Gotta Get Theroux This: My Life and Strange Times in Television
Gotta Get Theroux This: Chapter 7

For a year and a half, up the Amazon in a rickety motorboat, in the revolutionary hills of Mexican Chiapas, among religious crazies in Jerusalem and good old boys in the backroads of the Deep South, and occasionally amid the almost-as-alien milieu of a well-funded workplace with ambitions to change American television and society, I worked at TV Nation. But it was all a salutary apprenticeship – I was learning, without realizing it, skills and techniques that I would rely on through the course of my TV career.

That was all in the future. When I started I was simply intent on lasting from week to week, working from segment to segment. I remember thinking if I could get enough together for a reel, maybe I could replace more TV work when Sarah and I left for Vietnam. Later the Vietnam option receded as my position at TV Nation became more secure. I figured I should keep going as long as they would have me.

It was a summer replacement series, commissioned for six episodes on a trial basis. My beat was, more or less, offbeat cultural phenomena – or, for want of a better term, weirdness. For an idea to work, there also needed to be some political or social relevance. A branch of the Ku Klux Klan whose leader was rebranding it a civil rights group for white people. Avon sales ladies who worked in the Amazon rainforest, selling cosmetics to dusty villagers. A company in Baltimore that specialized in cleaning up the mess left by crime scenes and suicides.

At the time I didn’t have enough TV experience to know how far from being a typical show TV Nation was. Much as he had reinvigorated the documentary form with Roger & Me, Michael was attempting a new way of making TV. He would often say he wanted to see meaningful political change in his lifetime, and the production had an enjoyable mission-focused atmosphere of being about something bigger than making entertainment. It was part TV project, part political advocacy group, with a sprinkling of religious cult. ‘Behave as if you are never going to get another job in television,’ he would say. He told us we should consider it a good sign if we were ever arrested while making a segment.

Michael had a year-zero attitude to the work. In long story meetings in his office, he would slouch back in his chair and ramble about his pet subjects, mumbling out of the side of his mouth: his theory that OJ had been framed for the killing of his wife Nicole; the liberationist properties of rock and roll for the baby-boomer generation; random people in the media he had a grudge against for their reviews of Roger & Me. Prior to working at TV Nation, I had thought of myself as being politically liberal, though not in an active way. But TV Nation’s undercurrent of Jacobin anger appealed to me. It spoke to my unacknowledged resentful side that saw the world as corrupt and inhospitable. To be fair, this was driven as much by my own callow angst against those older and more comfortable – and a world I viewed (ridiculously) as having taken insufficient notice of me – as it was by any righteous political attitude. At least as much as the politics, I enjoyed the weirdness and danger of the show and its writers and, in the spirit of Shakespeare’s third life-stage, I was seeking ‘the bubble reputation’ in the camera’s mouth, in charged encounters with excitable extremists on the American fringe.

One of my proudest moments came during the second season of TV Nation while making a segment about Ted Nugent, the right-wing rocker, when I was manhandled and shoved by a gatekeeper at the Washington office of the NRA after being repeatedly told to leave. Later, back in the office, Michael commended me, using me as a kind of object lesson for other staff and drawing attention to the irony that a person born to privilege should end up his fiercest soldier.

Without realizing it, I began to breathe in Michael’s way of making television. There was a house style that dictated everything should be shot hand-held; when a correspondent met a contributor for the first time you captured it for real; there were no sit-down interviews. Everything was geared towards creating a sense of liveliness and authenticity. One of the few times I saw Michael annoyed was when a producer showed a rough cut that had a reverse shot from inside a door as it opened, signalling to any thoughtful viewer that the sequence had been set up in advance. ‘I never want to see that shot in this show,’ Michael said solemnly.

Many of the show’s most memorable segments involved satirical stunts and pranks. In one, Michael hired a ‘TV Nation lobbyist’ to see ‘how much democracy $5000 could buy’ – they managed to get a ‘TV Nation Day’ passed in congress. Another involved Michael flying to Britain and buying a Lordship. In another, a black TV Nation correspondent, Rusty Cundieff, attempted to hail a cab – and was repeatedly passed by in favour of criminals and men in clown suits. All of the segments were supposed to serve the show’s political agenda of advancing socialism.

TV Nation was justly lauded for the inventiveness of these satirical pieces, but what made them work wasn’t just the concepts but their execution and in particular Michael’s eye for reality-based comedy and the moments of tension and awkwardness it created. Interviews that went sideways. The corporate handler putting his hand over the camera. Random people shouting abuse. Michael had a gift for taking situations into extreme terrain by nudging and twitting his interviewees in a friendly way, threatening to run into the back of a factory across the Mexican border to check out working conditions or gatecrashing political conventions in a quixotic attempt to hug all fifty US governors.

TV Nation’s strange mix of comedy show and political documentary was reflected in the way the show was staffed. There was a team of writers who came up with ideas and who tended to be younger and less ideological than the rest of the staff but who were in a way – certainly at the beginning – Michael’s inner circle. Then, at one remove, there were segment producers, some of them distinguished documentary film-makers with Oscar nominations to their credit. At marathon meetings, Michael and his wife Kathleen, who was also an exec on the show, would sit in session with the writers as producers came in for progress reports on the segments they were developing. For all his political bent, Michael seemed to view his writers in an almost talismanic way, recognizing that for the show to work it needed first and foremost to be funny.

Always there was a hunger for ideas, to the point where ‘What else ya got?’ – Michael’s question to a writer or producer who was pitching him – became an office catchphrase.

While many of the segments on the show were high-concept satirical pieces, my own bits tended to be less stunt-driven. Usually they involved me visiting a weird or eccentric character with questionable views and then shooting long days and pushing him or her until something funny happened.

In a way, the millennium piece, with its mixture of crazy religion and racism, set the template for much of my subsequent work. My second shoot was the one about the Klan rebranding. Before we flew to the location, the segment producer, Kent Alterman, convened a bull session in the conference room. Someone suggested it might be funny if I wore a Klan robe and hood during filming. Michael advised against it. ‘You don’t want that photo out there,’ he said. Michael felt the segment wouldn’t require any big gestures on my part for it to work. In the mid-eighties, before he made Roger & Me, Michael had collaborated with the director Kevin Rafferty on a feature documentary about the racist right called Blood in the Face. He knew how the Klansmen operated, he said. ‘If you just go down there and film, without them meaning it to, all the racist crap will slip out. They can’t help themselves.’

We flew out to the location a couple of days later. Having already made one segment involving white supremacists, I imagined it might be the same drill with the Klan: be nice, and wide-eyed, and gently satirize their ludicrous racial vision. But it quickly became clear these were a different calibre of racist – they weren’t sequestered in the mountains of western Montana, lonely and maladapted. They were in mainstream America. Their spiel, about being for white civil rights, had a surface plausibility, and they had an instinct for the need to cover up their more outlandish beliefs.

Our first contributor, Michael Lowe, lived in a quiet unassuming single-storey home outside Waco, Texas, which he shared with his mother. Probably in his forties, slightly built, mullet-haired, in jeans and a short-sleeved collared shirt, he came to the door, seeming both a little friendly and a little wary. Much of that day is lost to me but I can reconstruct it from viewing the finished segment. He led us out into his extensive yard, green and overgrown and backing onto fields, centred around a vegetable patch. Nodding to my heritage, he smiled and said, ‘Those are my English peas.’ With that old footage as evidence, I’d like to make fun of Michael’s appearance but what is clear is that, of the two of us, it is I – in an ill-fitting thrift-store sports jacket, hair shaggy and uncombed – who am the more ludicrous to look at.

‘You’re the Grand Dragon of the Knights of the Ku Klu Klan,’ I said.

‘Yes, sir.’

‘How is your Klan group different from other Klan groups?’

‘Well, one, we promotionalize. We have items to sell to the public and that’s an advantage. It’s the nineties and you need to sell yourself to the public and let them know about the Klan.’

The conversation continued – I was asking about women he found attractive and whether it mattered what race they were. The name Roseanne came up. ‘She’s Jewish, ain’t she?’ Michael said. Other TV Nation writers had written up some sheets of goofy questions, which I tried to slip in alongside the more normal ones. One written by my colleague Stephen Sherrill was: ‘If you were in a plane crash and you had to eat human flesh to survive, would it make more sense for you to eat the white people or the people of other races?’ ‘It has happened,’ Grand Dragon Michael conceded, and attempted a thoughtful answer, before returning to his media script: that their branch of the Klan didn’t hate anyone but just preferred their own.

In a shed at the bottom of the yard he showed me a sign they used for roadside sales. The wood of the sign was old and battered – ‘rethered’, to use Grand Dragon Michael’s word. Still, it wasn’t so rethered that you couldn’t read that it said: ‘For the discriminating individual’, with the word ‘discriminating’ in red.

‘And it’s kind of catchy,’ he said. ‘For the discriminating individual.’

‘Is that because you discriminate?’

‘No, we do not discriminate. No, sir.’

‘It’s not a pun, there?

‘Course not,’ Grand Dragon Michael said, not quite able to keep a straight face.

‘A slight one?’

‘Well, maybe just a slight one,’ he allowed, in the spirit of someone conceding that he might be a ‘wee bit of a Nazi’. The moment was so odd that both of us giggled awkwardly.

A little later he let us into his bedroom, where we found more racist pictures. One showed a cartoon of a petrified-looking black boy – Grand Dragon Michael said he was planning to put it on a t-shirt. There were also Klan figurines doing what looked like Nazi salutes.

‘Why is he sticking his arm in the air like that?’ I asked.

‘It is a salute,’ Grand Dragon Michael replied. ‘A lot of times the media will think it’s a Nazi salute.’

‘It looks a little bit like a Nazi salute.’

‘Yes, sir, but it is a right-hand Roman salute. Like the Roman Empire, they gave the right-hand salute, to legions.’

‘But that’s his left hand.’

The mood in the room had become awkward again, and though, truthfully, it really didn’t matter which arm the Klan figurine was saluting with – it was as racist either way – the revelation of the mistake momentarily broke the tension. ‘They made ’em wrong!’ Grand Dragon Michael said, and we both laughed nervously.

I continued, in as gentle a way as I could, asking to look at other objects until Grand Dragon Michael lost patience. The mood shifted again. ‘Now, now. Don’t burn me. Let’s face it. I been nice!’ he said, and ushered us all out of the room.

Our other main contributor – Michael Lowe’s Klan colleague and superior, Thom Robb – lived in a rusticated old house up a long driveway on the outskirts of Harrison, Arkansas.

Robb was smoother than Michael Lowe. He wore glasses; he didn’t have a mullet – if anything, with his rumpled bearing and air of educated indigence, he came off like a professor at a community college. On the top floor of his house he had an office – family members were stuffing envelopes with his Klan newsletter, to give an impression of activity.

‘What would you say is the traditional negative image of the Ku Klux Klan?’ I asked.

‘The image is that every Saturday night you put on your Klan robes and go out and lynch a black person or burn down somebody’s home. This is the image – of a bunch of yahoos out night-riding in the back of a pick-up truck . . .’

‘Do you hate being called a hate group?’

‘The white people are my family. I love ’em, but it doesn’t mean I hate anybody else. Hating people is stupid.’

We filmed him printing out a flyer – ‘New leadership! New ideas! New direction! . . . We’re not in the cow pasture any more’ – then he took me on a visit to a local store that made up little pieces of branded Klan merchandise – keychains, ballpoint pens, fly swats. It was all fairly low-key, less obviously fractious than the encounter with Michael Lowe, and I wasn’t too sure how much useful material we were getting. As ever, there was a balance of ‘normal’ questions and sillier satirical bits of business. I had thought it might be funny to suggest other rebranding ideas, like giving their outfit a classier pronunciation: ‘Ku Klux Klaaahhn’. He batted this away, likewise the ‘which human meat would you eat’ hypothetical dilemma, and a sophomoric riff about whether, if you were checking out an attractive woman from behind and then discovered it was actually a man, that made you gay. In the end it wasn’t Thom Robb who lost patience but my camera operator, who stopped filming in the middle of a testy exchange about the Holocaust, exhausted from holding his camera for so many hours while I frittered the time away going down conversational blind alleys, needling about nonsense.

By the end of the shoot, I had no clear sense of whether we had what we needed to make the segment work. I was aware that I hadn’t been in control of the encounters in the way I had on the millennium segment. If the mission had been to build rapport with the contributors, put them at their ease and gently satirize them, I was fairly sure I’d failed. In the edit, most of my sillier questions were cut out; I worried we didn’t have much of a story, that I’d been bumbling and hadn’t built the necessary trust.

But in the course of cutting down the material, something surprising happened: the tension and the sense of me being out of my depth combined to give the encounter a power I hadn’t expected. The encounters were stronger for my being less in control. There was comedy in seeing me diffidently probe Michael Lowe and in his fumbling attempts to explain away the unexplainable. There was a winning quality in the juxtaposition of mildness and malice and a kind of maturity in the way the segment did not push its judgements too hard. Michael came into a screening of a rough cut and said simply, ‘You got it.’

For a final coup de grâce in the story, we found news footage of Michael Lowe and Thom Robb at rallies, facing off with counter-protesters, being less guarded and more openly racist than they had with me. We edited these against the blander statements they’d made when we filmed, making the point that the main difference between the old and the new Klan was how careful they were about what they said in public. From a mild soundbite of Robb telling me he didn’t go around saying ‘He’s a Jew, he’s not a Jew’ we cut to footage of Robb at a Klan event saying to a protester: ‘You’re a Jew, I’m not going to talk to you.’ From another clip – of Robb saying he didn’t hate black people – we cut to a speech of Robb declaring in strident tones: ‘America belongs to the children of the Republic! Not those from Mexico! Not those who came on slave ships from Africa!’

We also had a clip of Michael Lowe claiming, with a display of sensitivity, that Nazism ‘turned his stomach’ – then showed him on stage shouting about ‘taking back’ the country ‘for White America’ and doing what looked like a Nazi salute. He might have called it a Roman ‘right-armed salute’ but, once again, he was doing it with his left arm.

Time passed. I did more segments. There were some rifts on the show, and several writers departed – including Chris Kelly, who had been so instrumental in getting me hired. Much of it had to do with disgruntlement over an occasionally eccentric work environment. Coming from Flint, Michael and Kathleen sometimes gave the impression of viewing the TV Nation staff as spoiled and pampered and insufficiently grateful for their jobs, while the writers understandably took the view there was a contradiction in Michael, tribune of the working man, skirting union rules on his own TV show.

Working on my own segments, I was insulated from the office politics. Having been rescued from publishing drudgery and set to work in TV as a writer and correspondent, I was still enjoying the novelty of a busy, well-funded workplace. I loved spitballing with the other writers, wisecracking, trying to come up with ideas for segments, and writing ‘sheets’ – questions and ideas for bits of shtick for other correspondents on location.

I’d gone from being a confused and insecure magazine underling to a TV correspondent flying around the country to talk to the wild and weird denizens of the American extremes. I liked and admired Michael, while also being grateful for the break he’d given me, which felt undeserved. Given how green I was, looking back I’m surprised at how much latitude Michael afforded me to do my work. He was far from being a conventional mentor. He wasn’t huge on bonding. But just his keeping me on board felt like a huge endorsement.

I knew I was doing well at TV Nation because I kept being brought back – for more segments, for a year-end special, for a second season, by which time the show had moved from NBC to Fox. I thought back to Michael’s hiring me and as time passed I began to realize how much my own unfitness for TV was part of what worked. It was my lack of the conventional qualities of a TV presenter – smoothness, self-assurance, maturity, good looks, half-decent wardrobe – that marked me out and made a funny contrast with the American characters I was reporting on – and in fact, more than that, which licensed them to express themselves to me, confide in me, and sometimes in amusing ways dominate me.

But I also had pangs of conscience. Increasingly I worried I was taking something real and abusing it – building trust and making it a basis for ridicule. I suppose I came to see myself as a bit of a hatchet man, doing hit jobs on racists, members of the far right, religious kooks. At the same time, I didn’t see myself as a satirist, and my guilty secret was that I rather liked some of the supposed crazies I was spending time with.

With many of the alpha-type ideologues, I had a reassuring feeling of invisibility when I was in their presence. In certain ways it was a little like being around my dad – himself an American gun-owner of decided opinions. It was comfortable, like listening to an oldies station on the radio. I found I could switch off a bit, surrender control, and go with the flow. It was almost a secondary side effect that whatever friendliness arose turned out also to be useful for the creation of a candid and revealing TV segment.

I made about fifteen pieces for TV Nation in the end. Most of them are forgettable and in all of them I’m embarrassed now to see how weird my hair looks, the strange way it is sort of stacked on my head, the size of my spectacles, and the puffiness of my shirts.

Looking back, those segments that worked best were the ones that relied on me forming good-natured relationships with contributors, in which the comedy flowed from an unlikely bonhomie between me and someone utterly unlike me, usually a gun nut or a religious crazy. It may sound obvious – the idea that some chemistry and goodwill might be a helpful ingredient in making a TV segment – but in fact the idea that we were satirizing the enemy or trying to get one over on people we viewed as malevolent or wrong-headed meant that there was sometimes a gravitational pull towards an antagonistic approach, which could end up being ugly and unkind. Minute for minute, the best piece of television I appeared in at that time was probably a very short segment about a visit to an exotic weapons shooting range in Arkansas, called The Farm, and advertised as ‘the safest place on Earth’. The owner, Robert Lee Warren, a droll good old boy and Vietnam vet, had laid out a selection of high-calibre guns on a table, like a paramilitary buffet.

Robert’s enthusiasm for his weaponry was infectious, and by the time we had blasted off a thundering round from a fully functioning military-grade mortar I had more or less forgotten about the angle of the segment and was enjoying the intoxication brought on by discharging heavy-duty artillery. ‘That was coo-ool!’ I heard myself exclaim.

Later, I heard a British colleague refer to the segment as a piece of satire, and I was a little surprised. Not that I didn’t think it was weird that such powerful firearms should be freely available to the citizenry. It was just that an encounter that I’d viewed as textured, ambivalent, warm, he’d seen as a kind of exposé.

From colleagues I kept hearing that the BBC was taking an interest in me – an exec had visited from London. ‘He wrote down your name,’ I was told.

Towards the end of the second season of TV Nation, when it became clear that the US network wouldn’t be renewing the show, a BBC producer named David Mortimer took me to one side to let me know there was an appetite ‘at the channel’ for a spin-off project from me. This all felt rather theoretical. I didn’t lend it much credence. It felt premature to begin outfitting my own escape vessel when the mother ship was still afloat, albeit listing badly.

It was never officially said that TV Nation was over. In a way, it was classic Michael. He would never admit defeat and even after it was clear she’d gone to a watery grave, I stayed around to replace out whether we might be called upon to do the show on cable or in some other incarnation. For a while Michael developed a sitcom for Fox, called Better Days, which Jim Belushi was supposedly attached to. It was to be a more political Roseanne. He sent me a copy of his script and I tried to offer constructive feedback. Then he began writing a book that would appear as Downsize This. Once or twice we spoke on the phone and I suggested ideas, but by now I was distracted because David Mortimer had made good on his word and offered me a BBC development deal to come up with ideas for my show.