The Man Who Explained the World

250 years on and we still haven't learned

Good Sunday to you on this beautiful spring day,

Here is this week’s commentary. Take a look if you haven’t already.

Has Gold Already Peaked?

This week saw the 250th anniversary of the publication of The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith's most famous book. Smith was so obviously right about so many things, it amazes me that we still need to not only explain, but actually make the case for his ideas today.

So today’s Sunday thought piece is the film we made about him. I’m proud to say IMDB gives it a rare 10/10 ranking (only six people voted, I know, I know).

Alex Webster and I made Adam Smith: Father of the Fringe during the lockdown. We think it’s a really good film with a powerful story.

You get a handy summary of Smith’s ideas in the first 15 minutes, followed by the incredible story of the greatest arts festival the world has ever seen. Watch it on a big screen, if you can. It’s worth it.

It also features Jimmy Carr (early in his transition to thought leader), Al Murray, Henning Wehn, Shazia Mirza and Arthur Smith.

You might like the story of how it came about. Director Alex Webster and I went up to Edinburgh and shot the film in the year the Fringe was cancelled, believing that because television production had halted during lockdown there might be an opportunity for outsiders like us, able to produce something good quickly, to break into TV.

We needed some capital to get over the line (post production, music, archive footage etc), and managed to snag a meeting with the head of BBC2 and the BBC Head of documentaries. They politely declined and then went away and made a “similar” film 6 months later (only not as good, of course - theirs didn’t get 10/10 on IMDB).

Then, out of the blue, a multi-millionaire video games entrepreneur, who had had a near-death experience with Covid, stumbled across my YouTube vids, got in touch to say thank you for making him laugh on his deathbed, said he’s like to help with anything and the next day I had twenty grand to finish the film.

What incredible good luck. But I guess, if you keep putting stuff out there that people like, you increase the probability of getting good luck.

(Incidentally, the only other feature I’ve written, Four Horsemen, got 7.7/10 on IMDB, from over 3,000 votes, which is very respectable. More to the point, it got more than 10 million views on YouTube alone. People don’t even realise I wrote that film because of the, yes, well, we move on.)

Finally, I appeared on the reform party podcast last week, in case of interest. Here it is:

Until next time,

Dominic

PS Here’s that gold piece again, because it’s worth it.