Gotta Get Theroux This: My Life and Strange Times in Television
Gotta Get Theroux This: Chapter 11

That first Weird Weekend with the militiamen and survivalists – and the sense of belonging I’d felt on location among people utterly unlike me – taught me something about my own survival in the world of television. It seemed paradoxical: the success of the shows would hinge on my ability to open up on location, lose perspective, go native, and though elements of it were an act, there was a large part of it that was real. Later, when the time came to do publicity interviews, I would say that I felt more comfortable among the supposedly weird people I documented than I did in the corridors of the BBC, and I was only half-joking.

We made three more episodes in the first half of 1997, one on male porn performers, another on UFO contactees, a third on Christian evangelists of the healings-and-miracles variety. I tried to remember the lessons I’d learned from that first excursion in Idaho. For each episode I spent a concentrated period of time in a subculture alien to my own outlook and way of life, in which the subjects had a commitment to something I viewed as wrong-headed, weird, ludicrous or self-destructive. Each focused on a defined area of the country. This helped give the show an organic quality, a unity of place and look. And with each I tried to stick to the idea of giving the programme a sense of pathos and imbuing our contributors with dignity while also not ignoring the fact that they and their worlds were often quite funny.

The episode about male porn performers, in particular, benefited from this double-edged approach. Having sex for a living – staking one’s professional fortunes on an unpredictable physical organ – is strange, kind of funny, and potentially pretty sad, all at once. The young performer we featured, J. J. Michaels, went on to become a friend. As I write this, he is living in Ukraine with his fourth wife, very happily if his Facebook posts are anything to go by. The UFOs episode was arguably the closest to the freaky Americans Yank-tacular that I’d been telling myself I’d been trying to avoid. It is faux-naive and undoubtedly mickey-taking. The emotional stakes are low. The voiceover is over-the-top and silly. But all of that is outweighed by the sheer otherworldliness of the Nevada and Southern California desert terrain and the self-seriousness of the true believers – one of whom, Reverend Robert Short, was a ‘space channel’, able to give voice to a being on another planet, and another of whom, Thor Templar, claimed to have personally killed ten aliens.

Not long after finishing the shows, word came that the BBC2 controller Mark Thompson had seen them and wanted to commission more. I signed up to a two-year deal for twelve more episodes. I think there may also have been a clause about doing some specials – I’m not sure what was in the contract because I don’t think I read it. Contracts made me tense: they made everything too real and I just thought about the pressure of having to fulfil them. But there was no word on when the new shows would actually go out, and there followed a weird interval of a few months.

Around this time Sarah and I separated. She initiated the break-up, possibly thinking a little bit of a reality check would focus my mind and shock me into a more serious commitment to my future with her, or perhaps intent on following her own romantic interests.

One of my periodic episodes of unsought celibacy soon followed. I took an apartment in Fort Greene, a historically black neighbourhood of Brooklyn that was battling the tide of gentrification. The apartment was on the second storey of an elegant brownstone, overlooking Fort Greene Park, on a street lined with towering plane trees. I bought furnishings second-hand at thrift stores and junk shops. The city’s lower income areas were full of these emporia of cast-offs, records, old clothes and board games, kitchen utensils. I enjoyed the air of abandonment that hung over them – the other lives they testified to; the sad way they were arranged; the weird mothball smell and the benign lack of interest of the salespeople. It was the antithesis of the typical commercial encounter’s hard sales and constantly moving inventory, an antidote to the lie we’d been told that we needed new stuff. Thrift stores were like animal shelters, and shopping there was an act of rescue. The fact that the drawers in the dresser didn’t work or the clothes didn’t really fit felt a small price to pay for the chance to build a friendship with an object with its own sad back story.

I was in a strange limbo. I wrote some articles, smoked and drank my nightly allocations of red wine and spliff, watched old movies. It was a little like the interval between taking exams and getting the results. Nothing was quite solid and it was difficult to commit to doing anything in particular. It may be that this otherworldliness contributed to my decision to embark on what, in hindsight, is probably the strangest and most wrong-headed of all the TV documentaries I’ve ever been in involved in.

No one likes to dwell on failure. In certain self-actualization philosophies there is an expression: there is no such thing as failure, only feedback. As someone who took four goes to pass his driving test, I’m not sure that’s true. (‘Well, Mr Theroux, congratulations on once again getting feedback on your test.’) But I do think failure is often more interesting and revealing than success. Second-rate works, pieces that don’t quite come off, are more likely to reveal how they’re done. It’s like watching a magician perform a trick badly.

It started with David Mortimer’s mentioning that the channel was looking for Christmas programming for the following year. At the same time, I’d been thinking about how much I’d enjoyed my time in the worlds of the first four shows, and specifically what great characters we’d found. The idea began gestating of making more out of those contributors. In concert with the Yuletide theme, I wondered about bringing one person from each of the first four programmes to New York to spend Christmas with me at my apartment. As funny as it was seeing me on location in Idaho talking to a neo-Nazi, wouldn’t it be twice as amusing to see a neo-Nazi interacting with a UFO contactee who was channelling a space being from another planet? I mentioned the idea to David, who liked it and encouraged me to put calls out to contributors to test their enthusiasm for taking part.

One of the first calls went to Jerry Gruidl, the Are You Being Served?-loving neo-Nazi from Idaho. Once on the phone with him, I had a feeling I’ve had many times when talking to contributors after taping is concluded: an irrational surprise that it isn’t an act and that they are still exactly who they were on screen: in his case, a poisonous neo-Nazi and anti-Semite.

I asked him about Christmas.

‘What do you normally do?’ I said.

‘The normal thing is I try to thwart the Jews’ plan for the takeover of the world,’ he replied. ‘Anything I can do to screw a Jew, I’ll do.’ He paused, then added, ‘I don’t mean sexually.’

The strange reality check engendered by the call – the ugliness of his discourse and his complete inappropriateness as a candidate for what was basically a reality-TV format – might have been the first red flag if I’d been paying attention, which I guess I wasn’t. There is a world of difference between stumbling across funny contributors in weird situations on location and, on the other hand, flying them out of their normal environment to engineer comical shenanigans on demand. What was I thinking – that we would go a-wassailing around Manhattan with a neo-Nazi while he handed out racist pamphlets? I had enough sense to rule Jerry out of contention for the show, but not enough to wonder if there might be a problem with the concept itself.

We pushed on with other less toxic contributors: Mike Oehler, who lived underground and whose political views were relatively mainstream, other than thinking society was on the verge of collapse; J. J. from the porn show; a Christian preacher called Randy James from the episode we made in Dallas about evangelism.

We began thinking of how we might structure the shoot. This was before Big Brother and the idea of rigging a house. We figured we would put our contributors up in a hotel but our days would involve small missions – one for each contributor – that the other members of the group would help out with.

Filming went smoothly enough, taking place in the week leading up to Christmas – ‘smoothly’ in the sense that there were plenty of made-for-TV arguments between the contributors. Early on it became clear that Randy would be providing the necessary conflict, as so many of our activities seemed to clash with his hard-line Christian beliefs. Unsurprisingly, he was not totally cool with watching J. J. getting it on in a porn shoot and wandered off in a huff to proselytize to passers-by, which then led to a set-to between them about J. J.’s chosen path. ‘You’re dead, spiritually,’ he said with utter gravity.

On Christmas Day, Reverend Robert Short arrived and channelled his alien friend Korton in the front room of my apartment, issuing horoscope-like space messages for each of us for the coming year. Randy’s feeling was that New Age prognostication of this sort was demonic. He opted out of this session, too, and when he came back he accused Reverend Short of being a satanist, whether or not he knew it. I tried to broker a peace on camera.

Afterwards I remember feeling the shoot had been successful. Certainly we’d had our share of explosive arguments. The interventionist, high-concept dimension felt ballsy and brave – like we were real TV makers as opposed to documentary chroniclers of a slightly dull but worthy sort. Only afterwards did I realize how dubious it all was – not so much ethically (since the contributors all knew more or less what they were signing on for) but dramatically: the entire undergirding of my shows, namely that ‘Louis Theroux’ is at the mercy of forces beyond his control, the correspondent who has gone too deep, was short-circuited by the inescapable sense that ‘Louis Theroux’ was also an insincere on-camera ringmaster. The whole exercise was haunted not so much by the ghost of Christmas past as by shades of Jerry Springer past. When it finally aired – almost exactly a year after taping – the public agreed: Louis Theroux’s Weird Christmas was a cracker that made no noise. A few months afterwards, I was approached at a party, in a friendly way, by someone who described himself as a fan – he’d loved the first four Weird Weekends.

‘But that Christmas episode. What was that about? I sat watching it with a friend and I’d built it up to him and it just . . . oh dear.’

‘Well, you weren’t really supposed to enjoy it,’ I offered. ‘It’s more of an avant-garde piece.’

Much later, David tried to claim that we had invented the Big Brother format two years before the fact, which – given that we had no ‘house’, no ‘rig’, no public voting, no evictions, plus me in it – was a bit of a stretch, but I applaud him for trying and any residuals to which I am entitled can be forwarded to my agent.