrayed. All the stories have been torn away - both happy family life, and passionate love. She tries to commit suicide, is saved and returns to her family that has now become a prison.

It is impossible to give a proper sense of the film from a clip - you really have to watch the whole thing.

Michael Balcon, who ran Ealing studios, didn't like all this complex pessimism, and he stopped many of Hamer's future projects. I really like the one which was going to be the story of a young man who gets falsely accused of murder, is tried and is acquitted. But in the process he has become intoxicated with being in the news headlines, so he decides to commit a murder in order to experience it all over again.

Hamer made one other masterpiece - Kind Hearts and Coronets. On the surface it was a jolly comedy, but underneath Hamer wrote it as a vicious black satire about how a horrible lower middle class couple lie, cheat and murder their way to the top of British society. They have no goodness as characters - yet Hamer makes you like them, and root for them.

And then Robert Hamer became a self-destructive alcoholic.

I have stumbled upon a wonderful programme the BBC made in 1977 which tells the story of what happened to Hamer. It is a monologue done straight to camera by Pamela Wilcox. She was the daughter of another British film studio boss, Herbert Wilcox. In the late 1950s she met Hamer and fell in love with him, and they started living together.

By now Hamer drank all day. In 1960 he was given one last chance, to direct a film called School for Scoundrels, but he collapsed on the set. He and Pamela Wilcox then started living an extraordinary life, both of them were drinking heavily and bit by bit they fell into their own private hell.

Wilcox tried to escape - only to find that she fell further into what she describes in the programme as "limbo-land". Like the heroine of It Only Rains on Sunday, she found herself without any comforting stories, facing only the terrifying chaos that is existence.

It is a really moving story - and she tells it very vivid way. You can see how annoying and self-destructive she must have been. But you also really like her and get caught up in her story.

I have cut the beginning where she tells of her time living in Hollywood in the early 50s. It picks up when she discovers that her American husband has a lover - and she returns to England.

The vivid story that Fred Hoyle told about the universe not only caught the public imagination but it also promoted the idea that mathematics was somehow the key to understanding everything.

Hoyle had a mantra that he repeated in all of the programmes he appeared on:

"If there is a god, then Mathematics is God. The basic laws of physics, insofar as we have any concept of god, is God."

What Hoyle meant by this is that the science of mathematics was not just a construct projected onto the stuff of the universe - but that the pattern of order that physicists and astronomers like him were uncovering was mathematical.

It was a very powerful idea - and many other disciplines turned to mathematics in the post-war era to try and give themselves a power and dignity that they felt had been missing from their "science".

One of these was economics - and out of the economists' attempts to "mathematicize" their discipline would come another great story of our time. The conviction that the economy could be organised in such a way as to achieve its own "steady state".

In the 1930s most economists didn't bother with mathematics - except for a few numbers in tables. But after the war an economist called Paul Samuelson decided to take the mathematical methods developed to study the laws of thermodynamics and apply them to economics. It was an extraordinary move - because what Samuelson said was, that just as a thermodynamic system seeks to achieve equilibrium, so too does an economy.

Getty/Time&Life/YaleJoel

Samuelson called it the "Ergodic Hypothesis", and the image he gave was of the economy as being like a giant pendulum - that wherever you started its swing from, the pendulum would always want to settle back on the same fixed point. To put it in his language, the ergodic hypothesis was:

"a belief in a unique, long-run equilibrium independent of the initial conditions"

The simple phrase "initial conditions" is the key - because it means that whatever you do to the system, or whatever turbulence hits the system, it will always want to return to the same stable position. In other word - history doesn't matter. Again there is no beginning and no end. There is just the equilibrium - just like the steady state of the universe. And the economists' job was to help the economy achieve that equilibrium.

It had an enormous effect on political ideas about how to manage economies in the 1950s. The theories were further simplified so it became a technocratic dream that promised the politicians an economy that would expand but would also remain stable.

A few dissenting voices in the 50s said this was a pseudo-science. That what people like Samuelson were really doing was telling stories about the world in mathematical form. But the substitution of numbers for words seemed to make the stories more valid.

Here is an extract from a film from the Pandora's Box series that I made about the history of those economic experiments in 1950s and 60s Britain. It begins with an economist called Bill Phillips who built a giant computing machine run by water to demonstrate how to make an economy expand, yet not run out of control.

In 1961 the Steady State theory began to fall part. The attack was led by Fred Hoyle's sworn enemy - a Radio Astronomer called Martin Ryle. Where Hoyle was stubborn, Ryle was angry, sometimes so angry that he was made to work in a different building in Cambridge from his colleagues to avoid violent arguments breaking out.

In 1961 Ryle gave a press conference proudly announcing that he had discovered pulsating things called quasars far out in the universe. This proved that the steady state theory was wrong, he said, because if it was correct then qasars should be everywhere - not far out in the distance receding from us.

And then, four years later, came the killer blow. A couple of scientists in New Jersey called Penzias and Wilson had started picking up a hissing noise on a giant radio antenna that they were using. At first they thought it was the pigeons inside the antenna, so they went out and shot all the pigeons.

But the hiss continued, and they finally decided that they were picking up something much bigger. It was called Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation, and it was a faint glow of radio light that seemed to fill the universe.

This kind of radiation had been predicted by the big bang scientists because it was the radiation left over after the early stages of the universe's formation. Now it had been found, and their theory conquered the scientific world.

This is their big radio antenna, after the pigeons had gone.

But Hoyle didn't believe it. He accepted that the radiation raised serious questions, but he wasn't convinced that the big bang was the answer. He thought that the scientific establishment were like fish two miles off Yarmouth believing that they now understood what Yarmouth was really like.

To express his anger Hoyle wrote a TV drama series for the BBC called A for Andromeda. His aim was to show how scientists, and the politicians they entrance, can become possessed and corrupted by what seems to be a pure mathematical theory.

A for Andromeda tells the story of how astronomers pick up radio signals coming from outer space. They decode the signals and from them learn how to build a giant computer. The computer then electrocutes one of the scientists - Christine, played by Julie Christie. But it then recreates a perfect clone of her.

The hero - John Fleming - becomes convinced that the computer is being used to take over the earth by the aliens who sent the signals. But none of the other scientists see this. Then the government becomes obsessed with the computer because it seems to answer all their needs. It starts to run their defence systems - and then it offers to run the country's economy, and make it a rational system.

So Hoyle's hero - who was a model of Hoyle himself - has to save the world.

All the episodes have been lost except for one, the fifth out of six. It is very much in the model of John Wyndham science fiction, but Hoyle's fury burns through, especially in the passionate speech of his hero as he sets out to destroy the computer. It's great - and it was very popular.

The most frightening section of Dead of Night is the story of the ventriloquist who becomes possessed by his dummy. Michael Redgrave plays the ventriloquist called Maxwell Frere who has a dummy called Hugo - and the film follows Frere as he descends into madness. Hugo becomes a vicious, horrible and cruel figure that seems to control his master. At one point Frere says quietly to a rival ventriloquist: "You don't know what Hugo is capable of".

The director of this section was Alberto Cavalcanti. He was originally from Brazil where his father was a mathematician. But in the 1920s Cavalcanti had gone to Paris where he became deeply involved with avant-garde filmmaking. Then in the 1930s he came to England and worked in the early documentary film movement.

Like Robert Hamer, Cavalcanti thought that the British had a dangerously false vision of themselves - a twee artifice of forced jollity. He expressed this most powerfully in 1942 in a film he made for Ealing Studios called Went the Day Well? It tells the story of how a group of Nazis, disguised as British soldiers take over a beautiful English village.

The films starts as a piece of war propaganda. The nazis are vicious and sadistic. Then the villagers start to fight back, but instead of being noble and kind they become even more violent - and what's more they start to really enjoy it.

Here is a brief clip, but it will give you a sense of what Cavalcanti was up to.

Cavalcanti later said of the people in the film: "People of the kindest character, such as the people in that small English village, as soon as war touches them, become absolute monsters"

His point wasn't the simple oh-dearist lament that "people are bad", it was that humans are very complex, and that they have all sorts of dimensions and capacities that the simple stories leave out. For Cavalcanti, and many of his generation who experienced the second world war, post war Britain was possessed by a false and shallow cheerfulness.

In the story in Dead of Night the ventriloquist is possessed by the opposite. His dummy is a dark, bitter, destructive character that for Cavalcanti represented the dimension of human beings that was being brushed under the carpet and suppressed.

What Cavalcanti was saying was that just because we fought a good war, it doesn't necessarily mean we are good people.

In the 1990s I made a series called the Living Dead. The first film was about how that complex and extraordinary experience that many people lived through in the second world war was wiped away and forgotten immediately after the war. And how it was replaced by a simple story of the Good War.

The film argued that we are still possessed by that simplistic myth of goodies and baddies - a myth that subsequently has been the main driving force behind humanitarian interventions from Kosovo to Iraq and Libya. That myth says that if we liberate the people from their evil oppressors, then they will automatically become like us - good people.

Here is a part of the film. It begins with the story of the film that the American prosecutors showed at the Nuremberg trials in 1946 . It was called the Nazi Plan, and helped create the idea of the Good War. Set against this is the personal experience of some of the Americans who had fought in the war. One of them is a very interesting man called Paul Fussell who went on to become a well-known writer and critic in post-war America

And economics was rapidly becoming another central part of that simplified post-war world.

In the early 1970s there was a terrible battle between the man who had bought mathematics into economics - Paul Samuelson - and the free-marketeer, Milton Friedman.

Friedman said that Samuelson's mathematical models - that showed governments what to do to make their economies stable - were completely useless. Samuelson had been promoting something called the Phillips Curve which had been created by the same Bill Phillips who had built the giant economic water machine.

The Phillips Curve showed, Samuelson said, that if governments let unemployment rise then inflation would inevitably fall. Unfortunately it didn't. In the 1970s both unemployment and inflation went rocketing up, and none of Samuelson's followers could explain why.

Milton Friedman said that the solution was simple. Governments should stop trying to manage their economies and other than controlling the money supply they should just let things rip. This became the cornerstone of Mrs Thatcher's policies in the 1980s, which culminated with the deregulation of the financial markets in the City of London in 1986 - which was called the Big Bang.

Unlike the cosmologists and their Big Bang, the free market economists still believed that this explosion would lead to a stable equilibrium.

They had a simplified, mathematical vision of human beings as creatures who logically analysed everything in the market, and then reacted as if they were computing machines. Few people at the time said that this might be an area that maths didn't really have anything to do with, and that the scope of equations like the Black-Scholes model - which made derivatives trading predictable - might be very limited.

Here is a montage of the TV news reports leading up to the Big Bang in the City in 1986. It's a great picture of the old world that was about to be swept away - and the new one that was coming. Plus a wonderful early example of fear journalism - promoted in a very funny interview by a detective from the Fraud Squad.

But in the 1970s the mathematics behind the cosmologists' theory of the Big Bang started to lead to some very weird places. The man who caused the problems was Stephen Hawking.

Hawking had begun his work as a cosmologist by studying the big bang. He looked at black holes - they are what happens when a star collapses in on itself. Thus they are a sort of reverse of what is supposed to have happened at the origin of the big bang.

In the 1970s Hawking showed mathematically that black holes were eating information. Put simply this meant that stuff in the universe was disappearing into the black holes. Under the theories of quantum physics this was impossible, and lots of other cosmologists got very angry. But Hawking's mathematics were so good that no one could disprove it.

It was called The Black Hole Information Paradox.

Hawking's argument had massive implications. As he himself pointed out - it meant that there was no certainty any longer in the universe, it undermined the whole idea of cause and effect, and you couldn't predict the future with any certainty, or even be sure about what had happened in the past.

It was pretty bad.

So lots of other cosmologists set out to destroy Hawking's proof. They were led by a man called Leonard Susskind who publicly declared war of Hawking. It led to a wonderful, vicious scientific battle - and a few years ago Horizon made a film about the thirty year War of the Information Paradox.

The proof that Susskind finally comes up with is extremely odd. It involves accepting that if you as an individual fell into a black hole - it would look to those watching you from outside as if you had been torn to pieces. But in reality you would still feel as though you were you - even though you had been stretched around the edge of the black hole to become a two-dimensional version of yourself. Just like a cinema film.

You begin to wonder whether the mathematics isn't leading the cosmologists to tell stories that are far odder than any science fiction. I particularly love the scientist who explains that there are trillions of black holes throughout the universe. He says there might even be black holes inside his own head.

Here is a part of the Horizon programme.

Meanwhile things hadn't been going very well for Fred Hoyle. He had been appointed the head of the Institute of Theoretical Astronomy in Cambridge, but he was so difficult and argumentative that he was forced to resign. He then turned his back on the scientific establishment and went to live in the Lake District - where he continued to write science fiction with his son who was a national pistol champion.

But Hoyle still managed to fascinate the BBC - and he persuaded them to make a ninety minute film about his ideas, and dramatise one of his stories. The drama is truly one of the worst things I have ever seen on television - so I thought I would show part of it.

A beam from outer space has made time slip on earth. But in some places it makes time go forward, while in others it goes backwards. Time has effectively disintegrated and two scientists move separately through this dislocated world until they both end up in Mexico - but a Mexico way in the future.

Hoyle also put forward even odder scientific ideas. He said that he had proved that intelligent life on earth had originally come from outer space - in the form of bacteria carried on meteorites. When other scientists attacked this - he became even more convinced.

Hoyle had succumbed to the thing he had attacked other scientists for back in the 1960s - he had become possessed by his own stories. He had become a fish that thinks it knows what Yarmouth is like - and Hoyle's vision of Yarmouth had turned out to be a very strange place indeed.

Coincidentally, at the very same time, the BBC made an episode of the Holiday Programme about Great Yarmouth. It was presented by Joan Bakewell. No fish, however good their mathematics, could have ever imagined this.

Meanwhile Hoyle's enemies - the proponents of the Big Bang theory - had been trying to deal the fundamental problem with their theory.

What came before the Big Bang?

And out of this has come a new idea in recent years which is called The Big Bounce. This says that before the initial explosion there was a contracting universe just like ours which collapsed in a Big Crunch, and then exploded out again. What this implies is a cycle - with the universe exploding out, contracting and then collapsing until it explodes - and starts all over again.

Which is just like the structure of the film Dead of Night.

You have the funny feeling that you have been here before.

And since the economic crash of 2008 Britain seems to be returning to an older form of society and politics.

I'm told on reliable authority that the servants at Chequers feel more at home today than they have for a very long time. The cycle has returned to its conservative origins.

Maybe it was all a dream.

Getty/AFP/CarldeSouza

WE'RE ALL IN THE SAME BOAT - AREN'T WE?

Adam Curtis 31/01/2012 16:43

At every moment there are hundreds of thousands of Americans and Europeans floating around the world on "Funships" - superliners like the Costa Concordia that crashed and capsized off the coast of Italy.

These ships are extraordinary creations, millions of ordinary people pay not very much to spend weeks in an offworld pleasure bubble, surrounded by vast replicas of pictures and architecture from the glories of past civilizations.

Italian Navy

I want to tell the story of the rise of the modern cruise ship industry from its beginning in the 1960s - how it promised to make a world of aristocratic luxury available to everyone in the west, but also the hidden story of how that promise was achieved.

In many cruise ships there are hundreds of workers from some of the poorest countries on earth who are paid minute amounts of actual wages - sometimes less than two dollars a day - to attend to the passengers' needs.

Many of the ships' workers can only get a living wage on the whim of the thousands of passengers above them - on the tips they choose to give them. And in the strange fun-world of the superliners the waiters, the cabin staff, the cooks and everyone else who serves, live in a state of continual vulnerability - unprotected by most of the employment laws that apply on land. Meanwhile many of the companies that own the vast ships pay practically no tax at all.

But it wasn't always supposed to be like that.

The biggest company in the cruising world is the Carnival Corporation, based in Miami (the Costa Concordia is owned by one of their subsidiaries). Carnival has its roots in a small company set up in the 1960s which had a utopian vision that cruise liners could transform the world. One of its founders believed that the giant ships were machines that could help bring about a new era of world peace.

The liners would, he was convinced, unite the rich westerners and the poor from the "third world' by bringing tourists to new and remote destinations. This would foster a new enlightened understanding of each other that would bring about equality and justice throughout the world.

But it didn't turn out like that. And this is the story of what happened - and how the very opposite resulted.

It is also the story in miniature of one of the central consumer phenomenons of our time: the democratisation of luxury. How one half of the world all began to live as though they were aristocrats, while the other half became their servants. And how this allowed the real elite aristocrats of our time - who had become wealthier than any group ever before in history - to disappear, and become invisible.

The idea of elegance and aristocratic indulgence of an ocean cruise was born out of the image of the rich men and women who ruled the British Empire slowly sailing to India and the Far East while sipping gin and tonic on deck - served by men in white jackets.

But with the growing democratisation of Britain after the second world war, more and more ordinary people wanted to experience this, and what was called "the Cruising Revolution" started. In the 1960s the "one class cruise" was invented - passengers were promised that the experience would still be "ultra deluxe", but anyone could go, there were no class divisions.

In reality the idea was born out of desperation. Jet airliners had stolen many of the transatlantic passengers, which meant the shipping companies had nothing to do with their liners.

In 1966 Alan Whicker made a wonderful documentary about one of these cruises. It was on a liner called The Andes, and it is a very funny picture of Britain's postwar class structure in miniature when they are all thrown together in a boat. Everyone claims to be getting along together - but they all bitch about each other and everyone hates the Nouveaux Riche.

Here they all are, enjoying their genre fiction.

And there's always one:

I love the fact that there is a mysterious child on the ship that everybody complains is going round telling the passengers to "shut your cakehole", but Whicker can never find him.

There is also a woman who in one sharp line points to the problem that would bedevil the democratisation of luxury. "I came because I expected millionaires" she says - "but all I found was a load of Huggets". The Huggets were a fictional working class family from a famous radio sitcom.

If exclusive places are open to everyone then they are no longer exclusive.

Here is some of the film.

But it was the Americans who took the cruising revolution and turned it into a global phenomenon.

In the mid sixties the American cruise industry suffered a terrible disaster. An old converted troop ship called the Yarmouth Castle was on a cruise to the Bahamas when it caught fire and 91 people died. It was a terrible scandal, the sprinklers didn't work and the public address system failed. And the captain, it was alleged, jumped into one of the first of the lifeboats with four other passengers and sped off into the night. He later claimed that he was going to get help.

Here is a postcard of the Yarmouth Castle along with a picture of it on fire.

An Israeli-American businessman called Ted Arison saw an opportunity to regenerate the cruising industry - by using modern boats.

In the mid 1960s Arison was working in the airfreight business in New York, but his family had run shipping lines in Palestine and Europe in the 1930s, and he wanted to start a cruise line.

Arison found a Norwegian called Knut Kloster who had a suitable boat. Kloster also came from an old shipping family. They had made their fortune shipping ice to Europe from Norway, and they now ran a vast fleet of tankers. In 1966 Kloster and Arison set up a company called Norwegian Cruise Lines based in Miami.

Kloster and Arison are today seen as the founders of the modern cruise industry. Their first boat, the Sunward, started taking middle-class Americans on week-long cruises to Jamaica from Miami - and it was an immediate success. They also became close friends.

Kloster believed that the aim of capitalism was not just to make money but to use its power to improve society. He saw the world as divided between the rich, industrial west - and the "third world" which was struggling to escape from the debilitating legacy of colonialism, and the still vastly unequal distribution of global power.

So his cruise ships were going to remedy that.

Kloster hated the idea that his liners were just going to take white middle class Americans on cheap holidays in other peoples' hell and misery. He supported the left-wing politicians in Jamaica who said "Tourism is Whorism".

Here is a picture of Kloster, his wife, and a very big boat

Kloster held brainstorming sessions in the company to come up with new ideas that would provoke the American tourists to engage with the lives of those they were pointing their cameras at. One brilliant suggestion was that women workers in a Jamaican coffee factory should be given instamatic cameras so they could take picture of the passengers as they toured past them. The aim was to make the tourists feel what it was like to be watched and snapped as if they were animals in a zoo.

In a wonderful and perceptive history of the cruise industry called Devils on the Deep Blue Sea, Kristoffer Garin has described another scheme that Kloster dreamt up. It was called "New Experiences", and involved having a "Jamaican Family in Residence" on each cruise.

The New York Times described what was supposed to happen:

"The passengers will be invited to meet the Jamaicans informally, to dine together, drink, dance and play together, to ask questions and pump them for all kinds of information in friendly conversations with no holds barred, including political and racial problems."

And then - when the ship arrived in Jamaica - there was going to be the "meet the people experiment" where passengers would go and spend a day with middle-class Jamaican families who were like the passengers - doctors would meet doctors, teachers would meet teachers - people Kloster believed would be "articulate enough to communicate".

The only problem was that they couldn't find enough Jamaican middle class families, and many of those who were deemed suitable thought it was incredibly patronising. Plus Kloster found that behind his back in the Miami offices the experiment was called the "Take a Nigger to Lunch Program"

Kloster was helped in his vision by his vice-president of public relations, called Herb Hiller who was a bit of an early countercultural management theorist. In 1970 Hiller wrote the greatest company mission statement of all time:

But then it all went wrong, because Kloster discovered that his friend, and business partner Ted Arison wasn't a nice capitalist, but a ruthless one.

Kloster claimed that Arison had been taking the advance payments he was supposed to be holding from the bookings and doing all sorts of odd and dodgy things with the money. Plus a lot of it was missing. Kloster accused Arison of cheating him, Arison denied it and there was an enormous row - and Arison left the company taking with him all the future bookings. So Kloster broke into Arison's new offices late at night and stole them back.

Arison set up a new company to try to beat Kloster - it was called Carnival Cruises, and it was funded by a great character called Meshulam Riklis.

Riklis was one of the earliest of the takeover kings of the 1970s and 80s who used junk bonds to build a giant financial empire. He is also famous for lavishly wining and dining the judges of the Golden Globes awards in 1981 - which some believe led to the unlikely triumph of his actress wife, Pia Zadora, for her film Butterfly.

Here is a picture of Ted Arison.

To make Carnival Cruises grow, Arison went downmarket - offering the cruise experience to people who would never have considered it before. Then he had a massive stroke of good luck in 1977 when ABC TV began the Love Boat series. The series was an instantaneous hit and it transformed the image of the cruise liner. It not only portrayed it as a sexual paradise, but crucially a paradise that was open to all. It was the opposite of the exclusive and unattainable world portrayed in Dallas and Dynasty.

But to make the cruise affordable Carnival had to cut costs - and Arison did this through tough management. Just how tough was shown on Easter Sunday 1981 when 300 crewmen on two of Carnival's "fun ships" in Miami decided to strike. They weren't unionised, it was a spontaneous outburst against the harsh world they were forced to live and work in, and the low wages.

Ted Arison's son Micky was now second in command. Garin's history describes what Micky then did. He waited four days, and then invited the strikers' leaders to come ashore to talk. But it was a trick.

At the same time Micky sent a fake news helicopter to fly down the side of the boats. The strikers rushed to the deck to wave banners at the helicopter - while at the same time a force of private security men wearing helmets and holding clubs rushed onto the ship. They cornered the terrified strikers, pulled them off the liner and gave them to the immigration authorities waiting on the deck - who promptly deported them back to Honduras.

It couldn't have been more different from Knut Kloster's utopian capitalism.

But Knut was about to have another vision that was going to make everyone in the cruise industry rich beyond their dreams.

Kloster was still running Norwegian Cruise Lines and, in 1986, he came up with "The Phoenix Project" which was going to build a giant ship like nothing else ever seen in the world.

The journalist Kristoffer Garin described Kloster's vision:

"Phoenix would carry a staggering 5200 passengers and an additional 1800 crew - a number that rivalled the entire fleet capacity of any of NCL's competitors. Brochures spoke breathlessly of a ship designed for the 21st Century - a 'floating metropolis" a ship with a skyline.

Phoenix's superstructure would consist of several towers each of them eight or nine stories high, built atop a giant hull spanning the length of four football fields. It would feature beaches, palm trees and a retractable harbor at which smaller ships could dock. Its amenities would include nearly a hundred thousand square feet of convention space"

And true to his beliefs, Kloster still saw it as a way of helping create a better world - the brochure described:

"On this particular day, CEOs of Fortune 500 companies land their helicopters on the middle tower to join a conference on capitalism and third world development."

But the board of NCL thought he was mad - and in 1987 Kloster left the company. In his final speech he compared himself to John deLorean and finished by saying "business in America is impersonal" - and disappeared off the scene. Or so it seemed.

Meanwhile in the following years all the other cruise corporations in Miami, led by Carnival, did exactly what Kloster had dreamed of. They built giant superships that were just like the "floating metropolises" he had wanted to build.

The modern world of the cruise mega-liner is remarkably like Project Phoenix - except for one difference - no one comes on a cruise to discuss the problems of the developing world and how to create world unity.

That bit of Kloster's vision didn't make it into the modern cruising world.

Instead the ships became floating palaces where everyone became like an aristocrat on a sea voyage.

In the 1990s the BBC made a docu-soap on one of the new giant ships - the Galaxy, which was owned by Royal Caribbean Cruises who are also based in Miami. Here are some bits from a couple of episodes - it gives you a very good picture of the world on board, and its extravagant weirdness.

I particularly love the "midnight buffet". At midnight the doors to a vast restaurant open and passengers stream in to gorge themselves on elaborate food sculptures, while one of the staff stands above them with a microphone telling them over the speakers the amazing statistics of how much they are consuming on a voyage.

But in the series there are also glimpses of what life is really like below desks. I have cut together all the bits of Edward who has just been promoted to "butler". It gives you a very good sense of the intensity of the job. Edward works eight months straight, very long hours, 7 days a week, with just two hours off every other day.

The modern giant cruise ships that rose up in the 1990s are far more than just boats, they are really floating societies. But those societies are extremely strange.

Many of the liners work like a pure vision of capitalism. The floating worlds pay hardly any tax, most of the workers are protected by very few laws, and often many of them can only survive if they satisfy the needs and desires of the passengers well enough for them to give them a big tip. Free enterprise at its freest.

All this happens because of The Flag of Convenience. It was an idea that the Americans came up with in the early days of the second world war to allow them to send help to Britain. Roosevelt was worried that Hitler might declare war on the US - so a law was passed that allowed American ships to be registered either in Panama or in Liberia.

The Flag of Convenience was born out of altruism, but it is now used for purely selfish reasons. Many of the cruise companies register their ships in countries such as Panama and Liberia, this mean they do not have to pay corporate taxes in the US and aren't bound by many labour regulations.

Journalists and historians who have written about the industry have described the result. On many ships thousands of workers below deck work often 7 days a week, sometimes for fourteen hours a day. They are paid two to three dollars a day - depending entirely on tips to earn a living wage. The work most of them are asked to do on their shifts is impossible for one person to complete, so they in turn have to pay others to help them.

And a weird underground economy often results.

In his history of the industry, Kristoffer Garin has described how many of the workers also have to pay bribes to others elsewhere in the complex hierarchy of the ship - waiters have to bribe the cooks to make sure the food is hot, the cabin cleaners have to bribe the laundry chief to get clean sheets on time. He describes a world in which the cruise lines:

"take full advantage of their Flag of Convenience liberties when it comes to labor. Squeezing the most out of workers in return for the least possible pay is one of the keys to the industry's profitability, and the cruise lines have become extremely adept at it."

In response to such criticisms the cruise companies argue that great improvements have been made in the living conditions for their crews. And they say that the minimal wage - big tip system is the only way to keep the cost of the cruises affordable. They also point out that if a worker gets a lot of tips he or she can make a reasonable wage. But they also admit that it is a tough system

In 2001, the then CEO of Carnival Corp, Bob Dickinson, agreed to be the guinea pig of a BBC Back To The Floor documentary. Dickinson went to work at the lowest crew levels on the Fun Ship MS Imagination on a Carnival cruise in the Caribbean.

You have to admire him for doing it because it gives an amzing insight into just how exhausting and terrifyingly uncertain this world is. The person who is the real star of the film is Alina. She is a Romanian who cleans cabins and is paid $45 a month, and she works with Dickinson in the film.

Alina knows Dickinson is the boss, and you can see her holding back. But despite that she knows what she is up to - and she gives you a very clear idea of what life on Carnival's giant "fun ships" is really like.

But at the very same time Knut Kloster returned - with yet another vision.

He had spotted the central problem with the way the giant cruise liners had developed. They had been created as giant floating theatrical bubbles in which ordinary people could enter and feel for a few days that they were experiencing a luxurious indulgence that previously had been the privilege of just the rich and the upper classes.

But where should the really rich and powerful go - if all the Huggets were behaving as though they now ruled the world?

Knut Kloster came up with a solution. He was going to design the most luxurious floating metropolis ever, where only the really rich could come aboard. They could buy luxury apartments for millions of pounds and float around the world free of the hoi polloi.

Here is a report from BBC Breakfast Time in 1998 when the dream-boat project was first announced.

Kloster unveiled the ship in 2002. He called it The World. Just like everyone else he appeared to have abandoned his previous visions of world unity and compassion for the poor and downtrodden - this was strictly a utopia for the rich.

Journalists were allowed on for a look - and Oliver Burkeman described what he saw:

"This is not a private yacht, nor is it a cruise ship," Kloster announced. "It's a vacation lifestyle concept that goes beyond anything that has ever existed."
The World - 644ft long, 12 decks high, built at a reported cost of $ 532m - redefined the meaning of exclusivity. For prices from £1.5m to £5m and above, the ultra-wealthy could purchase homes on what was, in essence, a floating city-state, complete with shopping streets, six restaurants, the only full-sized tennis court at sea, a church, several pools, one of which doubles as a dancefloor, a running track, a 7,000 square foot spa, a helipad, a retractable marina, and one staff member per resident.

The apartments sold really well. Many billionaires were obviously attracted by the fact that the World's multi-denominational chapel was designed by a member of the Norwegian group Ah-Ha.

But as the deadline for the setting sail came nearer, something like 30 of the 110 apartments remained unsold. So the company running the ship did something without telling the residents. They let the apartments out to "very rich" people who wanted to go on a sea cruise.

In mid-2002 the World sailed off around the world. And it all started to go wrong - the "very rich" cruise passengers had obviously been attracted by the free drink and started to fall over and vomit. They were behaving like Huggets. The residents were outraged - and there was literally a mutiny on the ship. In 2003 the residents got together and bought the boat from the banks who owned it.

All the passengers were kicked off - and The World sailed off into mysterious exclusivity.

When Knut Kloster and Ted Arison invented the idea of modern cruising over forty years ago - at least one of them had a vision that it could help create a new era of world harmony and peace.

As the cruise-world developed and mutated over the next forty odd years it mirrored the changes in modern capitalism - from a naive utopian belief in transforming the world - to a harsh, narrow utilitarian vision of the free market where everyone above and below decks is expected to behave as "rational utility maximizers"

And today the world of the modern cruise liners also mirrors the present structure of our global society. Millions of people live in a world where they expect the luxuries which were previously only offered to the few. At the same time millions of others around the world struggle daily to create the platform that holds that fake luxury world together.

Meanwhile the small elite who are genuinely rich and powerful float off into the distance on their own boat - and kick anyone off who dares to get drunk and call it a cruise.

Our leaders tell us that we are all in the same boat.

But what will happen if our boat sinks? Will those same leaders be among the first to jump in the lifeboat and speed off into the dark telling us they have gone to get help?

THE YEARS OF STAGNATION AND THE POODLES OF POWER

Adam Curtis 18/01/2012 15:59

Everybody is always remarking about how stuck our society feels these days. The music doesn't change, the political parties are all exactly the same, and films and TV dramas are almost always set in the past.

We are also stuck with an economic system that is not delivering the paradise that it once promised - but is instead creating chaos and hardship. Yet no-one can imagine a better alternative, so we remain static - paralysed by a terrible political and cultural claustrophobia.

I want to tell the story of another time and another place not so long ago that was also stifled by the absence of novelty and lacking a convincing vision of the future. It was in the Soviet Union in the late 1970s and 1980s. At the time they called it "the years of stagnation".

There are of course vast differences between our present society and the Soviet Union of thirty years ago - for one thing they had practically no consumer goods whereas we are surrounded by them, and for another western capitalism was waiting in the wings to fill the vacuum. But there are also echoes of our present mood - a grand economic system that had once promised heaven on earth had become absurd and corrupted.

Everyone in Russia in the early 1980s knew that the managers and technocrats in charge of the economy were using that absurdity to loot the system and enrich themselves. The politicians were unable to do anything because they were in the thrall of the economic theory, and thus of the corrupt technocrats. And above all no-one in the political class could imagine any alternative future.

In the face of this most Soviet people turned away from politics and any form of engagement with society and lived day by day in a world that they knew was absurd, trapped by the lack of a vision of any other way.

But in the late 1970s a post-political generation rose up in Russia who retreated from all conventional political ideologies, both communist and western capitalist, and instead turned to radical avant-garde culture - in music and in literature - to try and protest against the absurdity of the system. I want to focus on their story - because it is fascinating and forgotten (and they produced some great music) - but also because of what happened to them when the Soviet Union collapsed.

Despite the differences between east and west, I think that the fate of that post-political generation does offer a glimpse of what happens in a stagnant political culture when a door finally opens on a different kind of future. Especially as some of the choices they made were very unexpected - and the outcomes sometimes very sad.

At the heart of the Soviet dream was The Plan.

The fundamental idea was that the whole of society could be planned and organised in a rational way. A giant headquarters had been set up in Moscow in the 1920s called Gosplan, it's job was to work out the needs of every single person and then make sure those needs were fulfilled.

And for a while it worked - the Soviet economy grew faster than America in the the 1950s. But then in the 1960s it faltered and those who ran the Plan began to discover that they could not control such a complex system. Their scientifically planned targets began to take on a strange and increasingly absurd life of their own - and the planners found that the system was controlling them.

In 1992 I made a film called The Engineers' Plot which told the story of the Plan and what happened to it. Here is a section from the end which shows the bizarre world the failure of the Plan created for the life of all Soviet citizens.

I've followed it with an extract from a Panorama programme made in 1981. The crew managed to get into the Soviet Union and secretly film bits of everyday life. It is a brilliant and vivid portrait of the emptiness and disillusion that was spreading through all levels of society - and how no-one believed in anything any longer. The woman who talks as she wallpapers a flat expresses this in a beautiful and touching way.

The disillusion had begun back in the 1960s as the economy faltered. As a result a new generation began to turn away from politics - and to begin with they looked to America and its pop culture as an alternative.

The problem was that it was very difficult for Russians to get hold of anything American. But then Dean Reed turned up.

Reed is an extraordinary figure. In the 1950s he had been a not very successful teen idol, but then he reinvented himself in the mid 60s as a singing leftist revolutionary, travelling the world singing songs that attacked American imperialism, not just in Vietnam but in Latin America and the Middle East.

This led him inevitably to the Eastern bloc countries, and then to the Soviet Union where he became a superstar. It was a bit odd - a generation of Soviet teenagers loved Dean Reed because he brought American music and modern culture into their society, yet Reed himself loathed America and had come to Moscow as part of his quest to expose the corrupting influence that America was having on the world.

Back in the 1990s the Arena series made a great film about the life - and very strange death - of Dean Reed. It was presented by the journalist Reggie Nadelson. Here is an extract about Dean Reed's arrival in the Soviet Union and the effect he had. The Russian rock critic, Atermy Troitsky, who appears will also turn up later in this story.

The disillusion with the communist dream grew throughout the 1970s. The millions of people who worked in the factories began to notice that the managers whose job was to run the plan were beginning to use the absurdities for their own purposes - to loot the system for the own profit.

Then in 1979 came the invasion of Afghanistan. It is now looked back on - rightly - as a disastrous decision that further undermined the Soviet Union. But what is forgotten is how for many of a young, disillusioned generation in Russia it was seen as a way to regenerate the ideals that were collapsing at home.

Sir Rodric Braithwaite, who used to be Britain's ambassador to Moscow, has written a wonderful book called Afgantsy. It tells the story of the Soviet invasion through the eyes of those who took part, and that includes the thousands of aid workers and civilian advisers that also went in. Their aim was to try and build 'socialism' in Afghanistan, just as thousands of westerners would later try and build 'democracy'.

Braithwaite quotes a Soviet youth adviser called Vladimir Snegirev who went to Afghanistan. In March 1982 he describes watching the Afghan New Year celebrations in the Kabul Stadium, and how they express the dream of creating a new world.

"There is a striking contrast which is only possible here: many of the women on the terraces conceal their faces under the chador - a primitive, medieval superstition; but parachutists are landing in the stadium and they are women too, who grew up in this country. The chador and the parachute. You don't have to be a prophet to foretell the victory of the parachute"

For Snegirev it was the ageing and corrupt Soviet leadership under Brezhnev that was the problem. He later wrote of the optimistic vision that Afghanistan seemed to offer:

"Were it not for our sclerotic leadership, people like Brezhnev, everything would work out differently. That's what I thought, that's what many people my age thought. When we arrived in Afghanistan we began to do what we had prepared ourselves to do for the whole of our previous lives.

In Afghanistan it was as if time had gone backwards, but now a power had arisen in this land which wanted to drag the people out of their superstition, to give children the chance to go to school, women the opportunity to see the world directly, instead of through the eye slits of the chador. Was that not a revolution? The battle of the future against a past already condemned?"

Here is part of a documentary made in Kabul in 1983 that filmed life under the Soviet occupation. It shows the Soviet advisers trying to transform this ancient world, including the celebrations for the new idea - Afghan Womens' Day

And here are some of the video rushes of the celebrations of Afghan independence day in 2002. They are happening exactly twenty years later in the Kabul Stadium - the very place that Snegirev watched the Afghan women celebrate their liberation. Now the women tell the camera they are celebrating the freedom brought by America and democracy.

But soon millions of Russians at home began to find out the futility and the horror of what was really happening in Afghanistan. Zinc coffins containing the dead soldiers were dumped in the middle of the night on the doorsteps of their families (sometimes it is alleged they contained the wrong body), soldiers returned with smuggled photographs and diaries that recorded brutal and horrific massacres of Afghans.

The mood of the generation who had turned away from politics and ideology now became much harder, cynical and sceptical. And one of the main casualties of this was the singer Dean Reed. Those who had once idolised Reed now turned against him.

Reed found himself trapped. He wanted to counter what he saw as American imperialist propaganda - and in 1986 he appeared on the US current affairs show Sixty Minutes to defend the Soviet Union, and that included defending their presence in Afghanistan.

To the Russian youth, who increasingly knew the truth about Afghanistan, this was absurd. He was now seen as Brezhnev's propagandist. And Reed found himself isolated. This isolation was powerfully expressed in a bitter song written as a message to him by one of his few friends left in America called Johnny Rosenburg.

A few weeks later Dean Reed was found drowned in a lake in a forest in East Germany. There are many conspiracy theories, some say he was killed by the CIA, others believe it was the KGB. But it was probably suicide.

Here is Soviet youth turning against Reed, and Johnny Rosenberg's song - from the Arena film.

Instead, in the 1980s, many Soviet youth turned to a new kind of music and culture that also borrowed from America, but it was one that attacked both the hypocrisy of western bourgeois capitalism and state communism. It came directly out of the punk movement in New York in the mid to late 1970s.

One of the key early figures was a Russian avant-garde write in exile in New York called Eduard Limonov. He had been expelled from Moscow by the KGB in 1974 and he arrived in New York just as the punk scene was taking off. Limonov became friends with people like Richard Hell of the band Television, Patti Smith, and the Ramones.

Limonov took the punk vision (best expressed, he said, in Richard Hell's song Blank Generation) and fused it with with Soviet disillusion. Limonov argued that that the West was in many ways just a more sophisticated version of the Soviet Union, with more sophisticated propaganda - plus a similar intolerance of real dissent.

Sophie Bassouls/Sygma/Corbis

In 1979 Limonov expressed this in a novel called It's Me, Eddie. In it he portrays a fictional version of himself on a dark, violent and pornographic journey through the hidden underworld of America. It was funny but also a cold and merciless depiction of the real effect Power has on modern American society and those in it. It shocked many people - but it became a best-seller in France and Germany, and Limonov was hailed as the voice of a new punk avant-garde.

These ideas had a big effect on the blank generation in the Soviet Union - and a new avant-garde underground grew up in Leningrad and Moscow who turned to culture, above all music, as a way of expressing the absurdity of their society, something that they believed politics was incapable of doing.

In 1986 the BBC captured the tamer end of this underground in a documentary they made about a Leningrad musician called Sergey Kuryokhin and his friends.

Kuryokhin was a classically trained pianist who had embraced the new musical radicalism - and formed a band called Popular Mechanics. Here are some extracts from the film - with Popular Mechanics rehearsing, conducted in a wonderful way by Kuryokhin. It is also a very good picture of the mood of that group, many of them children of high-up party members, who have completely detached from believing in any political future.

But the punk movement was not just composed of the children of the party bosses. In the 1980s a very big and influential cultural underground flourished throughout Russia, and it was much more than just a copy of western punk. One of its leading bands came from Omsk in Siberia, it was called Grazhdanskaya Oborona which translates as Civil Defence (the name was shortened to GrOb - which also means grave or tomb).

GrOb was led by a legendary singer called Yegor Letov. He was once incarcerated in a psychiatric hospital in Omsk for three months because of his rebelliousness. The music that Letov created was far more interesting than the western punk that had inspired it. His songs mixed modern noise with Russian folk in a full on attack on the emptiness of the world he saw around him.

The very perceptive journalist Mark Ames who edited the eXile magazine in Russia throughout the 1990s, and knew many of the avant-garde, says that Letov was one of the great geniuses of Russian literature.

Ames wrote of Letov:

"Punk may have started in New York and London, but the bravest spawn of all was Letov and his followers. When he began in the 1980s, Letov shunned the artsy irony of other anti-establishment bands in favour of raw violence and reckless confrontation against the blandness of the Soviet Union and the vapid optimism of Gorbachev's Perestroika. He left every band and every dissident in the dust, and they never forgave him for it.

Letov himself was the incarnation of what Edward Limonov calls "Russian Maximalism", the tendency to take things to their extreme."

Here is part of one of GrOb's greatest songs - Everything Is Going According to Plan - followed b a beautiful song by another member of the Siberian punk scene, Yanka Dyagileva, who was also Letov's lover in the 1980s.

I have cut the music to pictures of what was just around the corner, the sudden collapse of the Soviet union that began in 1989, and its strange aftermath. I have also added the lyrics to GrOb's song. The key lyric to Yanka Dyagileva's song that follows is "the television is hanging from the ceiling, and no one knows how f***ing low I'm feeling."

With the collapse of the Soviet Union this generation faced a terrible question. In the 1980s they had retreated from any engagement with political ideology of both left and right, and they distrusted the west as much as the hated communist oppression.

They had turned to culture instead and built an ad-hoc avant-garde movement to try and mimic and expose the absurdity of the system.

But now the system had gone - what did they believe in?

One of the group decided to try and express this dilemma in a dramatic way. In 1991 Sergey Kuryokhin, of the band Popular Mechanics, went on a popular TV talk show. He set out to prove that Lenin was really a mushroom. Kuryokhin wanted to show that in a society where no-one believed in anything the media could be used to make anything real.

To western eyes it is a bit silly, but at the time it caused a sensation. Here is a short extract

And you can watch a longer version here

The leading members of this post-political generation were now going to split and go off in very different ways.

Some made very sad, personal choices. In 1991 Yanka Dyagileva was found drowned in a river. It is believed that she committed suicide. Two other leading members of the underground punk scene also committed suicide.

But others decided to use the ideas that had driven the underground movement to try and create a new kinds of politic and new ways of running society in the wake of the catastrophic collapse.

These visions would manifest themselves in very different - and opposing - ways. But what linked them was a belief that in the avant-garde culture lay the seeds of a way of escaping the old, failed forms of politics.

The leader of one of these movements was the novelist Eduard Limonov.

When the Soviet Union collapsed Limonov had been allowed to return from exile. In 1992 he watched aghast as Yeltsin and a small group of technocrats decided to impose western-style free market capitalism overnight through "shock therapy". To Limonov this was a disaster, because from his experience of America he was convinced that American capitalism was no different from Soviet totalitarianism. It was just more subtle in its forms of oppression.

Limonov set up a political party. He called it The National Bolshevik Party. It's aim he said was to recapture the original aims of the Bolshevik revolution and integrate it with a modern nationalism.

The National Bolshevik Party almost immediately became the bete noire of both Soviet and Western liberals who saw it simply as the rise of a right-wing nationalism that was trying to hold back the inevitable modernisation of Russia.

This seemed to be confirmed dramatically when, in 1992, the BBC filmed Limonov on the mountains overlooking the besieged city of Sarajevo. He had come there as a supporter of Radovan Karadzic - and the film shows Limonov firing a large Serbian sniper rifle into the heart of Sarajevo.

It was part of one of the most imaginative and perceptive pieces of documentary journalism the BBC has ever made. It is called Serbian Epics - made by Pavel Pawlikowski. The central figure of the film is Radovan Karadzic and the poetry he writes, and in one hour the film tells you more about the Bosnian conflict and its roots than any other film I have seen.

Here is the section containing Limonov - and it is also beautifully shot.

The shots of Limonov with the sniper rifle caused a scandal in Russia. Limonov has always claimed that the sequence was edited in a way that distorted what was happening.

But what is true is that Limonov, his party and the ideas behind it are far more complicated and interesting that they at first seem.

Limonov has explicitly said that his aim is to take ideas and attitudes from avant-garde art and music and use them to try and create a new kind of confrontational politics - one that could break through the fake ideas of western democracy to show how the new bourgeois elites were greedily destroying the Russian state.

Much of this Limonov says comes directly from his experience in New York in the 1970s:

"Loud denial of so-called values of civilisation, grotesque, trash, screaming, some borrowings of Rightist aesthetics, were all common for the New York City punk movement of the 1970s as well as for the first National Bolsheviks in the 1990s.

The newspaper of the party 'Linomka' (the name of a hand grenade) was in the 1990s the most radical and most punish of the whole world. With its slogans like "Eat the Rich!" or "A Good Bourgeois is a Dead Bourgeois!" or "Capitalism is Shit!" We were in the punk tradition, what else?…."

And the party symbol was deliberately designed, Limonov says, to play just such punkish games

One of the first members of the National Bolshevik Party was the punk legend Yegor Letov - leader of GrOb (he was member number 4). Then Sergey Kuryokhin - the leader of the Popular Mechanics band joined and the party soon became a home to many members of the 1980s avant garde music scene.

You can watch some footage of Letov playing at an NBP rally here.

Together they reached back into the past - and borrowed, as punk had done, from fascist and revolutionary aesthetics (and even further - both Limonov and Latov idolised Mayakovsky), in order to invent dramatic ways of confronting contemporary smug westernised culture. They also associated with some very nasty people who took nationalism to racist and xenophobic extremes.

To western liberals who want to spread democracy round the world someone like Limonov is a frightening alien because he is reawakening the dangerous force of nationalism. But he in turn sees western liberals as fools who have been duped, and are really the unwitting agents of a corrupt economic global elite. Limonov believes that the only way to confront that corruption is to harness a force that appeals to the mass of the people.

Here are some glimpses of Limonov and his party on a march called by the communist party in 1997 as President Yeltsin was letting the oligarchs loot Russia - Limonov's young supporters mingling with the old communists. One of the National Bolshevik Party banners has a fantastic slogan.

RUSSIA IS EVERYTHING
EVERYTHING ELSE IS NOTHING

But there was another route that this generation took.

The key figure is a man called Vladislav Surkov. He is half-Russian, half-Chechen. He was born in the provinces, but like all the others he came to Moscow in the 1980s.

Surkov is shadowy and secretive, but he has given a very unusual window into his life and ideas. In 2009 Surkov allegedly published what seems to be an autobiographical novel under an assumed name. It is a cynical satire called Almost Zero and it tells the story of Egor, a disillusioned youth who comes to Moscow in the 1980s.

Egor can see through the fake ideology of the Soviet Union and he becomes a hanger-on of the Moscow underground movement - dabbling in avant-garde theatre. In the post-communist 1990s he then becomes a cynical PR man who will promote anything for anyone.

Egor is compared in the novel to Hamlet - someone who can see through the superficiality of the present age, but is unable to have any beliefs or even feelings about anything. In real life Surkov worked in the late 1990s doing PR for the oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, but then, in 1999 he switched and started working for Putin - and became a ruthless manipulator of modern politics.

Reuters/Corbis/Sergei Karpukhin

Surkov created a modern and innovative way of managing the new democratic system - but in a way that his critics say has sidelined the mass of the people and completely diminished real democracy.

To do this Surkov created a constantly shifting political tableau. As well as being one of the architects of Putin's own party, United Russia, Surkov also allegedly helped to set up opposition parties the Kremlin could then use for their own purposes. And he copied Eduard Limonov - he set up a quasi-military nationalist youth group called Nashi.

Nashi claims to be an "anti-oligarchic, anti-fascist movement" but members have reportedly compared themselves to the Hitler Youth. And the Kremlin allegedly uses them to beat up opposition journalists.

At the same time Surkov writes lyrics for a rock group called Agata Kristi and essays on conceptual art.

A TV journalist who worked in Soviet television called Peter Pomerantsev has written a fascinating article about Surkov. You can find it here. In it he argues that Surkov has turned Russian politics into postmodern absurdist theatre. In a way, just like Limonov, Surkov is adapting avant-garde ideas to this new political world.

"The novelist Eduard Limonov describes Surkov himself as having 'turned Russia into a wonderful postmodernist theatre, where he experiments with old and new political models'.

There's something in this. In contemporary Russia the stage is constantly changing: the country is a dictatorship in the morning, a democracy at lunch, an oligarchy by suppertime, while, backstage, oil companies are expropriated, journalists killed, billions siphoned away.

Surkov is at the centre of the show, sponsoring nationalist skinheads one moment, backing human rights groups the next. It's a strategy of power based on keeping any opposition there may be constantly confused, a ceaseless shape-shifting that is unstoppable because it is indefinable."

Here is part of a report the journalist Tim Whewell did for Newnight about the forces behind Nashi. He shows them using the very same slogan - "Bury the Dollar" - that Limonov's party uses.

And at one moment Whewell manages to doorstep Surkov and grab an interview. Whewell is a brilliant reporter with a range and cleverness that few others beat.

Eduard Limonov and Vladislav Surkov hate each other.

But in many ways they are very similar because both are convinced that western democracy is a complete sham - and both are trying to create political alternatives to what they see as the second wave of stagnation that took over Russia in the 1990s. This was the result of the corruption caused by the attempt to impose western capitalist and democratic ideas on the country.

Surkov believes that the truth is that the idea of democracy will always be an illusion, that all democracies will always be "managed democracies" whether east or west. So the solution is for a strong state to manipulate people - so that they feel they are free, while they are really being managed.

Limonov's solution is the opposite. He wants to bring The People back onto the stage of history - and make them active participants in building a new future. He believes that the way to do this is to use revolutionary propaganda, and to borrow from avant-garde ideas of the spectacle, in order to galvanise the masses and break through their torpor.

Opinion in the west is divided about Limonov. Many see him as leading the resurgence of the neo-fascist right. But others believe that he is misunderstood - that Limonov is genuinely trying to create a new kind of politics.

A French novelist called Emmanuel Carrere has just won the prestigious Prix Renaudot for a widely-acclaimed novel about Limonov's life. In it he portrays Limonov as an ambiguous hero of our time who is struggling with the great question of our age - how to create a vision of a new and different future in a post-political age where all ideologies are despised and distrusted.

Here are the rushes of one of Limonov's "revolutionary provocations" where members of the National Bolshevik Party invaded the Finance Ministry in the heart of Moscow in 2006. It is very like some of the activities of the Occupy movement that would happen later in London and New York - and it may be that both Surkov and Limonov are ahead of us. We're just at the start of trying to work out how to escape from our years of stagnation.

The protestors are shouting "Return the Money to The People" and "Putin Must Go".

I've also included some rushes of members of the NBP held in a cage in a court after another provocation - including one moment that shows just why liberals are frightened of Limonov's party.

This is followed by Limonov outside the court talking about the trial. The woman you glimpse behind him in the swirly coloured blouse is Anna Politkovskaya - who would be shot by an assassin in 2006.

Then, last December, thousands of people in Moscow came out and demonstrated against Putin and his "managed democracy". They too were shouting "Putin Must Go". It was exactly what Limonov and his supporters had been doing for ten years - but on a vast scale.

Limonov held his own rally alongside - obviously hoping that he would be the vanguard for this new insurgency. But he and his supporters were completely ignored. The protests swept on past them.

A week later, in response to the protests, Putin demoted Surkov - sidelining him from power. Surkov gave a great quote:

"I am too odious for this brave new world"

Maybe history is finally moving Limonov's way, but in its ruthless way it is leaving him behind - his job done.

Or maybe not. Maybe the new Surkovs will find a way of managing the protests. No one knows

Meanwhile rock music in Russia is a pale shadow of its former glory. Last year one of Russia's most famous rock critics, Artemy Troitsky, went on television and attacked rock musicians for becoming the poodles of those in power. In particular he savaged the lead singer of Agata Kristi, Vadin Samoylov, for being "the trained poodle of Surkov". This is because Surkov had written lyrics for Agata Kristi.

Here is a picture of Putin with his poodle - Tosya. The Kremlin image managers have always tried to keep Tosya hidden - because they consider poodles not to be very butch.

Troitsky's remarks caused a massive row, and he is now being sued for criminal slander.

Troitsky has reportedly defended himself by saying he loves dogs - and that he didn't think that calling someone a "poodle" was an insult. Poodles he said in court are actually "kind, intelligent, endearing dogs" and that he would not be offended if he was called "Che Guevara's trained poodle"

Brave man - standing up against the system.

THE GHOSTS IN THE LIVING ROOM

Adam Curtis 22/12/2011 12:33

Here is a ghost story for Christmas - it is a brief history of the appearance of ghosts and poltergeists and other spirits on television. Not fictional ghosts - but real ones, or the reports of their appearances, that you find in various news and documentary programmes.

But as so often when one looks at material in the archives, it turns out that it tells you less about the subjects of the programmes - the ghosts - than about the strange medium that possesses modern society - television.

In 1992 the BBC transmitted a drama that was based on a number of the factual reports I am going to show. The underlying aim of the makers of the drama was not just to frighten, but to demonstrate in a vivid way what had happened to the very idea of reality in television.

It was called Ghostwatch, and it caused a national sensation because thousands of viewers believed it was real. And, at the time, the BBC promised never to show it again.

I want to tell the story of the rise of the suburban poltergeist in factual TV from the 1970s onwards, how those reports inspired Ghostwatch, and how the extraordinary reaction on the night Ghostwatch was transmitted in 1992 showed clearly where the real ghosts of our society had now gone to live. They are inside television itself - a strange nether world of PR-driven half truths, synthetic personalities, and waves of apocalyptic fear.

In the 1950s and early 1960s the reporting of ghosts on television followed the classical rules. The hauntings were in old houses, stately homes, or ancient ruins. Here is a perfect example. It is from the Tonight programme in 1963. The reporter also follows an accepted format - he is indulgently sceptical, but brings with him a religious "expert" who is going to exorcise the presence.

But then, in the early 1970s, there was a peculiar change. The ghosts moved. They gave up haunting old castles and ruins and moved into the most ordinary suburban houses.

The battle between good and evil was now relocated into the suburban kitchens, bedrooms and even the stairs of modern Britain. Throughout, the ghosts also showed perfect taste in wallpaper.

Here is an extract from one of the earliest. It is the haunting of a council house in Swindon in 1973.

At this stage the film-makers are still following the classical editorial model. The local vicar brings in a religious "expert" to expel the poltergeist. The vicar smokes a fantastic pipe - and there is a wonderful shot of the Mr and Mrs Pellymounter watching the exorcism.

As the suburban hauntings multiplied in the mid 1970s, the approach of the programme-makers changed. The idea of exorcism disappeared and the TV reporters decided to turn to science. They would use special recording equipment to discover whether the hauntings were real, and the stories were turned into a battle between superstition and reason.

Here is part of a film made by the BBC Northeast regional magazine programme in 1975. It's about a 1960s block of maisonettes that have been built over an old disused coal mine just outside Newcastle.

The reporter and the crew decide to stay all night in an empty flat - and set up their special cameras and audio recording equipment.

There also a wonderful long-held shot in which one of the haunted occupants shows the reporter what the spirit did with his golf clubs.

The poltergeists kept spreading.

In January 1977 one turned up at 16 Ruskin Road, Dartford in Kent. Ann and Barry Robertson who lived there were terrified and are fleeing the house as the film starts.

There is a change in this film. The suburban couple at the heart of the story are no longer secondary figures in the story. They turn it into an emotional melodrama where they become the focus - Ann especially who has an epic turn of phrase:

"I can't even face taking the furniture with me because this thing - whatever it is - has interfered with my home. It's touched my things. And I'm so frightened that I won't even take the things with me now. So we're back to square one where we started. With nothing"

Suddenly suburbia becomes not boring - but sinister, mysterious and epic.

The film also interviews the man from Dartford Council who Ann and Barry are demanding rehouse them. He is sympathetic but then comes out with a great quote - "I'm afraid the Dartford Council Transfer Points Scheme doesn't recognise ghosts - and therefore they can't be pointed".

And then - ten months later in November 1977 - the Nationwide programme made a film which brought all the elements of the modern haunted house together into a perfect form. And it also introduced a powerful new character into the melodrama - the psychic investigator who was determined to prove that the haunting was real.

A poltergeist had apparently turned up in a house in the north London suburb of Ponders End in the borough of Enfield. The Nationwide film was going to make this house famous.

And along with the house, the film would also make a star out of this man - he was Maurice Grosse who was an investigator for the Society for Psychical Research. Maurice Grosse would come to dominate the TV-ghostworld interface.

The film is beautifully made. It is possibly the best evocation of the mood that is at the heart of all these film reports - a transformation of the dull interior of an ordinary suburban house into an intense psycho-drama where even the most mundane of objects, in this case a Lego-block, becomes possessed by an inner destructive force.

And the poltergeist has by now gone beyond wallpaper. It has chosen the most wonderful bedroom to live in. The walls are covered with Bay City Rollers and David Soul posters. And the shot of an elderly psychic investigator sitting among the images of late 70s teen dreams while listening to the recordings of himself communicating with the poltergeist is just brilliant.

The fascination with the Enfield haunting didn't stop there. Two years later BBC Scotland made another film inside the house.

This time they concentrated on the two daughters - Margaret and Janet Hodgson. The crew filmed the two girls as the poltergeist seems to speak through Janet, the strange voice coming and going in front of the camera.

It is weird and a bit frightening - but you also think that she may be faking it. And it is fascinating to watch the long held shots of the two daughters, studying their faces to try and work out what they are up to. And it introduces a new element into these haunting stories - that children are not innocent, but potentially malicious and a bit dangerous (like in The Innocents). A modern fear that was going to grow much bigger in the 1990s - especially again on TV.

The girls have since said that they faked some of the incidents in the house. But they insist that they were only doing this to test and tease Mr Grosse - and that much of it was real.

The Scottish crew had also got their own mini-scoop. They persuaded the police who had seen the chair levitate inside the house in 1977 to describe it. It is a fantastic two-shot.

The Enfield haunting became famous, and so did the psychic investigator, Maurice Grosse. He was completely convinced by the two Hodgson girls from Ponders End and it launched him on a thirty-year odyssey to try and fight against the rise of what he saw as a narrow-minded sceptical rationalism in Britain.

Grosse was a wonderful person. He died in 2006 aged 87. He had been trained as an engineer - and back in the 1940s he had become an inventor. His most famous invention was called "The Cost-Effective Poster Machine". It is better known as the rotating poster display which you can still see today at thousands of bus stops.

In 1976 Maurice Grosse's 22 year old daughter died in a traffic accident. It devastated both him and his wife. But then Maurice came to believe that his daughter was trying to make contact with him from beyond the grave. This led him to join the Society for Psychical Research - and that took him into the Enfield house just a year later.

Maurice Grosse was well aware that his quest to contact the supernatural was driven by the intense feelings of loss he had experienced through his daughter's death. This made him intensely sympathetic to the people he encountered in his investigations.

In 1996 Grosse made a Video Diary with the BBC. He went around with a Hi-8 camera, operating it himself. He then had full editorial control - and used it to put together a beautiful and moving film.

It is structured around various of his visits to hauntings - both past and present - but he uses that structure to also tell the story of his life - both factual and emotional. He describes his daughter's death and the feelings that raised in him, and the odyssey it led him into, in a very moving way.

One of the most touching moments is when he sits in an ordinary living room and talks to a couple who believe their dead son appears to them on their television. Grosse himself then becomes overtaken by emotion and has to leave the room

As you watch the film it becomes clear that Grosse believes that it is these intense feelings that give people, and the places they live in, the power to summon up poltergeists. The feelings give people something special - the power to pierce through the disappointing reality of their suburban lives and enter into something new and special. Another, and possibly better, world of high drama and raised emotion.

In 1988 a TV dramatist called Stephen Volk had an idea for a six-part drama based on all these suburban hauntings - the story would focus on how television had reported them. Volk's original idea was to have a TV reporter team up with a psychical researcher to investigate the haunting of a contemporary London council house. It was going to culminate in the final episode with a live broadcast from the house - and all hell was going to break loose.

Then Volk's producer, Ruth Baumgarten, suggested that instead they make a one-off play based on the sixth episode. Volk agreed. And he immediately realised that he could use the structure of a live outside broadcast to make a powerful drama that demonstrated dramatically what was happening to television as a medium - how the line between reality and fiction was getting blurred.

Out of that came Ghostwatch.

A few years ago Stephen Volk wrote a fantastic essay about the making of Ghostwatch. It was published by the Fortean Times. And you can find the whole thing here.

In it Volk describes his underlying aim - to make people look at what was happening to reality on television:

Ghostwatch was, of course, also about television.

It’s quite difficult now to think back to the televisual landscape of 1992. Formats that dissolve the boundaries between factual and fictional TV have since become the staple diet of the schedules, and it’s difficult to imagine a world where they were new or unusual. But this was the time of the first successful hybrids: docu-dramas and drama-docs. Drama series like NYPD Blue increasingly employed a hand-held camera style derived from documentary realism, and documentaries like Crimewatch and 999 were full of reconstructions using actors mix-and-matched to real footage of real people.

Ruth, the producer, and I discussed how we both felt we could no longer trust what we were seeing, what we were being shown or told by TV. The lines between the once distinct languages of factual and fictional TV were becoming dangerously blurred. Even the CNN Gulf War reports on Newsnight (with the infrared camerawork we duplicated in Ghostwatch) felt suspect, somehow unreliable. What was drama and what was not?

But then Volk added a line that I think goes to the heart of what has happened to TV ever since. The strange paradox that, at the very time that the audience is becoming more and more aware that not everything on TV is real, that same audience feel that if an event appears on TV - that is a guide to whether it is real or not.

Yet, paradoxically, television had also become the arbiter of reality, as John Waite exemplified on hearing of the release of his hostage cousin Terry in November 1991: “I won’t believe it until I see it on TV.”

Ghostwatch was transmitted on Halloween 1992. It was quite obvious from both the introduction and the titles that it was a work of fiction. But the reaction was astonishing - thousands of people rang in - either terrified or angry or to report that they were experiencing paranormal activity in their house at that very moment.

The next day there was a media storm - and the BBC reacted in its normal courageous way by burying the programme and disowning it. The Radio Times was apparently told never to mention it ever again. And Volk has described how it was like being airbrushed out of a photograph in Stalinist Russia.

But the extraordinary reaction rather proved the central aim of the drama.

It demonstrated the truth about modern television - that we all know that increasingly the line between fiction and non-fiction is blurred on TV. But far from making us distrust television this actually makes it more powerful. It possesses our imagination more powerfully precisely because we don't know what is real and what is not.

I think the reason is that, from the early 1990s onwards, the big confident stories of our time started to collapse, and people were faced instead with an everyday reality composed only of small and mostly mundane fragments. In the face of that, factual television has increasingly become a two-dimensional version of our world where everything is amplified and distorted.

News reporting and factual television are populated today by a strange nether world of PR-driven half truths, synthetic personalities and waves of apocalyptic fear. It is a world that is like ours but is exaggerated - weird, wonderful and frightening.

It is just like living in a haunted suburban house on the fringes of North London - except that it is now the whole world. All the mundane and banal aspects of reality are taken and infused with an hysterical intensity - that we are both fascinated by and terrified of - whether it be food or Al Qaida. Yet we know in our hearts that much of this is either distorted or just untrue.

It is the true spirit world of our time

It is made even weirder because, at the same time, audiences are shown harsh and terrifying moments of reality, but they are also insubstantial 2D images flickering on a box in the living room. They don't feel real, they look like a ghost world. Here is an example.

The tiny white figures you see that look like ghosts are actually still alive. But probably not for very long.

And here are some extracts from Ghostwatch - which show how much it was rooted in the suburban poltergeist reports of the 1970s. But also how it used them to brilliantly evoke the mood at the heart of today's television - where so much is half-fiction and half-real.

It is also very frightening - and a brilliant piece of TV drama. Just remember it's not real.

THE BITCH, THE STUD AND THE PRAWN

Adam Curtis 08/12/2011 15:16

THE RISE OF GEEZER CAPITALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

It is very difficult to properly see the times you are living through, but it is made more difficult today by the insistence of politicians and commentators that there is no alternative to the present economic system. This almost hysterical mantra closes down other, different perspectives and makes it impossible to draw back and see what the present world is really like.

I've stumbled on a wonderful documentary film made in the 1960s that in an odd way does help give some kind of perspective on today. It's about two brothers called Billy and George Walker. Billy was a boxer and George was a gangster who became Billy's manager. The film is a beautiful record of the way two brilliant chancers were manipulating British society and the media at a moment in 1964.

Out of that moment would come a vast business empire - of property, leisure and films all run by George Walker, that rose up in the 1980s and then crashed spectacularly in 1991. If you follow the story of that empire it takes you on a behind-the-scenes journey that shows the truth behind many modern businesses in Britain - showy facades built on a mountain of debt.

But the story doesn't just stop there - because the ghost of George Walker, his family, and his business practices have continued to haunt Britain in all sorts of odd ways. And the story suddenly brings into focus some of the attitudes underlying modern society. A world where many people have become chancers like Billy and George Walker, out to get something for nothing.

George Walker was the elder of the two brothers. He began as a boxer himself, but in the mid 1950s he became a right-hand man to the most notorious of London gangsters - Billy Hill.

Billy Hill spent his time doing what he describes as "little tickles" - stealing from warehouses, holding up mail vans and even ram-raiding jewellery stores. Then in 1954 a group of Moroccan "businessmen" asked Billy to restore the Sultan of Morocco to his throne. The French had forced the Sultan out - and exiled him in Madagascar. Billy and George went to Tangier, set up a fake insurance company called The American Fidelity Corporation to cover their activities, and bought a boat to go and get the Sultan.

But it all went terribly wrong. Interpol told the Moroccan police that they were "Britain's biggest bandits", and then someone torched the boat and Billy Hill and George Walker ended up fleeing to Cannes.

Later in his life Billy Hill published a wonderful autobiography called Boss of Britain's Underworld - and in the book he outed the by now famous tycoon, George Walker, as his sidekick. He confirmed it by publishing this photo of him and a young George Walker on the run sunbathing in the beach at Cannes.

George Walker then got caught trying to steal a consignment of nylons from the London docks and was sent to jail.

When he came out he gave up the gangster life and turned instead to managing his younger brother Billy who had become a boxer. Guided by his brother, Billy Walker soon became a star in Britain - famous far beyond the world of boxing.

In 1964 the BBC made a fly on the wall film called The World of Billy Walker. It is beautifully shot in a 60s cine verite style - and has some fantastic footage when Billy Walker goes to America that was shot for the BBC by the legendary documentary maker Albert Maysles.

The film captures the beginning of the rise of the two brothers - and the lost world of the 1950s east end where they come from. Here are some sections.

But not everything was quite what it seemed in the world of the Walkers. Although Billy Walker was a good fighter - he never actually won a professional title. In reality he was an early modern celebrity - famous as much for who he was as for what he achieved.

And George Walker took that celebrity and used it to start building businesses - first garages, then their own brand of petrol called Punch Petrol, then a chain of fast food restaurants, followed by a nightclub in Piccadilly called Billy's Dilly.

In 1968 the BBC made a film analysing how George Walker was still able to use his brother's relative failure in the professional boxing world to create the businesses. The programme shows how, although Billy Walker loses the fights, he still gets a big cut of the purse. As George Walker bluntly says in the film. "We only box so we can invest".

But then the brothers split. George Walker wanted to borrow a vast amount of money - and Billy was too frightened. I have added a touching interview from the 1980s where the two brothers explain the split. It is a great moment - when Billy Walker says about his brother: "He can handle, what's the word for it? - oh yes, debt"

At which point British cinema enters the story. First with Billy Walker.

In 1968 Billy Walker was badly defeated by Henry Cooper in another championship fight - and he finally gave up boxing. He decided that he was going to become an actor instead. In 1970 he got a part in the film version of Up Pompeii playing a character called Prodigious.

Unfortunately the role was not a speaking one - but Billy decided that he could develop his range and he started to take acting lessons. In 1971 the Nationwide programme made a short film about Billy Walker learning to act. Here it is - and I have added on a clip from his next acting role. It is in Up The Chastity Belt - the sequel to Up Pompeii. This time the part is a speaking one. The character is called Chopper (you can see how Billy was getting typecast) - and you can observe the effect of the lessons.

Meanwhile George Walker was turning himself into a "leisure tycoon". In 1974 he formed a company called Brent Walker - and built the Brent Cross Shopping centre on the old Hendon Greyhound track in North London.

And then he too turned to cinema. In 1977 he went to the Cannes Film festival - 23 years after he had first been there on the run from Tangier - and found himself sitting next to Joan Collins at lunch. He offered to finance a film based on the novel written by her sister Jackie, called The Bitch.

It was a great success and Brent Walker went on to fund the equally successful sequel, The Stud. It was the start of the rise of George Walker as the saviour of the British Cinema industry. This would culminate in the 1980s with him buying Goldcrest Films who were famous for making Chariots of Fire.

But like so much of what George Walker did, this wasn't quite what it seemed. It would later be revealed at a trial in the 1990s that Brent Walker had ruthlessly used the cinema part of the empire, and the films they made, in a scheme to fake profits for their whole business. Those fake profits were then used to persuade the banks to lend Brent Walker more money - so they could do more takeover deals.

Here is George Walker the film tycoon filmed as part of a documentary in 1982 about the new face of the British film industry - along with another outsider who has come into finance the movie renaissance "he's an Arab" says the shocked commentary - "he's called Dodi Fayed"

In the late 80s Walker's film empire continued to grow. In 1987 he bought Elstree studios. The studios were sold to him by two great characters - the brothers Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus who ran Cannon Films.

In many ways they were the American model for what Walker was trying to become in Britain, an independent force that could challenge the big studios by making popular movies. And in the 1980s Golan and Globus pretty much invented the modern Action Movie - like the immortal Death Wish IV: The Crackdown along with comedies like Dumb Dicks - but most notorious was Delta Force starring Chuck Norris, made in the wake of the hijacking of a TWA plane in Beirut in 1986.

In 1987 the BBC made a wonderful fly on the wall documentary about Golan and Globus. It's called The Last Moguls and it is a brilliant peek into the world of movie deals and trash remakes of the 80s, and this is a good excuse to show some extracts.

I love the section about the making of Delta Force where Chuck Norris in an interview explains how the film tries to show what America's response to Arab terrorism should be in the future:

"I think terrorism is going to get greater all over the world, and I think it's time we started doing something about it right now rather than waiting till it gets a lot worse."

The aim of the film, Norris says, is to show America how to do this retaliation - through what he calls "positive violence". As opposed to "negative violence" - which is what the terrorists do.

Along with George Walker's use of film and celebrity to fake profits in order to do takeover deals, you begin to wonder whether the whole of the subsequent economic and foreign policy of Britain and the United States wasn't created by the rubbish movies of the 1980s.

By the late 1980s George Walker was at the zenith of his fortunes. Both press and TV portrayed him as one of a group of new tycoons who were re-generating Britain. Well-connected bankers elbowed each other aside up to offer him money to use to make more deals. The bankers then told the financial commentators that Walker was "a visionary" - and it all became a self-fulfilling legend of success.

Walker bought the Trocadero in Piccadilly, the Brighton Marina, then he branched out into chains of pubs - then he went to Europe and bought casinos, marinas, hotels and holiday villages across the continent.

Walker was brilliant at publicity - and the archives are full of him in helicopters showing reporters his latest deal. Only one programme pierced briefly through the hype. It was a film made by BBC South in 1988 that began with the normal helicopter sequence - but then captured an odd moment where George Walker goes to meet the Mayor of Le Touquet.

Walker was proposing to develop a holiday village and golf-leisure complex on the sand dunes next to the town. At the meeting Walker wants the mayor to give him a document agreeing to the development, but the mayor wants Walker to show him the details. Walker doesn't seem to have any details - and insists all he needs is for the mayor to say yes.

Here he is - first charming a whole load of bankers, then in the helicopter - and then with the mayor.

In 1989 George Walker did the biggest deal yet. He bought the William Hill chain of betting shops. But then he found that he himself had been conned because William Hill's previous owners had massively exaggerated the company's profits. As a result Brent Walker came crashing down. The banks who previously had queued up to give him money now viciously turned on George Walker and destroyed him.

In June 1991 the banks forced Walker out in a dramatic late-night board meeting. But it was only the start of his downfall. Within months the banks called in the Serious Fraud Office. They told the investigators that they had discovered evidence that the company had faked profits on an enormous scale during the 1980s. The SFO then charged George Walker with theft and false accounting.

The SFO were convinced that Walker would be convicted - but in October 1994 he was cleared of all charges. But then it got very odd. A year later the former Finance Director of Goldcrest Films, Donald Anderson, was convicted of covering up the faking of profits on a massive scale at Brent Walker in the 1980s - and was jailed for two years.

The key witness was another Goldcrest employee called Frederick Fisher III who told the court that Mr Anderson had told him that millions of pounds of false profits were being concealed. Anderson also told him, Fisher said that "it was being done at the behest of Mr Walker".

In the face of this George Walker fought back in a dramatic way. He and his family told their version of his downfall in a BBC documentary in 1996. At the heart of it is a wonderful three-way set up in a pub with Walker, his wife Jean and one of his daughters called Romla as they sort of emotionally act out the story.

The Walkers use the film to tell how, when the crisis began, they had put the family's personal fortunes into the company in a last desperate attempt to keep it afloat. The real villains, they say, are the banks who effectively mugged the family and forced George Walker out.

And it was true that, privately, there was a lot of sympathy among city commentators for George Walker. They thought that what the crisis really showed was the horrible ruthlessness of the major banks. In reality they had used George Walker - and now were letting him swing alone in the wind.

I have put these bits from the programme together. Yet again Walker was ahead of his time. He and his family were creating something very akin to today's reality soaps.

Three years later Romla Walker would star in Eastenders.

George Walker wasn't finished though. In 1997 he went off to Moscow - to sell cigarettes to the Russians. And he also set up a company that transmitted greyhound racing live from Britain to Russian and Serbian betting shops.

And the practice of creating business empires based on vast amounts of debt went from strength to strength in Britain. It was no longer the province of geezers and spivs like George Walker. Instead posh people now did it and accordingly it adopted a shiny new name. It was called Private Equity.

The inventor of Private Equity takeovers in Britain was called Guy Hands and one of his first purchases was the very thing that destroyed George Walker - the William Hill chain of betting shops.

Guy Hands began as a banker working for Nomura, but in 2002 he set up a Private Equity company called Terra Firma. He quickly became a heroic figure - called a financial genius and a visionary because he had invented what was described as a new system of financial engineering that was described as "like crack cocaine for financiers".

But this was mostly PR rubbish. Essentially what Hands did was simply borrow vast amounts of money from the banks, tinker with the companies he bought (or brilliantly streamline them and introduce efficiencies - as his supporters claimed) and sell them on for an enormous profit.

And lots of people copied him. They also ruthlessly exploited the tax loopholes that had originally been created to encourage genuine entrepreneurs who sold businesses they had built up over the years. This was hijacked by the private equity players - and it allowed them to pay tax at just 10% on the gains they made.

At the height of the boom one of the leading Private Equity financiers pointed out that he paid less tax than his cleaners. Many people questioned whether people like him could truthfully be described as entrepreneurs.

The takeover boom flourished until the financial crash of 2008 when the banks stopped lending money, and it has left many large British companies with their solid foundations removed - and replaced with the shifting sands of debt. Many of those debts will soon come up for renewal, starting next year - and there are are growing fears that this may lead to a massive national crisis - the collapse of a number of key British enterprises.

But unlike the geezers of the past, the heads of today's Private Equity hide away and avoid the limelight. There is very little footage of them in the archives. But Guy Hands does share George Walker's fascination with showbusiness. In 2008 he borrowed £2.6bn to buy EMI - and here's a rare bit of footage of him - going to an Odeon cinema to tell the assembled EMI employees that thousands of them are going to be sacked to service the debt.

And like George Walker, Guy Hands also got involved with making movies. In 2001 he backed what seemed to be an unlikely script.

It was a film called Crust. It told the story of a pub landlord who finds a giant seven foot mutant shrimp on a beach. The landlord then decides to teach the shrimp to box - and believes this will make his fortune.

The film was made but unfortunately it was never shown - and even more strangely never even made it to video.

Here are some pictures of the 7 foot mutant boxing shrimp.

And luckily the director of the film has put an extract from it on his website - and you can watch it here. Personally I think it looks great.

But then the truth came out - thanks to Gordon Brown.

Officials in the Inland Revenue had begun to notice more and more British films had actually amassed takings of less than £100. The tax men began to suspect something was up.

One possibility was that all the films were so bad that no one would release them.

In fact the reality was that for all these films it didn't matter whether they were seen in a cinema or not. Their real function was as a tax dodge for rich people. It was known as double dipping - and it allowed the investors to claim tax relief twice on their investments. And this is what Mr Hands had been doing when he put his money into the mutant shrimp film.

In 2005 Gordon Brown put a stop to it - and Guy Hands was furious. Together with 74 other investors he sued the tax advisors who had recommended he invest £11 million in a whole range of such films - another one was a comedy called Nine Dead Gay Guys (which did make it to DVD).

I'd love to know the full list of these tax-dodge British films. One estimate is that between 2003 to 2005 the tax breaks were worth £5bn in cash terms. As the journalist Nick Cohen has pointed out:

"This was money that came from working and middle-class taxpayers who didn't hire accountants but paid as they earned. It was money which might have been spent on schools, hospitals, the army or other fripperies"

In March 2011 George Walker died. At the same time his other daughter Sarah finally found love.

Back in 1989 Sarah had married into the aristocracy. She became the Marchioness of Milford Haven. But the marriage went wrong, she got divorced, dated James Hewitt, and did good work for charity.

Here is some footage of Sarah Walker back in 1988 talking about what it was like to work for her father, and then awarding a polo trophy to the Marquess of Milford Haven's team. The team was sponsored by Brent Walker. (George Walker also did the other posh thing all businessmen are supposed to do - it sponsored a Wagner festival).

Then, in 2010, Sarah met a city entrepreneur called Michael Spencer. Like her father, Spencer was a self-made man who had risen to become fabulously wealthy. He was a friend of David Cameron's and had become the Treasurer to the Conservative Party.

Like Guy Hands, Michael Spencer too has found an innovative way of making money out of the best intentions of the government. He is one of a select group of City brokers who make Quantitative Easing work.

Their job is to buy up bonds using government cash - taking a tidy cut for themselves for every bond purchased. At the last count the government had pumped in £275bn. Spencer has been quoted as saying "the crisis is good for business."

Meanwhile the last remains of George Walker's empire are quietly crumbling into decay. Brighton Marina hasn't quite lived up to Walker's claim that it would be "the Venice of England". And here is the Trocadero today:

It is all rather shabby. Segaworld is long gone and Funland is all boarded up.

But fragments and memories of that empire still surface in the oddest places. One of the famous contestants in Big Brother 2009 was a character called Freddie Fisher who changed his name to Halfwit - along with Sophie who changed her name to Dogface. In real life he was Frederick Fisher IV, son of Frederick Fisher III who was the star prosecution witness who revealed how Brent Walker had faked profits throughout the 1980s - and finally destroyed George Walker's empire.

Freddie the IV survived for 72 days in Big Brother and fell in love with another housemate Bea who then rejected him. And all this happened in a fake house built inside the old water tank at Elstree studios - the studios that were once owned by George Walker.

And the mutant prawn boxing movie, Crust, was finally shown - in Japan. It was a cult success and has subsequently spawned a whole new genre of films in Japan called "sea-life sport movies". The two most famous are "Calamari Wrestler" and "Crab Goal Keeper".

And here is a link to the moment the Calamari makes his dramatic entrance.

If only Guy Hands had not just invested in Crust as a tax dodge - but made sure it got released. Then he might really have given something back to society, albeit a boxing prawn.

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