Name: Adam Curtis: UK Politics is a Psycho Witch Hunt and Other Sordid Tales (Best of Office Hours)
Uploaded: 2022-10-24T15:00:14.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Adam Curtis: UK Politics is a Psycho Witch Hunt and Other Sordid Tales (Best of Office Hours)' from Tim Heidecker on Comedy Buff. Published 2022-10-24. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Adam Curtis: UK Politics is a Psycho Witch Hunt and Other Sordid Tales (Best of Office Hours)' from Tim Heidecker on Comedy Buff. Published 2022-10-24. Transcript available.

Adam Curtis: UK Politics is a Psycho Witch Hunt and Other Sordid Tales (Best of Office Hours)

mr curtis i'm here can you hear me yes i can hear you can you hear me
i can well we are off to a great start how great it is to talk to you again do
you recall speaking
with me a few years ago i do it was extremely uh agreeable is that the right
word yeah i think
i hope so i i was uh i was incredibly intimidated by you just because of your
stature and your
intelligence and i felt unworthy as wayne's world might have done we're not
worthy um i uh i want to
get into the new uh documentary you don't like to call it a documentary right
you want to i should
get my no it's a documentary okay um i want to get into this uh with you but
first the hell's going on
in england um overall like give me the two minute two minute spiel from your
perspective of course
i tell you what being in england is like at the moment you know in those
computer games where you
leave a room and you fight your way around something and then you suddenly find
your way back to the same
room that you were two days ago that's what it's like in politics here we've
our prime minister has
just resigned yes yeah i saw that's big breaking news and olivia should have
gotten to this
liz truss after being in power i think she's the shortest yeah 44 days prime
minister ever in
44 days um i mean i'm sure they'll find someone shorter somewhere in the world
but i think it's
the shortest in our country ever she's also the shortest she's also the
shortest prime minister in
uh british uh history i believe in terms of heights yeah it's extraordinary and
what and what all the
newspapers are now leading with is the idea that actually the man she replaced
who fell from grace
because he allegedly lied to parliament and everyone else uh is now about to
come back as prime minister
oh my god whoa and and this is all without the general consensus of the
population right yeah i think we've
had four or five prime ministers in the last six years i think it's something
like that and none of them
have ever actually been voted on by the electorate so can you explain i mean
because we're we have a
largely american audience how does something like that happen what is the
system what why is what is the
system in place that allows that to happen uh the the ruthless party that uh
can control we have a system
whereby we elect a party the party elects the leader right you don't have that
and that's the basic
system the other system is that i have a theory that politics here has become
what you could best
describe as cosplay and actually what all of us the electorate the politicians
the journalists all know
that somehow powers move somewhere else we're not sure where it is but we know
these people don't have
the power so what we do is cosplay instead it's kabuki theater what happened
yes and what happened
what's made it worse in this country is that you remember our queen died quite
recently wait what a
great the queen died we didn't get that news over here no i'm just kidding you
remember when diana
died princess diana died there was a great wave of emotion which sort of went
out of control the royal
family decided this time that was going to control it so for every day of the
what was it 10 days before
the funeral they kept on coming up with photo ops new new bits of pr in order
to control the emotion
and i think the emotion was really really really suppressed then the queen was
buried and the emotion
went away but it didn't it went underground and it's now burst out in the heart
of politics
and really it's sort of hysteria time and it's sort of there's a sort of psycho
witch hunt going on for
anyone who puts themselves up into a position of authority it's very very
peculiar how is this
affecting like your average brit like what is going on in their lives right now
that is that is it economic
primarily well it's affecting them in two ways one they're completely scared
because the price of
everything which i think is sort of true in america as well but not so much the
price of everything
including fuel heating is just soaring uh the idea that actually the government
might look after you
seems not to be happening uh and people are scared on the other hand they're
also extremely entertained by it
so you have this strange strange cocktail of fear about the future a feeling of
bewilderment and being
alone in the face of these great big dark forces of history roaring around you
and no one in charge
which is terrifying but yet at the same time it it's just weird well it's it's
like our trump years
which are still happening but there's this you know it's incredibly frightening
but also very entertaining
because the guys there's a quality of uh things are happening and there's
something new to talk about
every day by the way adam adam conover is here that's the other voice you're
hearing in case
you feel like you're losing it nice to meet you adam nice to meet you too um
but i mean but i mean
you had the same thing in the trump years yeah the fascinating thing about the
trump years which is
sort of true about brexit here is that although there was constant daily hysteria
actually if you analyze
trump he didn't really do much apart from reducing taxes for very rich people
right he didn't actually
he didn't build a wall as far as i know did he uh he got some stuff adam might
know a bunch of it
a bunch of it was built it's just sort of hanging out there in the desert biden's
completing some of
it some of it was cancelled there's a bunch of concrete and rebar out in the
desert where there
wasn't before but there is not a continuous wall stretching from one side of mexico
to the other let's go
come back uh i just gave my first warning to vic sorry that was right you can't
resist i couldn't
resist just close your laptop you know the reason i say that is because the
guys over here make sound
effects and it gets confusing for the listener on the other end being you adam
um all right well
that's it it's um somebody was telling me my friend was over there and the rail
the what's going on with
the railways is two weeks yeah but in general like the idea that the rail lines
are being privatized
and the prices are going crazy and so people are if you don't reserve your
ticket in advance ahead
if you don't reserve your ticket um how do i say this early enough yeah you you
can't the prices keep
going up and then they cancel trains actually you can't travel no you can't
travel i mean there is a
company i think it's called avanti which runs one of the lines that goes to manchester
and glasgow
from london that actually literally has cut half the amount of trains quite why
we don't know no one
you see what's weird about this is no one knows we've sort of entered this
weird world where no
journalist seems to know why anything is happening no politicians have any
ability to actually do anything
about say avanti so it just happens the rail unions go on strike quite
reasonably because their jobs are
being cut and they're not no one's explaining why yet the government seems to
pay no attention to it
and the people just sit there mutely wondering what the hell is going on um it's
just very odd it's it's
and i think it's almost like it's like well if we strike who's the person who's
actually going to take
notice of us right and actually help us because the government seems to do
nothing you need an uprising
you need a a populist movement that's going to make it almost impossible for
regular business to happen
but that's probably not going to happen either i saw today no no we had that
that was we had that
that was called brexit right and we tried that one and the government you've
now got sorry the government
that fell today was the ultimate result of brexit and promised that it was
going to bring in a new kind
of a new world it's fallen they've now gone back to the previous policies of
that actually gave you
brexit in the first place so we it's it's weird it's loopy all right well let's
get on to let's move to
uh trauma zone which i was so grateful to get an early uh link to and got it
yeah i watched i i mean
when your stuff comes out man i've i'm sure i've said this before and i'm a big
prophet of yours is
that that's not the right way a disciple no that's not even it proponent proponent
oh uh i push your
stuff it is very i will say it's very difficult to watch your stuff in america
uh especially new stuff
because it's behind the bbc paywall yes but there are ways let me just say that
i hope you don't
mind me saying that there are ways to see i've noticed that pretty soon after
anything goes onto
the bbc iplayer it sends to turn up on youtube i have no idea how and you don't
you don't particularly
care do you well personally i think that's fine because i work for the bbc
which is a public organization
the public have paid for the footage it's not exactly full of famous people who
want to benefit
from it right so i think the people should have it whether the bbc themselves
agree with that i don't
know yeah well um i got i watched the whole thing and it's just so people
understand it's called trauma
zone it's a history of the soviet union or russia i should say uh from the late
i'd say from the mid to
late i'd say mid 80s to uh 99 and it's all as you do it's yours it's your style
your format it's entirely
consisting of uh a of news footage and home videos um other documentaries i
assume it feels like there's
some other documentaries that you're kind of taking from yeah yeah um all with
their your beautiful
music score and curiously and this is my and this is kind of a more of a
filmmaking question than a
political or you know content of the documentary question but no classic curtis
vo no what was that
decision there are two reasons well there are two reasons one the reason i made
the film in the
the series in the first place is i got my hands on i think it must be over 10
000 hours of unedited raw
footage that was shot by bbc crews all across russia well what was then the sub
union and then became
russia from about 1985 to the present day and it's an extraordinary record of
the collapse implosion
cataclysm whatever you want to call it that happened to the russian people both
with the fall of
communism and then what eight years later complete collapse of all trust in
democracy which is what
they've been promised and i just thought the reason i made it is i thought look
i don't think people in
the west and that includes america as well as britain really understand what
the russian people went
through yeah they know communism collapsed and then it all got full of gangsters
and then president
yeltsin got drunk and then you got putin yeah they know that don't actually
know the sort of strange
the effect that had on the russian people and i just wanted to show that in
detail
um because i think it sort of explains where this is what putin came out of it
isn't i mean there are
other reasons but it didn't come out of nowhere he didn't come out of nowhere
he came out of total
disillusioned bewilderment and anger at the fact that they not only had the
collapse of one giant
ideology in 1991 communism but then nine eight nine years later the other big
ideology of the 20th
century democracy also collapsed by 1999 as a guy at the end of the seriousness
um in a tv studio uh you
if you call someone a democrat you're cursing them no one a democracy is a
curse now
in russia he says so that was the that was the reason i made it because the
material was so good
i decided not to use my voice it it just was so good yeah why would i want to
see me talking over
it but there is another reason behind it and you had laryngitis that week no i've
got this funny
instinct that i'm people are a bit fed up with what is called in social media a
hot take you know the hot take
yeah which is has been rose up really since brexit and trump here to its
present peak and i just and
i'm one of the worst offenders in my films you know i'm provocative and sure
things i've just got this
funny instinct that people we we're 