Who or what is Adam Curtis? Is there only one of him, or is Adam Curtis the name of some energetic collective that pops up in wildly different places in an effort to mock the cultural mores of the age?

For a start there is Adam Curtis the BBC documentary maker, who appears every couple of years with a series of programmes about contemporary ideas and their origins, all illustrated with archival footage so beautiful or so monstrous that it makes you gasp. Curtis was the man behind a controversial three-parter seen on BBC Two in 2004. It argued that Western governments were systematically overegging the threat from al-Qaeda for political gain. The Power of Nightmares kick-started a debate among columnists and leader writers that lasted months. After the terrorist bombs of July 7, 2005, some journalists and “terror experts” turned against him, arguing that the London attacks proved his thesis foolish and wrongheaded. When it was discovered that the bombers were indigenous and ramshackle weekenders rather than professionals knitted into an al-Qaeda terror cell, other voices argued that Curtis had been vindicated.

Curtis has put the furore over The Power of Nightmares behind him. If anything, however, his latest three-part BBC Two series The Trapis likely to be more incendiary. It accuses new Labour of presiding over growing social inequality and reinforcing a work culture in which many of us waste time trying to meet ridiculous performance targets. But it would be a mistake to assume that he is a man of the Left. The Power of Nightmares poured almost as much scorn on envi-ronmentalists as neo-conservatives, and said some kind things about Henry Kissinger along the way.

In The Trap, Curtis’s central thesis is that the end of the Cold War led not to a victory parade for freedom but to the revelation that the whole idea of freedom incubated in intellectual circles in the postwar period was narrow, inward-looking and always in danger of collapse. Like The Power of Nightmares, it defies easy political categorisation, slating everyone from Margaret Thatcher to the radical counter-culture of the 1960s.

And then, strangely, the same Adam Curtis turns up as “archive consultant” in the making of the Stephen Frears film The Queen, whose portrait of Elizabeth II is quite the best publicity our royalty has enjoyed for some time ( see DVD review, page 15).

There are other anomalies. In between making what one journalist has described as “upscale b******s for television”, Curtis has time to sit on the steering committee of the scurrilous e-mail magazine Popbitch. And if Curtis ends up with a peerage for helping out with The Queen, he will be the first member of the House of Lords to have started his career as a researcher on That’s Life.After teaching politics at Oxford University, this homme sérieuxthrew himself into the world of light entertainment, where his research bore fruit with — among other things — the discovery of a talking dog which was only capable of saying the word “sausages”.

The author of nine documentaries, he graduated to fame with his 2002 series The Century of the Self, in which he traced the path taken by Freudian individualism towards the birth of consumerism and the growth of the public relations industry.

But what are his politics? “What motivates my work,” he says, “is the belief that traditional divisions between Right and Left have become meaningless, and that power moves in wider channels than mainstream politics can ever hope to engage with.” The real political issue, he believes, “is no longer mainstream politics but the sources of power and how that power is exercised, the same power that has already slipped out of the grasp of our politicians.”

That is why his films have fun with everything from consumerism to focus groups to modern genetics. In The Trap Curtis adds game theory to his portfolio, arguing that this obscure discipline which evolved out of paranoid Cold-War strategising about the arms race became central to the modern idea about what it is to be a self-interested individual. It’s an intriguing view, and one measure of its success will be whether game theory becomes as much a talking point amid the chattering classes as Sayyid Qutb (inspiration for al-Qaeda) did after The Power of Nightmares, or as Wilhelm Reich did after The Century of the Self. As in those films, Curtis’s journalistic method is to let intellectuals speak for themselves. For me, one of the best bits in The Trap is the sequence in which Curtis is interviewing an anthropologist about an experiment he once conducted into a primitive society. When Curtis wonders if the presence of the anthropologist and his camera didn’t itself affect the results of the experiment, the anthropologist stares back at him and growls: “Are you sure your father is your father?” Curtis is off-camera and could have retaliated with a smart rejoinder. But instead he keeps schtum, and eventually the anthropologist, disappointed that no one is going to take the bait, returns to the sorry but inevitable business of hanging himself with his own rope.

Curtis has the knack for excavating the hidden byways taken by ideas. What gives him his edge among essayists is his visual flair, building artful and often bawdy visual illuminations around the ideas he is trying to explain. How did he get the inspiration for that? His boyhood hero “was an early American pop artist called Robert Rauschenberg, whose skill was to bring disparate images from our media-saturated culture together in such a way as to lend them a new meaning”. It struck him much later that this kind of collage effect “could really work on television to evoke ideas and illuminate patterns between those ideas”.

He immediately deflates himself with a giggle, claiming that he really owes everything to the populist brio of Esther Rantzen and Sausages the talking dog. “I simply use the techniques she taught me to make people laugh, and apply them to serious subjects. It’s all a trick.”

The Trap, Sun, BBC Two, 9pm; Adam Curtis’s previous documentaries can be viewed for free online, www.archive.org

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