That’s Adam Curtis, right there. He’s in an empty bathtub, his naked body dimly lit by a solitary flickering candle. He is attempting in vain to connect all of the moles on his body with a biro. Already the lattice of thin pen lines covers most of his bloated flesh, but the complicated system of mirrors he has constructed has left several blind spots. He fears that there may yet be a hidden mole under his left buttock that remains unconnected to its melaniferous brothers, he’s sobbing now.

Things weren’t always this bad for Adam, he used to produce critically acclaimed documentaries for the BBC. He was the master of the Kafkaesque, and his natural flare for matching archive footage to well-enunciated sound bites was soon legendary. But even then the fledgling spark of his paranoia was smouldering, growing, catching the kindling of pure information down in the BBC basement where, even then, he spent concerning amounts of time.

That’s when I first saw him. I was a production assistant on ‘Who Do You Think You Are’. We were working late to finish up the Paxman episode (I was tasked with finding stock footage of a late Victorian workhouse to show how Jeremy’s grandfather had lived — he later insisted we scrap that part of the programme and made us all sign NDAs).

I had begun rummaging through old tin canisters of film when I saw a pale grey light coming from under the doors of one of the screening rooms. I had assumed I was the last one in the building as it was nearly 2AM, but I gingerly turned off my torch and made my way to the door to investigate. Pushing it open slightly I immediately made out the shape of Adam Curtis, surrounded on all sides by TV monitors of various sizes and ages, stacked clumsily on top of each other from floor to ceiling. Every single monitor was looping black and white archive footage: a nazi rally, a burning American flag, maggots crawling through the eye-socket of a decomposing fox. Adam was crouched in the middle of his panoramic hell, completely naked and slapping himself on each side of his head in turn with open palms. I thought I heard him whispering ‘make it stop’ but I, fearing for my safety, backed slowly towards the elevator and went straight home.

Days later, one of Adam’s films was featured on Charlie Brooker’s ‘Newswipe’. It was a piece about non-linear warfare, how we are all essentially being deliberately misdirected all the time by governments in a bid to render us supine and manageable. I watched it on my sofa, and checked twitter to see a stream of plaudits flooding in; all extolling his creative genius and thanking him for opening their eyes, but I could not help but be troubled by the Adam I had seen only days prior.

Several months later I saw Adam again in the BBC foyer, he had forgotten his lanyard and clearance card and was arguing with security to let him through the barriers. My own card had clearance for visitors and so I swiped him through. On the other side he thanked me and asked me my name. We exchanged pleasantries and he informed me that he needed more researchers for his upcoming project, something called ‘hypernormalisation’. It all sounded very interesting and I was excited to get off the ‘Who Do You Think You Are’ wagon after I had been told that Danny Dyer was going to be the next project.

As we departed he extended his hand, he had a firm grip yet his palms were deathly cold and very clammy. As we withdrew his hand his cuff rode up his forearm slightly, revealing a strange pattern of thin pen lines running from freckle to freckle, he hastily pulled down his sleeve, looking visibly panicked, and marched away mid sentence.

Weeks later I began work on ‘hypernormalisation’. I never told any of my colleagues what I had seen, and at any rate Adam was rarely ever around. We would simply get short emails from him maybe once a week telling us which archive clips he wanted and in which order.

Until one week the emails stopped coming, we were approaching a meeting with the producers but production had completely halted without Adam’s guidance. No one had heard anything, ‘that’s just adam’ some of the veteran researchers said to me, but they hadn’t seen what I had seen. Fearing for his safety but also my job I managed to track down the address of his Kensington apartment, and on a rainy Sunday morning, two days before our meeting with the producers, I went.

The door was already open, I knocked and called to no reply. The smell was immediately repulsive, I pulled my shirt up over my mouth and nose and stepped inside.

“Adam?” I kept calling, but still no answer.

I stepped quietly through the apartment, winding my way through maze of overflowing bin bags and cuttings from various newspapers and magazines that adorned the floor. I pushed open the door to the living room, and saw him standing by the mantelpiece, he was dressed in a billowing white kimono, fettered with various yellow and brown stains.

“Adam are you alright?” I asked, again to no reply.

I walked over to him and to my astonishment found that he was arranging all the dead flies on the marble, hundreds of them, all aligned into little swirling patterns and intricate mandalas.

“Adam” it was no use, he could not see me, he could not hear me.

I waved my hand in front of his face but his eyes never focussed on anything but those flies. Suddenly in a croaky voice he began gibbering and muttering in hushed tones, so quiet I could barely make them out. I put my ear close to his mouth and heard “six around the edges, five in the middle, six around the edges, five in the middle, six around the edges, five in the middle” and so on and so forth. This would be the last time I saw him, and sadly I don’t think he really saw me that day. Hyper-normalisation was a critical success, despite Adam’s absence.