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

If this were a documentary I would montage through the next few years. Working with my team, we produced a series of hard-headed programmes in high-crime and high-conflict areas – Philadelphia, Johannesburg, Lagos, the West Bank of Israel/Palestine – that looked at the outlaw code of the streets and the practices of the police, and the way in which they reflect each other. It was Max Weber who defined the state as that institution that has a monopoly of ‘legitimate violence’. In a real sense, according to Weber, the government and its enforcers are simply the biggest gang, running a protection racket, which we happen to call taxation. For another perspective, there is the lyric in NWA’s ‘Sa Prize (Fuck Tha Police – Part 2)’ that says, ‘Motherfuckers from high-crime areas view the police as a threat and that’s some shit you better not forget.’

In amidst all of this, halfway through filming the Philadelphia doc, our family expanded again. In February 2008, at Queen Charlotte’s hospital in East Acton, our second son, Fred, arrived via C-section. We took him home a couple of days later. Albert, still not yet two, greeted him with a pile of toys he thought the newborn might enjoy playing with. It was faintly heart-breaking: the knowledge that he had no inkling of how his life was now altered – condemned to getting half of our attention, at most, forever more. The toys seemed an attempt to propitiate an angry, squalling deity. As with so many similar acts, it was in equal measures honourable and utterly futile.

First time round I’d learned certain baby skills, based on a single book, with a theory about replicating the conditions of the womb. It involved tight swaddling, semi-violent rocking and loud shushing. As weird as it sounds, it worked surprisingly well with Albert. But Fred was somehow immune to the technique and found it distressing. I tried swaddling him even tighter, pulling the ends of the blanket practically with my knee on his chest, and rocking more violently.

‘I think if I can just tuck this in here—’

‘He’s a different baby,’ Nancy said. ‘He likes it if you’re just gentle.’

‘I’m not getting the swaddle tight enough. The old blanket was better. This one doesn’t hold the knot.’

In March, when I re-engaged with work, it was probably a relief for everyone.

By now a directive had come from the empyrean echelons of the BBC. The new, more dangerous stories we were doing required me to go on something called a Hostile Environments Course. I’d heard tell of these courses. They were whispered about in BBC corridors. ‘Have you done the Hostile Environments?’ The way they said it, it was a little like people who’ve taken magic mushrooms or bungee-jumped, a feeling that you were in on something, a certain rite of passage requiring reserves of bravery. Another analogy that springs to mind is the Agatha Christie play, The Mousetrap. Like The Mousetrap, part of the mystery of the Hostile Environments Course was that it entailed a twisty ending that those who’d taken the course were pledged not to reveal.

I had by now done enough years at the BBC to treat diktats about safety and procedure with a certain level of scepticism. One of the discoveries when I first began working in television was the ‘risk assessment’ form. I remember reading one that said: ‘Hazard: presenter may be doing some driving; Proposed solution: will stick to speed limit and drive carefully.’ Undoubtedly they served a purpose some of the time. But a lot of it seemed disconnected from the reality on the ground. Of course we would drive safely. Did we really need to worry about a visit to a lawfully accredited gun range, of which there are thousands operating safely across America? And as to the real possibility of risk: who honestly knew what would happen at the White Supremacist compound or riding around Jackson, Mississippi with a pimp? Hazard: pimp may attempt to turn me out. Proposed solution: shake my money-maker and stay on that grind until Daddy is happy.

The Hostile Environments Course took place in April 2008. The closest thing I can compare it to is a school trip or possibly a not-that-fun stag do. There were fifteen or twenty of us – BBC staff from all over the organization, news reporters, fixers on foreign bureaux, World Service producers – bunking up for two or three nights in an annex on the grounds of a shabby old stately home somewhere outside London. In charge of the course were two ex-army instructors, one specializing in security and danger; the other covering medical know-how. The days were divided between classwork – reminiscent of school, with whiteboards and group discussions – and field exercises. One outing involved using a twig to pick your way out of a minefield, another navigating around the grounds with a compass and an Ordnance Survey map. There was also quite a lot of running into darkened rooms, finding badly injured plastic dummies and shouting: ‘He doesn’t look good. I’m checking airways! I’m putting him in a recovery position. Panda eyes! Elevate his leg!’ The instructors had little pumps that squirted blood from the dummies’ arms and legs. ‘Oh! Nasty! Tourniquet that!’

The medical stuff was useful. The war zone stuff was less immediately relevant for me – not many mines or Ordnance Survey maps in Philadelphia. Very occasionally I had the sense the instructors might prefer it if we didn’t make any programmes on location but stayed in our hotel rooms, memorizing our acronyms. But I am being a little unfair, and in fact in subsequent years – after doing stories in Lagos and the West Bank – I had cause to think back to what I’d learned and find it helpful.

Probably the most memorable bit of instruction had to do with dealing with roadblocks: that you should resist the urge to be overly accommodating; don’t roll down your window unless asked, and even then only a crack. If possible don’t let them into your car. Present polite resistance at every stage. It sounded in some ways counterintuitive: I had always made it a habit to placate and appease police. Yes, officer. No officer. I’m so sorry, officer. But in fact every act of power involves a kind of negotiation. By giving a little, you are inviting more trespasses, putting yourself in more danger.

It occurred to me that the roadblock and the car was a metaphor for power in general: how bullies and predators depend on us to cede authority to them, and that those without power should never forget how much it is still up to us to fight back, to not give in. In the words of the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard, ‘Power is a seduction.’ Even violent force depends on a kind of giving-in. (I can’t find that quote on Google, which means I may have made it up. However, it is true.)

The last day of the course – a kind of grand finale – took place a couple of weeks later. It was an ambitious, fully realized role-play event in a fictitious country with its own currency and a made-up recent history. There were rebels and government forces and we were issued little cameras. The idea was to get in and do some reporting, record a piece to camera and get out. In childhood, I’d played a little Dungeons & Dragons and had an unfulfilled yen to do LARPing – Live Action Role Play – as a knight with a foam sword going round a castle, with people dressed as orcs lying in wait. The last day of the Hostile Environments Course was the closest I ever came to this dream.

The event required quite a bit of staging and support personnel. Some of the extras were local soldiers for whom, I can only imagine, the whole exercise was a welcome change of routine. At least one or two had gone method in their approach to the performance: smelling of booze and shouting in an authentically deranged way: ‘Wind your fucking window down and show me your papers! You’re in the Republic of Raristan and we don’t take any shit, all right?’

The final exercise involved being pulled over at a roadblock, bundled out, and having sacks put over our heads. This – being taken as a hostage – was the Mousetrap twist. The act of being blinded and frogmarched and shouted at, though you knew it to be fake, was surprisingly disconcerting. You had to stumble a little way from the vehicle then, with the sack removed, try to plead for your life. The lesson, I recall, was to not stop talking, don’t look away or submit, maintain eye contact, keep being a human to your captors and not someone ready for death. ‘I have children waiting for me. Their mother is dead. They depend on me. I have a picture in my wallet – please! Do you have any children?’ and so on. When my time came, and the trainer raised his gun, it miraculously jammed and I made a run for it.

My most abiding recollection of the experience was the input from some of the BBC fixers and producers from far-flung places who’d already faced extreme hazard while reporting on wars in the field. Towards the end of a field exercise, one producer from the Middle East or North Africa asked with touching sincerity for advice on how to triage the casualties in a car after a serious crash. ‘Because one time, after our vehicle was blown up in Libya, we didn’t know which one to help first,’ he said, ‘and one of my colleagues died from bleeding.’

A couple of weeks after finishing the course, with our newborn, Fred, now if not exactly pitching in around the house then at least being somewhat more manageable – not in reality, but certainly in my own febrile self-justifications – I flew back to Philadelphia for two weeks to finish that programme, and then to Johannesburg for a couple of weeks for a new project about vigilantes and private security.

I look back at emails from that time and marvel at what Nancy had on her hands. Her messages are mainly short expressions of regret that she shouted at me on the phone or that she is tired and that Fred still isn’t sleeping through. Mine are long diaristic accounts of how the day has gone, apologies for not being around more, and lamentations that we aren’t getting much in the can.

The idea with the Johannesburg film had been to do a companion piece to the Philadelphia doc and to put them out as a two-parter. All we needed was to get access to the police. Alas, the BBC had burned its bridges with the Joburg police department, after running a scorching piece several years earlier that depicted its cops as violent and out of control. For lack of other options, we began thinking about a doc that looked at the burgeoning world of private security and the way it intersected with crime. I’d read accounts of home invasions of almost unimaginable brutality taking place in the suburbs. The private security firms were – apparently – taking up the slack from a police force that was outmanned and outgunned by the criminals.

And there were other leads: I’d seen a short Channel 4 piece about a grassroots vigilante group called Mapogo. In one of the scenes, a Mapogo official whipped a ‘suspect’, apparently unperturbed by the presence of a camera, bizarrely describing the punishment as ‘medicine’.

Then, a few days before we were due to fly, a spate of xenophobic violence convulsed South Africa. The disparity of income in the country was higher than it had been under the apartheid regime. Up to thirty per cent of people of working age were unemployed and many locals viewed immigrants from neighbouring nations like Zimbabwe and Malawi as interlopers who were taking their jobs and driving down wages. It was reported that angry mobs would corner those suspected of being foreign. Sometimes they’d ask them to pronounce certain words – the Zulu words for ‘elbow’ and ‘buttonhole’ – knowing it would betray a non-native speaker. Or they based their assessments on hairstyle or vaccination marks. Those identified as outsiders might be beaten up or burned to death.

I was at the airport waiting to fly when my brother called: ‘The riots are all over the news!’ he said. ‘You’re in the catbird seat! You’re in pole position! It’s the Hamiltons Part 2.’

His enthusiasm was so over-the-top, I was pretty sure it was insincere and that he was attempting to put some kind of hex on me. If so, it worked. Danger levels in South Africa were so elevated that it was virtually impossible to get into the townships to do any filming. Locals resented all the disapproving coverage. They viewed media as the enemy and were liable to turn on them.

We whiled away the days filming with security firms in largely white areas doing the rounds of houses and shops. This was singularly unproductive. No calls came in. ‘I don’t understand it,’ the guards kept saying. ‘It’s usually non-stop. You should have been here last month.’

After a week or so, the threat level in the townships dipped somewhat. We got the go-ahead to film and the BBC risk team assigned us a security detail of a couple of burly Afrikaners who looked like the physical incarnation of the old Apartheid regime and who, in addition, spoke no black African languages. Rather than protection, it seemed likely our Boer bodyguards would make us more of a target. There was an abortive attempt to film a walkabout and interview in a vast and volatile township-cum-shanty town north of Johannesburg called Diepsloot. We passed a shebeen. The drinkers became excited seeing a crew, and surrounded us. They seemed mainly happy, though amid the shouting and jostling it was hard to be certain. ‘We’ve got to get out of here,’ said the guards. ‘Evacuate! Evacuate!’ Afterwards none of us was sure whether we’d just had a narrow escape or had massively overreacted to a bit of high-spirited bonhomie.

By the end of the shoot, the only scene of any power we’d managed to capture was with the Mapogo vigilante, William. He’d arrived for a pre-arranged interview at his offices with a badly beaten ‘suspect’ in the back of his vehicle. It was shocking and upsetting. The man was bloodstained, his expression impossible to read. I asked our local fixer, Sidney, to try to speak to him but he refused to talk.

‘This is the medicine,’ William said, waggling a long leathery stick called a sjambok.

The whole situation – the casual, on-camera acknowledgement of corporal punishment; the bloodied man – was bizarre and seemed to bespeak a world in which death, violence, and injury were all part of the daily currency of life.

Still, for ten days’ work it was thin pickings. Back in the office in England, we went through the rushes with a funereal sense of gloom. The main takeaway was that we were unlikely to find our story in the suburbs and needed to take a different approach. No more Afrikaner security guards. Instead, we would ask Sidney to help organize protection using men who spoke at least two or three of South Africa’s black languages. Sidney was a consummate connector: he could speak to anyone, gathering intelligence and building trust. We hoped that with his help we would be able to get into the life of the townships in a deeper way, defusing situations simply by talking and letting residents know we were there to tell their story.

We returned. It was still slow going but little by little the scenes accumulated and a picture emerged of a world, in the townships and squatter camps, where mob justice was endemic. Despairing of being helped by the police, townspeople would round up suspected rapists and robbers, corner them, truss them and burn or stone them to death. ‘People are killed like chickens,’ a community volunteer called Walter told me. Another man recounted being shot and the police doing nothing about it. With a rueful air, he added: ‘Even myself, if they say, “This one is a robber,” I can assist to kill.’ To my knowledge, the story of mob justice in the townships hadn’t been told before and I felt proud that we were bringing it to light, in all its strangeness and cruelty.

The most surprising moment of filming – and eventual climax of our documentary – came late in the shoot when, one morning, a call came in from William, the Mapogo vigilante who dispensed ‘medicine.’ He was, he said, at that moment, in Diepsloot, cornered by an angry mob of local people grown sick of his practice of physically assaulting men in his custody. He thought they might be about to kill him and was hoping we might help.

We drove to Diepsloot, arriving to find an unruly gathering of local residents on a dirt road with rough corrugated shacks on either side. Sidney advised us to hang back while he went to speak to the crowd. Within a few minutes he returned, looking concerned.

‘William is in trouble,’ he said. He described how William and a co-worker had apprehended a supposed suspect in the area, detaining him inside a van. ‘While they were trying to drive out, the community turned against William.’

Sidney said he’d talked to the people in the crowd, reassuring them we were there to document but not to critique. He felt confident we were OK to film. But he added: ‘When we go in, you mustn’t mention William’s name as if we know him. They will turn against us.’

We walked up the road to where the crowd was gathered – a hundred or so. There was shouting, and William came into view, standing next to a police van, looking terrified. A couple of officers, in blue caps and jackets, carrying rifles, were attempting to marshal the crowd to no discernible effect. People dressed in t-shirts and dusty trousers and woolly hats were blowing whistles, and in among them was a man holding a rope that seemed intended for trussing William.

At the forefront of the mob was a young woman.

I asked her: ‘You’re saying this guy, William, beat someone up that you know?’

‘Yes, he beat Donald Lekgwati. Because this guy, this William, says he’s going to burn him. Truly speaking. William told us that he’s going to burn Donald Lekgwati. So we can’t allow him to burn Donald Lekgwati.’

William was bustled into the police vehicle, protesting his innocence in the affair at hand. ‘I can’t use my hands on him,’ he said.

Turning back to the young woman and Sidney, I asked: ‘What do they want to do to William?’

With a wry smile, Sidney said, ‘They want to kill William.’

‘Yes,’ the young woman agreed.

‘They want to burn him,’ Sidney said.

‘Yes, we want to burn him. Because he told us he is going to burn that Donald Lekgwati.’

It was an extraordinary scene: the surreal juxtaposition of people who came across as personable and thoughtful, expressing in a matter-of-fact way a desire to burn a fellow human being to death. It was also a testament to Sidney’s soft diplomacy, his ability to reassure and placate and negotiate. In the high-risk theatre of the mob it was a thousand times more useful than a phalanx of bodyguards.

The phase of work in which our main output of stories was of a slightly more dangerous stripe – ‘pushing the jeopardy button’, I used to call it – lasted a couple of years. A documentary about meth users in Fresno followed. It sticks in my mind as one of the only times I was forced to make four separate filming trips over the course of many months to get what we needed. Unlike the prison, where everyone is bored and already convicted, the streets were much harder to get into, and less safe. It was inordinately hard to film someone actually smoking or injecting meth, and over the whole endeavour hung the unwelcome spectre of the Brass Eye drugs special – when oh when were we going to find someone out of their gourd on Yellow Bentines or Clarky Cat?

We shot a film about gangstas and hoodlums in Lagos – two trips of two weeks each, two weeks being the deal I’d made with Nancy for the longest allowable filming trip. The Lagos film was memorable because our climactic scene – the result of an election that we were fairly sure would lead to unrest – coincided with a family holiday in France: a villa had been rented somewhere near a town called Verdun-sur-Garonne, where, apparently, the ‘Theroux’ clan originally came from, before they migrated to Quebec. Nancy, the kids, my brother and his family were all coming; my dad had flown over, which was unprecedented. He rarely came to Europe, and never for holidays, but he was enticed by the idea of a road trip to the ancestral spawning grounds. But I bailed on the holiday to film in Nigeria, which went down in the family ledger – a metaphorical accounts book in Nancy’s brain largely dedicated to my domestic failures and unkept promises, times I left outings early, missed parties – as The Time Louis Didn’t Come On A Family Holiday.

Then, during the unrest, which took the form of a ragtag procession of ‘area boys’ – local youth – jogging along in a loose-knit and motley street procession, at least one or two of them armed with broken bottles and dripping blood, at the point it was decided we had what we needed and should clear the area, the director Jason and I managed to forget our AP, Guy King, leaving him amid the melee as we bundled into a waiting vehicle.

All these programmes had their merits. I began to think of myself as making good on the awards and visibility I’d won too easily in former years – I was earning out the advance of my early promise. More importantly, our working practices at last felt sustainable: we were back to making shows in a way that was enjoyable and offered something different in the TV landscape. Having let go of comedy as a dominant flavour, the stories flowed steadily. I began to see that there was nothing so dark that we couldn’t handle it, and with each outing we edged a little further into more difficult material. ‘Go dark but cast it light,’ I would say. You know you’ve attained some higher grade of knob-hood when you have your own little professional mantras that you repeat to your co-workers. It meant, choose stories whose themes are filled with the possibility of misery and angst, but make sure your contributors are sympathetic and open.

Another thought experiment I sometimes found helpful was whether I could imagine a given subject being featured in a reality format. If yes, then it was a sign it didn’t have enough of a knotty or dubious dimension: drugs, crime, serious mental illness. You weren’t likely to see them in a programme devised by Endemol involving sexy guys with six packs and ladies in bikinis. I tried to dodge the ever-present threat of obsolescence by taking on topics that were just too weird and questionable to be treated in ‘normal’ TV.

I kept venturing gingerly forward. Well, we did that. Can we do this?