To be honest, I find the best documentary reporting these days in things that don’t really classify as documentaries. Things like South Park, movies like The Big Short and American Honey, and the This Is England series. They are all about portraying the real world but they do it in ways that are surprising and imaginative. They make you look at things in new ways. Whereas traditional documentaries seem a bit stuck. I think this has happened because most of them have been moved off TV and into the art house cinema circuit. As a result they tend to play to what their audience already know – reinforcing their beliefs. Like the fact that bankers are bad. Or climate change threatens the world.

Documentaries shouldn’t just reflect the world, they should try and explain why reality is like it is. That’s what The Big Short does: it explains why bankers became bad by taking you into the strange, exhilarating world of finance that rose up in the past 20 years, and you understand emotionally why they did what they did.

American Honey takes you into the feelings of a girl travelling through the United States while giddily in love. You see modern America through her intense feelings. But again and again the film pulls the rug out from under your feet – scenes never play out as you expect. And you begin to look at American society in a new and fresh way – unlike the slew of “Trump is a monster” films that just reinforce the present liberal isolation from reality.

But the true genius is South Park. Every week they report on the world in a really original way. Their recent shows have been all about social media and internet trolling – and it is just wonderful. They make you realise how strange and absurd that world is. But the show I would nominate is the three-parter they did called Imaginationland. It is about how terrorists take over all of our imaginations – and then our imaginations run out of control with dark horror. So the US government decide to nuke our imaginations. But Kyle from South Park confronts the government and makes an epic speech about how what we imagine inside our heads is more real, and has had more effect on the world throughout history than us as just physical beings.

The whole story is a wonderful attack on the narrow rational utilitarianism of our age that both left and right have bought into. It’s saying: you can make the world anything you want it to be. At its heart, South Park has a touching faith in human beings. That despite their absurdities and flaws, people have the capacity to create a better world. In our conservative times that is the most radical message of all.