Gotta Get Theroux This: My Life and Strange Times in Television

At the beginning of 1998, word came that the BBC had finally scheduled the first four episodes of Weird Weekends. I was still living in America, so the production flew me to London for a few days of publicity. There wasn’t a massive demand on my time. There was only one TV appearance, on an ill-fated Channel 5 chat show hosted by the Scottish comedian Jack Docherty, and I did a couple of print interviews. I was also on the Radio 4 show Loose Ends, where the host Ned Sherrin criticized my approach in the Christianity episode, accusing me – possibly accurately – of making fun of my interviewees. He played a clip of me talking with a born-again Christian lady who anointed her car with holy water. ‘You’re taking the Michael, aren’t you?’ Ned said. I should have been prepared for this but I was so wrapped up in the ambiguous rapport I had built with contributors that the question took me by surprise and I didn’t know quite what to say.

We had no photos from the locations so we arranged a shoot with a photographer and props relating to each episode. It took place in a studio in the basement of BBC Television Centre in Shepherd’s Bush. For the Christianity photos I held a large wooden crucifix and shouted at the camera – which wasn’t at all the feel of the episode but I have a regrettable habit of agreeing to do what I’m asked by photographers. For the porn one I stripped off and made antic faces while wearing only a pink feather boa and a pair of boxer shorts. That image still makes me sigh inwardly whenever I see it in random places on the Internet, where it lurks like a ninja awaiting the right moment to assassinate my ego. David Mortimer was at the shoot offering suggestions, one of which was that I should take my boxers off. He said they’d use an effect – possibly blurring or maybe a little box – to make sure nothing would be seen that didn’t need to be. To this day I’m thankful I declined this idea.

We also did some straight portrait-style photos of me wearing a ribbed turtleneck jumper that I’d recently bought at Gap. When combined with my two-sizes-too-big leather jacket I imagined it gave me a roguish seventies appearance, a bit like Bodie from The Professionals. This photo would return, years later, on the Internet and spread like a cancer across various media in meme-form. Time has somehow erased its roguish qualities; I looked less like Bodie than a missing child on the side of a milk carton. It was picked up by shadowy unlicensed makers of merchandise and began appearing on t-shirts and tea towels and other bits of product for reasons that are obscure but which I’m fairly sure have nothing to do with its roguishness.

When the shows finally came to air, it was more than a year since I’d begun making them. I felt a little disconnected from them. At the same time, I was fairly confident that they were doing something different – showing in an unvarnished and honest way the intimate lives of various unlikely American dreamers – and without me wanting it to, the embarrassing parts of my brain began entertaining all sorts of visions of grandiose success, with BAFTAs dancing around in a conga line.

Critics had their own opinions – mostly positive but not wildly so. I had the sense they hadn’t really understood how much in them was new. Many saw them as exactly what I hoped they weren’t – mickey-taking and anti-American. Of the TV reviewers, the only one I much cared about was Victor Lewis-Smith, who wrote for the Evening Standard. By the time his piece appeared I was back in America. I couldn’t find it online – this was before newspapers were routinely on the Web – and I had to resort to calling up the Evening Standard offices. It was late in the day in London and I asked a security guard to read it to me. It took him a while to find it, and he also couldn’t read very well, but it soon became clear that the write-up was not positive – my encounters with the UFO believers reminded Victor of someone ‘arm-wrestling a thalidomide victim’ – and so I found myself enduring the indignity of straining to understand a long, stumbling rendition of an unfavourable review down a transatlantic phone line.

Trying to look like Bodie from The Professionals.

‘OK, that’s probably enough,’ I broke in. ‘Thanks.’

Some of the negative feedback was a result of how the shows were scheduled. The Christianity episode went out first, followed by the UFOs one. Critics concluded we were taking a predictable anti-religious perspective on hoary examples of American flimflam. When the porn and militia episodes came out, some reviewers expressed surprise at the more complete palette of emotions they showed. Some wrote as though I must have been shocked to meet sensitive and appealing characters in far-out worlds, as though I hadn’t planned for them to be included in the shows.

A few months after those first four episodes went out, in May 1998, I moved back to the UK. I’d been living out of the country for nearly seven years. There were several reasons to return. Closeness to family and friends. Also, David Mortimer was based in London and I’d come to value him as a collaborator. I figured, if I was going to make programmes for the UK, I might as well live in the UK. And, oh yes, fame. I had never dreamed of being famous. But when I saw TV celebrity, of a modest sort, coming down the tracks towards me, I won’t pretend I wasn’t curious what it might bring in its train.

The answer was, first, random interview requests. I agreed to these with alacrity. I did one with a Welsh railway magazine and another with two fans from a student paper who asked questions like, ‘If you were a Quality Street, which one would you be?’ Occasionally people shouted at me in the street. Sometimes nice things like ‘We love you, Louis’ or more mystifying remarks. ‘Are you the bloke that does that thing?’ ‘Are you who I think you are?’ One I didn’t know how to respond to was, ‘I love the way you take the piss out of those cunts.’ (Said to me by three young men from Motherwell. I replied, ‘Oh, wow. Thanks!’) Another frequent interaction involved being complimented on shows I hadn’t made. I don’t just mean the title was wrong (‘Wacky Weekends’ is a common misnomer and I don’t bother to correct it); I mean praise directed at actual shows and documentaries made by other people. Over the years, I’ve been praised as Ruby Wax, Nick Broomfield, and Mark Dolan, among others. If any of the aforenamed is reading this: someone loved that thing you did about snake handlers/tiny people/the Grim Sleeper.

More than once I had the disconcerting impression that people expected me to be other than I am on screen, and that they felt a little insulted to find that that is more or less who I am. They thought I was making fun of them. Once or twice I overheard people I was working with say, ‘He really is just like he is on camera!’ which I found odd. The question I heard more often than any other was: ‘Is it an act?’ or ‘Are you playing a character?’ I don’t know that I ever found a satisfactory answer to this, except: yes, a little bit but possibly not as much as you might think.

The other storied side benefit of fame – sexual opportunity – was little in evidence, though this was at least partly due to my now being back with Sarah, my girlfriend-wife, and living in semi-married semi-bliss.

In the two years that followed I settled into habits of work that were to serve me well – with some changes and adaptations and a few hiccups – for the next twenty years. Programmes on husband-and wife-swapping sex-party enthusiasts, and devotees of Indian gurus. South African Boer nationalists, and gangsta rappers in the Dirty South. Some episodes I’m still proud of, some I’m a little embarrassed of. All have their moments, and – if Twitter is anything to go by – there are many people who would prefer if I went back to that light-hearted and slightly antic style and who regard everything that followed as a bit of a creative diminuendo.

Having suffered through the ructions and self-doubt of the first episode, I’d like to be able to say that the process of making the shows became easier. It didn’t. Story generation was always an issue. For the first four episodes, I had my subjects pretty well mapped out. It was a bit like making a debut album. Like a bag of songs, I’d been thinking about those shows for a couple of years at least – reading and cogitating and collecting cuttings. After that, it was second-album syndrome.

I still have a list from 1996 of possible ideas – a brain-dump of fifty or sixty subject areas from ‘Anarchists’ to ‘Toad Licking’. Some are so wrong-headed I am a little baffled as to what I was thinking. I had a preoccupation with US culture’s colonization of the world. Hence ‘Exporting Baywatch’ was one idea and ‘Game Show Missionary’. Malls and theme parks and fast food all feature prominently. I wrote:

Don’t want it just to be ‘fringe’. Need mix: fringe, sex, celebrity, violence, villainy, fun.

Keep it broad but still focused.

Also: is there a place for sadness? for people searching for meaning?

A small handful made it into the pantheon of commissioned episodes of Weird Weekends. Some we covered but not until many years later. The list includes ‘Eating Disorders’, which I made a programme about twenty years later in 2017. Scientology is on there too. My Scientology Movie came out in 2016. For some topics, because of their weightiness and lack of obvious comedy, it was a case of needing to gain the confidence to know how to handle them – or maybe earning the right to cover them. It’s also always been true that as a production we’ve had trouble focusing on more than one idea at a time. A little like air traffic control: you land the planes one by one. And sometimes they crash.

I used to say that each story rested on a kind of tripod of qualities: comedy, pathos, participation. But as much as I liked to think there was a formula, we didn’t always get it right. In the second series, I became aware that we had over-emphasized the ‘participation’ leg of the tripod and ended up doing stories that lacked moral complexity or gravity. It was usually a bad sign if my moment of becoming involved was the climax of the film: selling paper shredders on the home-shopping network or auditioning for a Norwegian cruise line. My participation worked best as a device – a tongue-in-cheek motivation, an opportunity for incongruous comedy – but the real story needed to be bigger: my connection with a contributor who’d pledged his life to something immoral, dangerous, even life-threatening. I’d sometimes reference a children’s TV programme that starred the Blue Peter dangerman Peter Duncan trying his hand at exotic pastimes like sumo wrestling: ‘We’re not making Duncan Dares!’

If I had to distil a single lesson in the selection of story ideas – which I still try to stick to – it would be to make sure there is something at stake for the contributors: life, limb, freedom, sexual or mental health. I tried to stay vigilant and look after the seriousness and the journalistic side of the story, but there was a countervailing pull towards comedy: the need for the shows to be funny and also that there should be opportunities for me to participate. It wasn’t always easy to find the balance.

Many of the techniques we relied on in that first episode about militiamen in Idaho became central to how we worked. Always we looked for subjects with a geographical focus. This had the practical benefit of allowing us to revisit characters we liked and to build their stories with multiple scenes. But it was also a sign that the story really existed in the way it needed to, suggesting a depth and realness to the relationships within the worlds we were exploring. I was suspicious of stories that were too spread out or only held together by Internet-based friendships. Furries (fetishists who dress up in mascot-like outfits and have sex at conventions) were considered but dismissed based on their having a part-time and largely virtual connection. The world of porn performers, on the other hand, is a village in which people live and work and even die together. It is not a hobby; it is a job and an all-consuming identity, which puts its practitioners at loggerheads with the mainstream world.

Even when we had an idea, there followed weeks of research – led by the director and his or her AP – in which magazines and newspapers were gone through, phone calls made, old films watched, until there came a moment of commitment to the recce. During the recce the director and AP visited locations and met and interviewed a variety of potential contributors with a view to deciding who would be in the eventual film. Usually, they filmed a little taster tape of each contributor. This might take a week or ten days or sometimes longer. Back in the office, they’d show the highlights of their favourite candidates. Based on these conversations, we would plan the journey of the story on index cards blue-tacked to the wall. ‘LOUIS MEETS MASTER P. HE ENCOURAGES HIM TO RAP.’ ‘LOUIS AND RANDY ORGANIZE EVANGELICAL CAR RALLY.’ ‘LOUIS RETURNS TO MELLO T TO CONFRONT HIM ABOUT HIS CHOICES.’ These index cards were only ever a rough guide: they tended to feature more contributors than we would end up using and the shape would change as characters dropped out. Still, they were almost always helpful, allowing us to plan action and have a vague structure in mind.

In general, when I arrived to meet someone on screen, we made sure it was my first meeting. But usually the team would have met the person already on the recce. This raises what is probably the biggest misapprehension about our programmes: how much I do. The shows all carry a ‘directed by’ credit at the end of them. And yet I am always surprised at the credulity of viewers – even those in the TV industry – who assume I am the sole author of the films. The directors are the motors of the film to which they are attached. They guide the research, do the recce, they are in charge on location, and they sit in full-time on the edit with the editor, while I drop in and out for screenings in between drinking martinis and being massaged with hot stones.

It’s for this reason that I try to remember never to call myself a film-maker but a journalist. To be honest, I sometimes think I’m closer to being the lead singer of a musical group – not a very glamorous or exciting one, maybe a glee club or a barbershop quintet – I’m the one doing the shrill coasting falsetto, I’m not sure who the deep bass dooby-dums are coming from, maybe the series producer? – but probably even that does me a little too much credit. Still, there seems to be no end to viewers’ naivety. I’m amazed when intelligent people worry that Bear Grylls might starve to death in the woods or drown falling off his raft when he is clearly being filmed by someone who presumably has sandwiches and/or a buoyant vessel. It’s flattering that people imagine I do more than I do. I used to try to explain it by comparing the ‘Louis Theroux’ on screen to Homer the poet, in that he is more like a committee of people operating under a single moniker. And yes, I did just compare a TV show about weird people to the Iliad and the Odyssey.

It also has to be said that getting disproportionate credit has its downside. When the shit hit the fan with the Jimmy Savile business, I was surprised to find that while I got called before various inquiries – including the BBC’s Janet Smith Inquiry – the director and executive producer on my Jimmy Savile doc were overlooked.

Acting headshot for the Weird Weekends ‘Off-Off Broadway’ episode.

I’d like to think I improved at my job as time went on. My strength had always been that I was an attentive listener and a hard worker. I flattered myself I was good at building relationships on location. It may be that whatever sense of anxiety I had always laboured under stood me, in certain ways, in good stead. I found shoots a welcome break from my routine. I felt many day-to-day cares dissolved when I was embedded in the odd worlds I investigated on location. I surrendered to the priorities of whoever I was with. I tried to pitch in. I felt it was my job to be fully present and available. And if there was a little bit of ‘going native’ – a mild dose of Stockholm Syndrome – then that was perhaps a salutary part of getting stuck in to a story, a way of understanding more deeply. And truth be told it was also just something I enjoyed: the release from my normal existence and sometimes an occasion to imagine myself in a wholly other life.

I had made the welcome discovery that the participatory element of the Weird Weekends concept – while it had been intended as a storytelling device and occasion for comedy – had the surprising effect of endearing me to my hosts. It helped win trust with those I was among when I rapped/did dynamic meditation/walked on hot coals. For the porn show, as a comic bit, I had stripped naked in the offices of the main porn agent and had my Polaroid taken. It was a funny moment, but the real revelation was the effect it had on other performers when I showed them these photos. They warmed instantly, seeing me somehow as no longer aloof or antagonistic. They made me part of the club.

In a way, the key to the whole enterprise was walking a line between winning over contributors and, at the same time, trying to keep my journalistic focus. Always, whatever the story was, I had an idea of what I was trying to understand: a simple ten-words-or-fewer contradiction, paradox, or tension, which I would worry away at, asking question after question while trying not to overly fatigue the contributors.

And yet, as much as I liked to flatter myself that I had a technique and knew what I was doing, I was aware that much of it was adventitious and undeserved, hingeing on lucky breaks and collaborators who took up the slack of my incompetence. And even those positive attributes I brought to the production were accidental much of the time – a certain quality of ingenuousness or maybe gormlessness that won people over, a willingness to get involved that was also twinned with an unworldliness that was for the most part unintended and unconscious.

In our office bull sessions I’d sometimes say, ‘The real participation is the emotional connection.’ If there was a trick to this whole thing, it was nothing more complicated than finding quasi-friendships in unlikely places – among people widely viewed as suspect or questionable or flat-out predatory and wrong. As much as the shows were still viewed as mickey-taking by some, there was also enough humanity that they worked as the opposite: exercises in rounding out people usually seen in two dimensions. I was trying to show the other as not wholly other. Even among those unapologetically devoted to ways of life I viewed as harmful – a pimp in Mississippi, a Boer nationalist in South Africa, an unscrupulous spiritual figure like a space channel or a miracle-working televangelist – I attempted to see them as up-for-grabs, salvageable, not so different from me.