The Way
BBC iplayer

“I’M mad as hell and I’m not going to take this any more,” about-to-be-fired news anchor Howard Beale screams in a television rant, urging everyone to go to the window and yell the same thing. 

This scene from the film Network, much honoured and claimed to be prescient, in fact represents simply mindless ungrounded fear, vaguely articulated, not drawn from the specific material aspects of people’s lives and thus open to a kind of manipulation that can easily be converted into simple resentment and will become the basis of today’s populism. 

Unfortunately, just such ungrounded impulses, after 45 years of devastation wrought by Reagan/Thatcher et al’s austerity and neoliberalism, are the basis of the BBC series The Way. It is a by-product of documentary film-maker Adam Curtis, who helped conceptualise the three-part series, who contributes not inconsiderable strengths (such as tracing advertising industry manipulation in The Century of the Self) but also glaring weaknesses (evidenced in the more recent anti-revolutionary, rabid anti-populism of Can’t Get You Out of My Head).