All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace

Wonderfully challenging. But what should it be called? A documentary? An essay? A film? Why #allwatchedover wasn't trending on twitter the night it was aired, and #embarrassingfatbodies was, could possibly be due to the fact that to describe it in 140 characters would be a gross injustice.

At times confusing, at other times interesting and at further times downright terrifying, All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace tells the story of how 'machines' have changed us in the last 50 years. On one level it is a strangely beautiful documentary and it looks visually different to documentaries of it's type, of which I would include Horizon and perhaps even programmes like A History of Modern Britain. Rather than relying on lengthy, talk-to-the-camera pieces in exotic and/or culturally significant locations, the story is narrated by a face-less Adam Curtis and is set to the kind of stock footage you would expect to see being played in a Utopian mental asylum. As someone who knows very little about film-making, I loved this. It's refreshing to see such a different (again, I don't really know what I'm talking about in this sentence) method of telling a story.

The content is, at times, jumpy. Great, big academic tomes of ideas are slung out into our living rooms by the dozen, and are optimistically linked together as if by tiny blobs of Blu-Tack. This seems to be the chief criticism of the TV series, with one journalist saying that All Watched Over is "the TV equivalent of plaice and lime marmalade audaciously topped off with a fried egg". To me this doesn't matter, yes the ideas were sometimes thrown together, but at worst the ideas are interesting coincidences which can be talked about later.

I haven't really understood all of the topics explored in the series; but on a surface level, the idea that machines haven't changed society for the better, as has been largely predicted and applauded, is an interesting one. This argument is put forward from an interesting perspective and the viewer is left wondering whether these 'machines of loving grace' refer to our computers or to us; either way, the title is very definitely ironic. Keep watching, because at the very least this series provides a nice starting point for a long night of discussion of ideas.