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

It started, like the hiss and whisper of train tracks announcing a coming train, with bits of noise on social media. On Twitter, there was a murmur of interest in my old programmes, some of which had turned up on Netflix. Young people tagged me in tweets expressing their appreciation for episodes of Weird Weekends – shows that were nearly twenty years old – and even, on occasion, avowed an unlikely amorous interest in that older version of me (if that two-sizes-too-big leather-jacketed gurning man-child was me, which at this distance I wasn’t sure it was).

Then a more unexpected development: unlicensed merchandise. T-shirts, Christmas jumpers, pillows, birthday cards, mugs – some of it frankly baffling in conception: one of the mugs showed me, for some reason, with large breasts – and often with the legend ‘Gotta Get Theroux This’ or ‘Sleep Tight Theroux The Night’. I had spent years, nay decades, hearing people say ‘Theroux the keyhole’, ‘Theroux the looking glass,’ even in the primary school playground – literally when I was about five years old – ‘Louis Theroux the ball! Ha ha!’ So I was by now anaesthetized to the comic effect of that particular jeu de mots but I was, nevertheless, grateful for what I took to be an appreciative sentiment.

Every now and then I’d hear of someone who’d got a tattoo of me on a leg or arm, which I found flattering but also stressful. Being emblazoned permanently on someone’s body seemed to carry with it certain responsibilities, and it was far from clear what those might be. Another darker part of me, the part that liked it, seemed to think that perhaps more people should be getting tattoos of me, and the notion even flitted through my head of incentivizing them with free signed DVDs.

A mug of me with tits? Sure! Why not?

A waitress on the West Coast of Ireland birthed a Twitter account, @NoContextLouis, with screen grabs from shows and the relevant piece of dialogue: one showed me apparently saying: ‘She said there was no dick too big’, another ‘Can I work the swan tonight?’ One of my pleasures in my years of making TV had always been getting into situations where I was forced by circumstances to say something ludicrous or asinine with a straight face. ‘He called you a bald-faced fucker.’ ‘Do you want some Lucozade?’ I enjoyed @NoContextLouis as a celebration of those moments.

There was also a Twitter account – @louistherouxbot – that used a computer algorithm to generate random bits of ‘Louis Theroux commentary’ of a wholly nonsensical sort. Sensing a PR opportunity, I announced on Twitter that I would record one of the lines if I got enough retweets, and ended up using my best ‘serious VO’ voice to announce, ‘I’m in Amsterdam to meet Hannah, a former IT expert turned cybergoth who believes that Hull is a portal to Hell.’

Peak ironic-Louis-appreciation – I still haven’t found a catchy way to describe the phenomenon – may have been a series of Louis Theroux-themed club nights around Britain. I didn’t delve too deep into the details – it has always felt unseemly to be over-interested in whatever cult status I may or may not enjoy – but I did stumble across a short video clip of ten or fifteen people on a dance floor, grooving around while wearing masks with my face on. I can only compare my feeling to the scene in Being John Malkovich when the eponymous main character enters a portal in his own head and arrives in a world in which everyone looks like him.

It was hard to judge the exact tone of some of the appreciation. It definitely wasn’t nasty. At the same time, it was clearly partly tongue-in-cheek and playful – naturally so, since it revolved around a kind of fiction, a constructed TV identity and not the real me, whoever that may be. Nancy researched the company that was making some of the merchandise. I’d wondered who else they featured on their iPhone cases and pyjamas, hoping it might be philosophers and revolutionaries like Jean Genet and Hakim Bey. I was a little disappointed to find their other honourees were David Hasselhoff and a Sky Sports commentator I’d never heard of. Nonetheless, it was basically flattering, and it was only strange to achieve some kind of ambiguous elder-statesman status when I felt my grip on success was still so tentative, my sense of security so fragile.

And the serendipitous part was that the slow percolation of interest among younger viewers coincided with us finishing up My Scientology Movie.

The film had been edited through the end of 2015 and beginning of 2016 – spending more than six months in the cutting room, four months longer than any of my TV projects. It had been a beast to get under control – for a while John and Simon had kept me out of the edit altogether. ‘I like to give my directors a little space to play with the material,’ Simon said when I called to ask what was going on. I felt like Colonel Sanders after he’d signed his name and image rights away to KFC and wasn’t allowed to open another restaurant, pressing my face against an imaginary screen door and saying, Hey, guys, remember me? Can I help fry the chicken tonight?

Then, having ‘played’ their way to a standstill, they invited me in to collaborate, and I threw myself into helping, which seemed only to make matters worse, at least for a while, until gradually the four of us – me, John, Simon, and Paul the editor – found a way through the material: an opening that set up the idea of Scientology as something beguiling and mysterious, the introduction of the device of the re-enactments, the story of my relationship with Marty balanced against a mounting sense of intimidation from the Church, and the final-act moment of confrontation with Marty on the street outside the studio where we’d filmed the recreation of the Hole.

In the last few weeks of the edit, we sent the Scientologists a list of all the allegations the film made. There was then a process of reflecting the Church’s denials and ‘clarifications’ using on-screen text. I had slightly dreaded this, worrying it would emasculate the story – clutter it up and weaken it with qualification. In fact, in the end, the inclusion of the Church’s counter-statements strengthened the drama by giving the viewer more access to the Scientologists’ mindset, shedding light on how they explain their actions to themselves.

Among the claims in the letters from the Church was the delightful explanation that they had filmed us at various locations only because they were working on their own documentary about me. I couldn’t help finding this idea flattering and intriguing, though at the time of press there is still no sign of My Louis Theroux Movie by the Church of Scientology.

The BBC legal and compliance teams for the most part let us say what we wanted. The only significant point of contention for them was that the scene of Tom Cruise playing backgammon was too close to the re-enactment of the Hole and that it might be construed as suggesting the star of Risky Business and the Mission Impossible franchise knew about David Miscavige’s alleged abuse and that he was around when it was allegedly happening. (Scientology denies any abuse in the Hole, or the existence of a Hole. Or the existence of a film called Holes starring Shia LaBeouf. Have I mentioned that?) To placate our lawyers, we tweaked some commentary and moved the backgammon scene a little further down the film. This still wasn’t enough. In the end the decision was referred all the way up to Danny Cohen, the BBC’s then Director of Television. From his Olympian roost, he ruled that yes, it was OK to show Tom Cruise and David Miscavige playing backgammon.

Along with its letters and rebuttals, the Church also sent a thick ring-binder full of printed papers in individual plastic sheaves. It was entitled ‘Letters from Executives and Staff who have been at the Gold Base since the 1990s’. It contained a hundred or so written testimonials from Sea Org personnel, in a variety of fonts, many with jazzy photos of the correspondents grinning and looking as though they were trying a little too hard to telegraph freedom and self-expression and definitely-not-in-a-cult-ness. What was eerie was the way the letters all hit the same talking points. Every one described the luxurious conditions staff live in and featured a vignette depicting Miscavige’s wonderful personality. ‘He is the most selfless person I have ever met.’ ‘He is the most compassionate man I have ever seen.’ ‘I will never forget the first time I met him . . . He came and personally spoke to me and asked me my name.’ ‘He is the most caring person I have ever seen.’

I imagined the orders coming in. Here is what your letter should look like. Here is a template but make it your own! The accumulation of over-the-top praise was so formulaic it had the effect of sounding utterly false.

In late 2015 the film was accepted into the London Film Festival, and it was around the same time that we sent a link for Marty to watch. We’d maintained a cordial long-distance relationship in the months of editing. There had been some talk of possibly flying him out for the premiere, and though that idea was dropped, we were still hopeful he would support the film and view it as a fair-minded albeit warts-and-all portrait. He wrote back to say, in somewhat muted terms, he had found it ‘clever’ and to congratulate us for being true to our word about showing the conditions in the Hole. A few days later he wrote again. This time he wasn’t so complimentary. He said he hated the film and he blamed Simon for – as he saw it – conning him into participating in a project that was wholly different than the one that was promised. On the plus side, he seemed to regard me as too trivial and unserious to deserve the same level of vitriol – though he did call me an ‘assclown’. He labelled John a ‘rimless zero’. In subsequent months, he made other false allegations – claiming that I had egged him on to be more lurid in his scripting of the alleged abuse in the Hole.

Three years on, the biggest mystery remains the ‘rimless zero’ remark.

I couldn’t find it in me to be annoyed at Marty. He had put a lot into the project and I could well understand why he felt hurt when it didn’t turn out to be as uncritical of him as he might have liked. I also tended to see his turning against the film as part of his general disillusionment with the world of anti-Scientology. And in fact in subsequent months and years Marty would blog and post videos attempting to debunk any TV shows and movies that were critical of Scientology.

It was widely assumed that he had been paid off by the Church and was now, in effect, back working for David Miscavige.

The night of the premiere, I rode down to Leicester Square with Nancy in a fancy car laid on by the festival. John and I introduced the film, welcoming everyone and in particular any Scientologists that were there, as they undoubtedly were, and then I skipped out, feeling no need to see it for the hundredth time, and also a little anxious about being exposed so directly to the reaction of the audience. Afterwards we did a Q&A, and I found it difficult to judge the mood of the room. It was only later – when I joined my mum and her husband, Michael, for dinner at Pizza Express, and I saw their reaction and how much they’d enjoyed it and how proud they were – that I felt more confident about the film and its prospects.

Over the next few days reviews appeared, all positive, and I looked forward to a distributor imminently buying the film and giving it a wide release. What I didn’t expect, though perhaps I should have done, was another pushback from the Church of Scientology.

It began in an almost comical fashion with a visit, one Sunday morning, by a pair of police officers. I’d been making pancakes for the kids, and I invited the two men into the kitchen. In the incongruous setting of our disorderly toy-strewn house – me wearing my pyjamas and dressing gown, with the two big boys watching The Dumping Ground in the other room, and Walter in his playpen – I heard one of the PCs say, ‘We’re here because a serious threat has been made against you, which has been passed on to us.’

‘Right,’ I said, waiting for the words to make sense.

‘The threat was made in an anonymous phone call by a Mr X. It was made – as we understand it – in a phone call to the Church of Scientology, in East Grinstead. The gentleman in question had seen a film you have made and had taken a negative view of the film, saying it had caused him to wish to hurt you. The Church of Scientology was concerned about your well-being, so we’re here to make sure you are OK. May I ask, have you seen anything out of the ordinary or suspicious?’

As he said this, I realized it had all the hallmarks of a Scientology scare tactic – in the guise of helping, but actually with the intent to cause fear and disquiet, they had invented a fictitious threat. In a weird way, it was almost gratifying to see the Scientologists still apparently working off their old 1970s playbook – like finding a collectable bit of kitsch from the seventies in a junk shop, a Rolf Harris Stylophone or a Speak & Spell. Wow! Remember these? I explained this to the police, though either I didn’t persuade them, or professionalism required them to continue to act as though the threat was real.

‘Any men lurking in the shadows, sir? Signs of breaking and entering?’

‘No, I’ve just told you . . .’

They ended by saying they were putting me on a ‘priority list’ with a special phone number – presumably my calls would ring on a giant red phone on the Police Commissioner’s desk. At the very least, I figured, it might help when there were unruly elements kicking off outside the house and we were trying to settle the children.

But the police visit was, in a sense, a mere tinhorn fanfare for the arrival of a more worrying development.

A message came in from Simon. Something in it made me think it was ominous and I called back, after the kids’ supper one evening, from the quiet retreat of our top-floor bedroom, to hear him say, in a voice that was unusually grave, ‘Yeah so, we’ve had a letter from David Miscavige’s personal lawyers. Apparently you sent a tweet that they consider libellous and they are threatening legal action.’

‘Oh dear,’ I said.

‘Yeah.’

‘That’s not good is it.’

‘No. Sorry.’ This was said in a manner so heartfelt and final that it suggested, not just that this threat to do harm really was serious but also that there wasn’t much he would be able to offer in the way of help. It was my Twitter account and if I was going to use it to libel vengeful high-profile figures, that was on me.

He ended by suggesting I call Nigel, the media lawyer who’d worked on the movie, which I did. He also forwarded me the letter. It quoted from a tweet – or rather a retweet, since the words had auto-generated when I’d clicked on a button to share an article – that said, and I quote, ‘David Miscavige is a terrorist.’ Yeah. That wasn’t good. I recalled tweeting the article – I’d had some misgivings on account of its overheated content and had wondered about erasing it, but a publicist we’d retained had suggested I didn’t, since apparently that was seen in PR circles as a sign of weakness and would probably only bring more attention. What I didn’t recall – and didn’t think I’d ever actually read – was the wording of the tweet itself. David Miscavige is a terrorist. I pondered all this a little ruefully, then called my agent. In a tone not dissimilar to Simon’s, she said, ‘David Miscavige may be a lot of things but he ain’t a terrorist.’

‘But what do I do?’

‘You need to get a good lawyer and get ready to spend a lot of money. Because I’m telling you now, this could be very expensive.’

A day or two later, another letter arrived from the lawyers acting for Miscavige, filled with more legal sabre-rattling and shield-clanking – ‘false’, ‘outrageous’, ‘defamatory’ – and a demand for an apology. This I might have thought about providing – given that I don’t actually think David Miscavige is a terrorist – except my lawyer warned that the apology would not forestall a claim of financial damages, but in fact, only make one more likely, possibly to the tune of £100,000 or more.

My lawyer advised me to instruct a high-powered QC. A name was suggested, Heather Rogers. She had once been part of the legal team defending the writer Deborah Lipstadt in her libel defence against the historian David Irving, whom she had labelled a Holocaust denier. There were meetings – the QC was as impressive as I’d expected – and as she did her preparation, read the letters, read my tweets, the articles, and viewed the film, and as the bills came in and money haemorrhaged out, I found myself mainly reassured by her level of competence and only slightly distraught at the strangeness of having to pay someone hundreds of pounds to watch a film you’ve made, as research.

Around the same time – towards the end of 2015 – I was making trips up to MediaCity in Salford, where I was appearing on a Christmas edition of the quiz show University Challenge. On the train, I would brood about my own stupidity at sending the tweet and the likelihood of its having catastrophic consequences. I looked up the meaning of ‘terrorist’. You could ‘terrorize’ someone without doing them physical harm, I reasoned. Though, as the Scientology letters pointed out, my tweet had gone out not long after the Charlie Hebdo murders, so I was sort of suggesting that David Miscavige went round stabbing journalists, which he hasn’t done as far as I know.

I did a Twitter inventory to see how many of my followers were real people. It suggested I’d only published the tweet to a million people, not 1.8 million. And in fact only a few thousand had probably seen it. I told this to Nigel, the lawyer.

‘Yes, I’m not sure how helpful that is for us,’ he said.

The case motivated me to do well in University Challenge. I was getting a small fee for each appearance. If my team went all the way, I’d only need another £98,000 for the war chest, though come to think of it that wasn’t counting legal fees.

In the final I got on a hot streak, answering questions on Mad Men, Tennyson, and Pope Linus I. We won. It improved my frame of mind for about fifteen minutes. Another legal letter came in from Miscavige’s lawyers. We sent one back. Despite all the polysyllables and legal verbiage, it was, I realized, just a more sophisticated and more expensive version of two kids in a playground saying ‘Come on then! If you want some!’ ‘You and whose army! Hold me back! Hold me back!’ but neither of them really wanting to fight.

Still, it was stressful and not helping my equanimity around this time was the sudden onset of a debilitating pain in the groin and the realization, after I checked myself in the mirror, that one of my testicles had grown to roughly four times its normal size. It was a couple of days after Christmas by now. Nancy had made plans for us all to stay with friends in Norfolk, but I showed her the questionable testicle, and she agreed I should get it checked out while they began the holiday. They drove off, and I made my way down to an urgent health clinic and there followed an embarrassing procession around a sequence of A&E departments where a series of doctors stared at and felt my balls – then asked if it was OK to let the trainee doctors sit in and have a look – and tried to figure out why one of my testes was the size of a goose egg.

Finally, late in the day, with the light gone outside, the last doctor said with a smile, ‘Yes, just an infection. Orchitis is the medical name. Antibiotics should sort that out, but you can’t be too careful. I hope you don’t mind me saying, I do like your documentaries. Anything new in the pipeline?’

I took the train to Norwich, where I joined Nancy and the boys, and the following morning I pushed Walter’s pram around a hillside that overlooks the city, conscious of my testicle jostling in my trousers like a spiteful troll. The next night was New Year’s Eve. We visited my old friend Adam Buxton and his family at their converted farmhouse, staying up and toasting the year ahead while I wondered inwardly whether I’d be remortgaging the house, and should I just apologize, or did that, as the lawyers claimed, lay me open to massive damages.

The next day we drove across to the easternmost edge of Norfolk, a little village called Sea Palling, whose buildings were mostly washed away in disastrous floods in 1953 that had killed seven people. Nancy and I and the boys whiled away the hours in an arcade filled with machines that cascaded two-penny pieces and spat out long snakes of tickets that you could trade for prizes, and I tried to forget about the legal case.

After a few days of antibiotics, the testicle returned to its accustomed size, presumably a little wistful about its brief visit to the big leagues. And by a strange quirk of fate, the Miscavige infection went down a few weeks later – finally succumbing to the weeks of high-dosage legal correspondence. Afterwards, along with the relief at the situation having gone away, I had the feeling of having been initiated, and that maybe this was the price of having been credited with more bravery than I deserved. Perhaps on occasion you had to weather misfortune that was undeserved – or at least, unglamorous, unexciting, and ten times more worrying than an angry glistening wrestler with nipples like rivets or an exasperated Klansman caught out with Nazi figurines.

Other than occasional attempts to hack my emails, which may or may not have emanated from Scientology, or the News of the World, or a Russian troll farm, things went largely quiet. Which was welcome, but there was still the question of whether anyone would ever get to see the film.