Gotta Get Theroux This: My Life and Strange Times in Television
Gotta Get Theroux This: Chapter 9

I wasn’t, in fact, working at NewsRadio but for a topical HBO sketch show about the presidential elections called Not Necessarily the Elections. I’d sent the producer a packet of material months earlier, in the fallow period after TV Nation had ended, and been hired based on a single funny idea, about fans of the acid-folk group the Grateful Dead following Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole around on the campaign trail in the wake of Jerry Garcia’s death.

The gig was for two months, but for me a big part of the appeal was that my day job could be combined with the active pursuit of my destiny as a sitcom writer. Sarah, my girlfriend-now-wife-kind-of, had stayed in New York. If anything she was a little too relaxed and philosophical about our separation, saying, ‘It’ll be good to have some space.’ Later, in LA, I recounted the story of this parting to a friend’s girlfriend. She explained that in women’s language that meant we were splitting up. I took this on board. Splitting up. In a human-like way, I attempted to do soundings of my inner depths about how I might feel about ‘splitting up’. Or like a ham-radio operator trying to make out a signal through a fog of static. No clear emotional response came back.

I’d also had to send David Mortimer an email telling him to postpone production on Louis Theroux’s Weird Weekends. I was aware it was tricky emotional ground – that it could be construed as a strange move on my part and maybe a little ungrateful-seeming, as schedules and budgets were now presumably having to be reconfigured, and vast BBC cogs screeching and sparking as they went into reverse – and I got Sarah to read the message to make sure I’d struck the right tone. I’d signed off, ‘I hope you will continue to view me as your boy from the BBC’ or something equally cringe. Though I said I’d be back in September, I was secretly thinking I might bail on Louis Theroux’s Weird Weekends, get hired on NewsRadio, and never come back.

Los Angeles was a vast sun-drenched factory town. For a couple of weeks I was back staying with my uncle Peter in Long Beach, an hour’s drive from Hollywood. Later, I rented a sub-let that came with a very needy kitten that had been weaned too young and was always mewing for attention and treadling me with its paws. I entered into a dysfunctional relationship with the kitten similar to ones I’d had with other people close to me. It needed me and I seemed to need it to need me.

The city was the reverse. Aloof and indifferent, it ignored me and I fell hard for it as a result – in pick-up artist parlance they call this ‘negging’, seduction by insult. Pale and skinny and bespectacled, I had little or nothing to offer the city of beautiful bodies and success, which made it all the more tantalizing.

I loved the morning adventure of driving to work on a Hollywood lot – Sunset-Gower studios – down roads colonnaded with palm trees. In my borrowed car, I felt like a knight riding into battle. The lot itself had the air of a medieval town, circled by high walls with guarded gates, and in place of a portcullis an electric pole that went up.

I turned out to be oddly ill qualified for my new job. The show was a US cousin to the eighties comedy format Not the Nine O’Clock News. It had been commissioned for four episodes over the summer – Bob Dole was then running against the incumbent Bill Clinton – and was hosted by the comedian Dennis Miller, though he was never around until we taped. Several of the other writers had come over from a live chat show Miller hosted, which was dark over the summer. With their day-jobs on the live show in their back pockets, the Miller writers were faintly dismissive of the hoary old eighties holdover they now found themselves working on. Even when I was staying an hour away in Long Beach I was the first one in the office and the last to leave. I shared a room with a talented stand-up comedian and writer called David Feldman. Alas, having had the one idea involving Deadheads for Dole, I struggled to come up with anything else.

By coincidence, also on the Sunset-Gower lot were the NewsRadio offices. By now I’d had a first, cursory meeting with Paul Simms – he’d seemed friendly, though a little distracted – and I’d sent some follow-up plot ideas along. But the line had then gone quiet and I wasn’t quite sure what the next move was – I didn’t want to badger him too much – and during breaks or just going about my day I wandered the central courtyard, hoping I might bump into him.

Finally, through his assistant, another meet-up was arranged. It was early afternoon when I arrived. Tinfoil had been put up on the windows to keep out the light. There were classic video machines about the place. Probably it says more about my own state of mind and the weird level of emotional investment I had in the whole notion of being a sitcom writer – I was like an airport frisking wand on its highest setting – but I had the disquieting feeling of there being no adults around; it was like being back in a sixth-form common room or a frat house the afternoon following a big party.

Paul, in a large back office, was in conversation with a PA called Spider, who was lounging on a sofa. ‘Wooden Ships’ by Crosby, Stills and Nash played – ‘Wooden ships on the water! Very free!’ – and someone remarked on the ridiculousness of the lyric about eating ‘purple berries.’

I nodded and tried to think of something funny to say about Crosby, Stills and Nash or purple berries.

One of the story ideas I’d sent over involved a character on the show becoming obsessed with Dungeons & Dragons and having a psychotic break, going down into the sewers of New York, thinking he’s an elf or a wizard.

‘Yeah, thanks for your ideas,’ Paul now said. ‘We’re actually working on one about Dungeons and Dragons already . . . So you’re based here now? You should come to a taping.’

‘I’d love to,’ I said.

He mentioned that the Writers Guild required a minimum number of scripts to be farmed out to freelancers each year. Maybe I could write one.

‘Wow, that would be great,’ I said.

Then he went to work editing a scene and complaining about one of the extras, who was over-acting. ‘This fucking guy at the back is killing me,’ he said.

Afterwards I was a little deflated. I had been trying to think what the office had reminded me of and later I realized it was of a story in Twilight Zone: The Movie in which a child with superpowers has taken the rest of his family hostage and they exist in a fearful state of forced fun. I wondered if this was the life I had dreamed of. Was I giving up my own BBC TV series for the possibility of freelancing a single script? And handing it in to a man in a room with tinfoil on the windows? And what was wrong with the lyric about eating purple berries? I trudged back to the Not Necessarily the Elections offices, wondering what exactly had I imagined life writing on a sitcom would be like.

We began taping segments, including the Deadheads for Dole skit, but not much else by me, since in the six or so weeks I’d been there I’d written virtually no other usable material. My office mate, David, had been kind enough to include me as co-writer on some of his sketches – one based on the idea that the language was running out of words and we needed to invent a new letter, the ‘triple-you’, and another about the Vice Presidential Republican nominee Jack Kemp and a fictional prehistory he had as a singer in a doowop group called The Kemptones. I’d had an idea about a robot running for president but that hadn’t made the cut and another about a makeover show for homeless people. That one was produced but bombed so badly in front of audiences in rehearsal that it was also tossed out.

One evening, eating a lonely meal at a fast-food restaurant called El Pollo Loco at Fountain and Vine in Hollywood, I stared into my ‘Pollo Bowl’ and realized I was being ridiculous. Of course I should do my TV series. With a new gust of anxiety generated by the idea that Louis Theroux’s Weird Weekends might become real, I went back to my apartment and sent a long venting email to David Mortimer, starting ‘Dear Dave,’ and confessing all my doubts and misgivings – about my competence, about his competence, about the folly of embarking on a set of four hour-long programmes when I wasn’t sure he understood my basic concept, and that I wasn’t interested in making piss-taking shows that pandered to British prejudices about Yanks.

David sent back a considered email taking my points one by one and ending by saying he didn’t like to be called Dave.