There’s a particular genre of British TV, sometimes called dramaganda, slopaganda or agitslop. These programmes present themselves as drama, even as art but really they are, as Tom Jones has written, “art made by social workers … produced neither to inform, educate or entertain the viewer, but to gently marinade them in moral instruction”.
The latest example is Series 3 of the BBC’s technology and policing drama, The Capture — the third episode (of six) of which aired this weekend. I’m going to spoil it because, based on the first few episodes, you aren’t missing much. The Capture is desperate to be taken seriously. It’s beautifully shot, if often using that blue filter which tells you how very important everything is. The actors do an excellent job of pretending to be highly competent police and security professionals, and the urgent soundtrack emphasises how very serious it all is. The Capture also makes a great effort to address the neuroses of the modern UK. We have a Russian agent sneaking into the country, only to be foiled by our heroes and their fancy new camera technology. If only the dastardly Russian had thought to arrive on a small boat instead of at Heathrow.
Then there’s all the dialogue about deep fakes, and the main thrust of the plot which involves the murder of a black Home Secretary, and the hunt for the prime suspect — a man who believes the small boats crisis is an invasion. You can really tell how great it must have sounded at the pitch meetings.
There is something rather sinister about the state broadcaster airing a series which the writers of Protecting What Matters would have been delighted with. But as much as it’s sinister, it’s also pathetic and hilarious. The plot and dialogue are slop. At one point a press officer calls her boss “really naughty” for briefing a journalist directly. When the cops, who we are supposed to believe are highly competent, search the suspect’s house they find highly suspicious evidence — books on British military history and a soldering iron, as well as Home Office Freedom of Information request response letters addressed to the suspect. On seeing these letters, the highly competent heroine (who has just arranged for her new boss to be interrogated by a CIA mate of hers), says “we need to authenticate these Home Office documents — did Whitlock get hold of them legally or did he hack the Home Office?”. Perhaps recruiting standards have dropped in the police of late, but I’m sure most officers are still able to read.
Best of all, in a fantastic allegory for the paranoid delusions of the UK regime, after the Home Secretary is assassinated at a Westminster press conference, the police seem to make no effort to understand the physical security failings which led to a gunman being able to sit within yards of the stage. No, instead their entire effort is to “get into his Insta, let’s get into his Facebook, let’s get into his 4chan”. The script is riddled with errors about technology, giving the impression the programme was scripted by Boomers who are terrified and confused by the modern world.
It’s perfectly natural for men in their 50s and 60s to find the changing world confusing and frightening
This is far from the first such piece of agitslop. Last year’s Adolescence spawned a thousand memes, and impressed the Prime Minister so much that he believed it was a documentary. It too was impeccably produced and acted, featuring flashy single cut scenes. It was also ultimately ridiculous and hollow, reflecting not actual reality but the paranoia of middle class parents who believe that something on the internet will possess their children and turn them into monsters. Years and Years, the high profile, prestige SF show created by Russell T. Davies also fixated around his fears about technology, politics and fascism, with nuclear explosions and British death camps. Much of the Charlie Brooker series Black Mirror is also agitslop, albeit with a hefty Netflix budget, in which the AIs are often going to murder us.
It is, I think, revealing that most of these writers are older. Adolescence’s creators are 47 and 52. Brooker is 55 and Davies is 62. It’s perfectly natural for men in their 50s and 60s to find the changing world confusing and frightening. This must be especially true now for liberal men at the sunset of the liberal order. It’s also perfectly natural for artists to express their fears through their work, and always has been. So perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that such artists produce confused, hilarious and paranoid work about technology, the youth of today and political changes sweeping the country. I’d be much more sympathetic though if they weren’t so desperately earnest about it — so keen that we take their ramblings seriously, as though they were saying anything true or important about the actual state of Britain in 2026.
