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

When they raised the baby’s head, tiny, cross-faced and smeared like a bagel in what looked like cream cheese and jam, I glanced at Nancy and could only think, We’re not doing this again.

He’d arrived after a harrowing C-section one October afternoon at St Mary’s Hospital in Paddington. Nancy looked half-dead afterwards, as pale as a vampire; the procedure had been delayed and delayed for mysterious reasons – we’d felt like passengers whose flight keeps getting pushed back, the same sense of boredom and impotence, though with an admixture of fear. Then when it was going on, there was a worrying atmosphere of hushed urgency, and muttered conferences, vital signs were dipping, and my mind naturally went to the worst-case scenario and I cursed myself for the foolhardiness we’d shown in taking Nancy through the blood-letting of another round of life creation.

Getting to term had been a trial. Two had ended in miscarriage. There were tears on a weekend away in Yosemite. We’d been through nothing like that before. The language of grief and the social forms I was versed in didn’t seem adequate to the occasion. The sadness was completely private, between us, and even I – if I’m honest – didn’t really understand what she was going through. It still seemed abstract to me, whereas to Nancy the babies had already become real.

Seven months into a new pregnancy we moved back to London, thinking it made sense to be close to family, arriving back in our old house in Harlesden to find the area had perked up a bit. The high street had been pedestrianized. A Specsavers and a Subway had opened up. Then came a Holland & Barrett. When Costa Coffee arrived in 2015 it felt a little like something magical was happening. A Costa? We hadn’t dared to dream we’d see the day. We were literally in a land flowing with milk and not honey but reasonably enjoyable coffee with a publicly accessible toilet. It might not seem like much, but to have some kind of recognized national chains felt like the green shoots of a comeback. There were still itinerant bands of street drinkers and shuffling medicated men emanating from halfway houses, but now they were sharing the pavements with young families sipping lattes. It was a mixed blessing, since many of the new arrivals seemed to avoid the local shops, treating the area like a bedroom community, but it was also a welcome addition to the mix – ‘Music and Movement with Little Beep Beeps’, Bouncy Castles on Friday at the Willesden Sport Centre . . . Even the ‘Pound Man’, a hyper-aggressive local cadger, was no longer in evidence (months later, I ran into him during a carol service in Wormwood Scrubs prison).

Being plunged back into baby mode was both wonderful and bizarre – a kind of regression to a previous life stage. In my mind, I compared it to going back to primary school as a grown man, the closest I’ve ever come to time travel. This time, though, we had Albert and Fred – the two big boys – so we were in a sense straddling time zones. They more than anyone had been excited to visit him – baby Walter – and just about managed to conceal their disappointment to find him, in those early days, a squeaking and floppy creature, an overgrown grub, blinking and squinting with unfocused eyes, who woke them in the night.

Alas, I’d sold a lot of our old baby paraphernalia on eBay – which Nancy liked to bring up, as though I’d passed up a chance to snag a priceless Mondrian at a junkshop or buy shares in Apple in 1976. So I had to re-buy everything: baby-change table, crib, sterilizer. Miraculously the baby monitor still worked. The first few months were a cascade of moments of recognition, each with its own emotional cue: will he feed? Why is he crying? When did he last poo? Why won’t he nap? What’s wrong with the fasteners on this baby-grow? Is he teething? Does this look like a rash? HOLD HIS HEAD! Burping and winding. Swaddling. Creeping around the house, putting him down so gently it was like doing bomb disposal, and the heart-stopping feeling of being stalked by random noises – is he awake? Third time out, we were lazy, overmanned by the other children, and all about the path of least resistance: dummies if he cried, let him eat what he likes, put him down when he feels like it and let him climb in with us if need be – let’s just relax and enjoy our farewell tour of babyland.

Somewhere around this time Nancy reminded me that I had agreed I’d only make programmes in the UK. I had no recollection of saying this, but it was definitely true that I’d campaigned for a third baby so I had a certain obligation to make myself available.

I had my doubts about doing UK shows. From the earliest days, I’d suspected that a certain amount of culture clash was an intrinsic element of the formula. Other than the celebrity programmes, I had never made a documentary in the UK – or never successfully, since there had been a couple of abortive starts. Was I still seen as a TV piss-taker? Was my brand toxic to contributors? Occasionally I’d recall a story in the Arabian Nights called ‘The Historic Fart’ about a man who breaks wind noisily at his wedding. He’s so embarrassed he flees the city. Ten years later, he feels he may have served out his exile and returns with a little trepidation and finds himself in the market place, where to his dismay, the very first conversation he overhears is a recollection of his now-legendary flatulence.

And what about me? Were my farts still at the forefront of people’s minds?

Forced to engage more seriously with UK ideas, my mind turned to subject areas that exist in a more extreme form in the UK than in the US. From there it was a short hop to Islamic fundamentalism. I spent several months reading, and watching videos of so-called hate preachers. The soi-disant caliphate of Isis was in its considerable heyday around that time. The reports of life regimented according to strict eighth-century Islamic practice, with brutal punishments, and taxes on Christians, and slaves, was reminiscent of The Pursuit of the Millennium by Norman Cohn, which I still hadn’t read, or millenarian sects described in histories of the English Civil War. I downloaded issues of Dabiq – Isis’s English language propaganda magazine – marvelling at its marriage of up-to-date desktop-publishing software and medieval theology. It featured full-colour photos of a Syrian air-pilot being burned to death in a cage – alongside numerous paragraphs of references to religious authorities that looked, to the outside eye, rigorously footnoted and sourced. Another issue ran an almost Smash Hits-style Q&A with the captured pilot before death.

I wasn’t seriously thinking of visiting the area – too dangerous – but I wondered about meeting the nexus of UK Isis supporters. Among the most visible British Isis advocates was Anjem Choudary. As a student of medicine at the University of Southampton, he’d gone by the name Andy and had a reputation as a party boy – a famous easily googleable photo shows him laughing in front of a table laden with beers next to a copy of the men’s magazine Mayfair. But later, after graduating, he’d fallen under the influence of the preacher Omar Bakri Muhammad and embraced a violent interpretation of the Koran. He’d pop up on Fox News and Channel 4, evangelizing – in a way that was oddly bland and legalistic – for a wholly Islamic sharia-based government in the UK.

When it came to trying to pin him down for filming, Anjem proved elusive. He’d talk to our AP, seem flattered by our attentions, then go quiet for weeks. Once or twice he notified us at the last minute of the locations of his weekly street ministries – where he did ‘dawah’. One Sunday, in the shadow of the City of London skyscrapers, we turned up to find his ragtag band of street preachers handing out leaflets to a bemused multicultural public, alternately preaching at them and berating the many hecklers. We got almost nothing usable out of the encounter. During our only significant conversation, Anjem fired questions at me while a minion or colleague filmed us. They put the conversation up on YouTube, editing out most of my answers.

A few days after that, an associate of Anjem’s, Abu Baraa, which means ‘father of innocence’, invited us to speak to him at his community centre. Abu Baraa was a little younger than me, of Pakistani heritage – he’d been born Mizanur Rahman and grew up in London. He appeared thoughtful and intelligent, explaining in mild tones that we’d fallen prey to Western propaganda in our view of the Caliphate: yes, there were ‘beatings’ of wrongdoers but we had to understand they weren’t being hit very hard; ‘slaves’ was a misnomer, he said, and you couldn’t rape your slaves anyway, they had to consent to sex; and besides, he continued, didn’t we have slaves in the UK? Weren’t the people locked up in prison ‘in bondage’ as slaves?

He went on the attack, asking what was the foundation of my supposed moral outlook? How did I distinguish right from wrong? If I did not look to the Koran or the Bible, what was the framework by which I judged actions? Suddenly I was on the back foot. I thought about saying, ‘I’m asking the questions,’ and dodging the debate but at the time I felt the ballsier move was to belly up and engage – make a case for a rational system of values founded in 2,000 years of philosophy, ethics, the Enlightenment – but I was struggling to do it cogently. I heard myself appealing to a Western liberal tradition, human rights, opposition to torture and capital punishment, but it was all pretty vague and the moment I invoked the idea of ‘the West’ I was aware I was already on thin ice. ‘Who gets to decide?’ he kept saying. ‘So it’s Western civilization is it? The West decides?’ Afterwards my director Jamie Pickup told me: ‘You got owned.’

When filming prospects are looking unpromising, I can usually salve my concerns if there is at least one contributor I feel positive about – someone compelling and different. And here there was: an Irishman named Khalid Kelly. He had been a nurse, named Terry Kelly, in Saudi Arabia. Imprisoned on a drinking-related offence, he’d converted behind bars, becoming increasingly radical after he was released. He was now back living in Ireland and his soft lilt of an accent and his amiable manner made a striking contrast with his radical views. All the signifiers were at loggerheads with the usual image of the jihadi – he sounded like he should be sharing a Guinness and talking up the craic to be had in Dingle. Alas, after showing some interest in our project at first, as time went on Khalid Kelly got cold feet, possibly for fear that he could get locked up for ‘glorifying terrorism’.

And there was a second stumbling block with UK ideas: there seemed to be three other documentary crews chasing all the stories we were interested in. The tiny handful of Islamists we might have been able to film with were already involved with other producers, who would whisper in their ears in self-interested fashion that they shouldn’t do any other publicity. For a while we pursued leads among Muslims advocating a conservative non-jihadi brand of Islam. I became interested in a YouTuber and Islamic provocateur who called himself Dawah Man, real name Imran Ibn Mansur. One of his videos was entitled ‘Would atheists drink their dad’s sperm?’ I liked the cheekiness of his delivery – he came across like a Muslim Ali G and professed to have been, at one time, a rapper on the verge of huge success. But even he didn’t want to tango with me.

Gradually, without the realistic prospect of contributors, the story withered and died. Abu Baraa and Anjem were locked up on convictions for advocating terrorism. They each got five years. Another man in their circle who I’d seen at the dawah in east London – Abu Izzadeen, born in Hackney as Trevor Green – was arrested on a train in Hungary, presumably attempting to migrate to Isis. A year after we were in touch, in November 2016, Khalid Kelly blew himself up in a suicide attack on Iraqi troops during the Battle of Mosul.

I regret that we weren’t able to make that film on radical Islam. It feels like a gap – a lacuna in my oeuvre (and no one likes one of those). I’ve done programmes on extreme Christians, ultra-nationalist Jewish Israelis, white supremacists and black supremacists, but nothing on the most polarizing religious topic de nos jours – the threat, or alleged threat, posed by violent Islamism. In the end, it was a failure of trust. The atmosphere was so heightened – the fear of being locked up in the UK for ‘glorifying terrorism’, the sense of suspicion of outsiders – as to make it impossible. A few months later the other crews’ efforts aired: Jamie Roberts’ The Jihadis Next Door; Peter Beard’s My Son the Jihadi and one or two others. As powerful and well-made as they were, even in them there was a vague sense of distance – a lack of intimacy – with the central element of the phenomenon, the home lives of the violent jihadis themselves, slightly missing.

In a practical spirit of thinking about shows we could actually make, I began work on a film about alcohol. Years earlier I’d seen Rain in My Heart, Paul Watson’s harrowing documentary that follows the end stages of several severely addicted drinkers: two or three of them died during the course of filming and there is an unforgettable scene of a young man in his bedroom who necks an entire glass of red wine and then promptly vomits it back up again. ‘Wouldn’t sipping, if you have to have a drink—?’ comes Paul Watson’s voice from behind the camera. ‘I don’t sip,’ says the young man, with a perverse pride.

My director, Tom Barrow, and AP, Grace Hughes-Hallett, secured access to the liver unit of King’s College Hospital in south-east London. For weeks they hung about, meeting the hospital’s regulars. The recce process dragged on and on. The people who would agree to be filmed tended to be street drinkers – homeless older men – who, it was felt, would give a false sense of the nature of the problem: keeping it at a safe remove. Our contributors should be proxies of the audience: this could be you. One day in August, having just arrived back from a family holiday in America, my series producer called to say the team had found a young man they liked and we should film.

Thirty-one-years old, an academic administrator, Joe Walker had been found collapsed in a street by a stranger and brought to A&E. He was four days into his detox when I met him: lying in bed, battered by his recent dissipation, with weird bruising on his legs and a cut above his eye.

‘That’s never happened before,’ he said in a shaky voice, looking at his legs. ‘It’s quite frightening.’

The nurse in charge of detox asked if he could walk and he hobbled around for a minute or so with the help of a stick.

‘Definitely ataxia,’ the nurse said.

‘It started with a bottle of vodka a day,’ Joe told me. ‘Then it went up to two bottles of vodka a day.’

He’d been four and a half years sober. Then he’d been turned down for a job and gone through a break-up. ‘I just thought “Sod it” and went for it.’

Joe became our central character. We filmed him intermittently over several months and alongside him a handful of other characters who appeared in the finished film – a big, soft-spoken South African called Pieter; a French and West African sometime waitress named Aurelie; an old-school Londoner and antiques dealer called Stuart.

Several weeks into filming, after he’d been released from hospital, I called on Joe at his flat above a parade of shops in Denmark Hill. He was doing well, on the wagon and looking for work. We talked about his life and his upbringing. He showed me some photos of trips he’d taken, including one to Australia – in the picture he was sunburned at the wheel of a boat; and in another, dressed in a red jumpsuit getting ready to go skydiving. ‘I was out pissing it up, quite frankly,’ he said, and mentioned a girlfriend he’d been horrible to through his drinking. There were books and CDs on his shelves that reminded me of my own tastes or the tastes of someone like me, a copy of Goliath by Max Blumenthal and the music of Nick Drake, and the feeling of similarity was only reinforced when I discovered he’d played Sky Masterson in a school production of Guys and Dolls – the only musical I think I can say I know almost all the words to, other than Jesus Christ Superstar. We sang ‘Luck Be A Lady’ together.

A few weeks after that, word came that he was drinking again. We entered a weird phase of production, aware that he was homeless and vulnerable, but unsure of exactly how we should attempt to tell his story. It would have felt strange and wrong to film him on the streets but he didn’t seem to want to reach out to his friends and family. Off camera, my director Tom encouraged Joe to seek services, both for his own good, and also because we knew it was our best chance of getting a useable scene. And in fact, by a stroke of luck, a week or so into this phase, we happened to be at the hospital shooting a different sequence when we heard that Joe was in A&E, inebriated and behaving erratically, demanding and then refusing treatment. I found him outside on a front wall of the hospital on Denmark Hill, bruised and bloody, shirtless, wearing an overcoat. His hands were shaking so much he couldn’t hold his cigarette. With one of the A&E doctors, a young woman, I helped him inside, into a small room, where he lay down on a hospital bed. His body was racked with the pain of withdrawal. He was buffeted by the craving for more alcohol, pricked by thoughts of lost loves, and almost crazed with self-pity.

‘You’ve actually been to see us three times in the last twenty-four hours,’ the doctor said. ‘What are you hoping we might be able to do?’

‘Detox,’ Joe said, and hiccupped.

Then, after she’d gone, he asked, ‘Can I have some Lucozade?’ He looked frightened and awestruck, as though it was taking every reserve of strength to make the request. I went and got some from a vending machine. When I got back he was lying down, groaning, in his dirty pink jumper. His head wobbled as he drank.

‘How are you feeling?’ I asked.

‘Withdrawing very heavily,’ he said. ‘It’s like I’m dying as a person.’

‘What was it that triggered you?”

‘My ex. Wouldn’t talk to me.’ He paused, then said, with utter hopelessness, ‘The most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen.’ He lay back, closed his eyes and gave a series of heaving bronchial sobs.

I wasn’t sure what to say or do, but knew he needed to hear something to boost his morale. Absurdly, I heard myself ask: ‘Do you want some Lucozade?’ Then I said: ‘You can get back on track.’

‘No, I can’t, I think this is endgame.’

There was a pause. He looked at me. ‘You must hate me,’ he said.

I hadn’t seen this coming. ‘No,’ I replied. ‘No! What a strange thing to say.’

He brightened. ‘Do you like me?’

‘Of course I like you.’

The doctor and the detox nurse came back in to say that they’d agreed to admit Joe for another extended treatment, though they had some misgivings based on his pattern of coming and going. ‘It’s actually quite neurologically dangerous, Joe, to keep on detoxing someone. But obviously we’re very happy to help this time.’

‘Thank you,’ Joe said with an air of performed sincerity. I assumed it was performed because he was having trouble holding himself together and was trying to converse appropriately but then, almost as soon as the doctor and nurse had left, Joe announced he was off. ‘I just want to get a bottle of vodka and go to Ruskin Park.’ I was a little shocked at the idea that, having just been admitted, he was now leaving again. I tried to dissuade him but he slipped past me, heading outside – for a moment he was forestalled by another nurse who spotted him and escorted him back – but then he was off again, making his way out into the crowds of the High Street, like a balloon wafting into the sky, watched by me and the doctor who’d been helping him.

We stood looking on with a sense of sad impotence – he had blown it, the doctor turned to go inside – and that was when he reappeared, with a bottle in his hands.

‘It’s only Perrier,’ he said when he reached us. ‘I didn’t drink anything.’

We followed him inside again. This time he stayed.

Afterwards I reflected on how uncomfortable it had been, filming Joe in the depth of his crisis. The awfulness of his addiction and not knowing how to help. I thought about how much easier it would have been if he’d had a girlfriend or parent with him who would have been the lightning rod for his emotional outreach. I wasn’t sure how to be a friend to Joe in his moment of need, nor whether it was appropriate to try to be one. I was also aware how inadequate my expressions of support sounded. Do you want some more Lucozade?

With Joe Walker, a few months after filming Drinking to Oblivion.

And yet, later when I watched it, I realized my discomfort and impotence were what gave the scene its power. My awkwardness, the Lucozade, were both embarrassing and ludicrous but also eloquent expressions of what many feel when confronted with addiction.

When the film came out, titled Drinking to Oblivion, it seemed to touch people in a different way than other documentaries I’d done. I wondered if it was because it took place in Britain. It was – literally and figuratively – closer to home. But my deeper secret was that it had also meant something more to me. As a British person, a south Londoner, I’d come home and been able to make a programme close to where I’d gone to school; where my Mum had grown up; where my grandparents had met and married.

It felt like a very personal sort of vindication. I’d served out a sentence. My farts were forgotten after all.