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

Several times over the years it has seemed to me that I was coasting onto the off-ramp from the TV highway, heading towards the gritty surface streets of obsolescence. Late 1999 was one of those periods. The second series of Weird Weekends seemed a decline from the first – ratings softer, reaction more muted – and I was still under contract to make six more episodes.

I’d been back in London a little over a year, living in a flat in Shepherd’s Bush with Sarah. The BBC had leased some offices in west London within a short cycling distance. Later I would come to value the unsupervised atmosphere of working away from the BBC campus. There are benefits to not being caught up in the politics of the corporate hive, but at that time I was still new enough to TV that I was curious what it might be like actually inside HQ and, if I’m honest, slightly interested – in a theoretical way – in the romantic opportunities it might afford, being in the swim of hordes of media types of a similar age.

David had been encouraging me to think of other ideas that might work as single documentaries. It was still my habit, from time to time, to write up lists of half-baked concepts for new formats. One I came up with was for an occasional series I was calling ‘Hotspots’. It would involve me doing gonzo first-person reportage at the site of major international incidents: wars, natural disasters. I’ve always had a secret yen to be a more respectable journalistic figure – a foreign correspondent covering big international stories. This never seemed to get anywhere with the channel. International disasters come and go but ‘Hotspots’ remains uncommissioned.

Another, more promising, avenue was the idea of a documentary portrait of an intriguing cultural figure. I had a file on Lemmy, the lead singer of Motörhead. I liked the pathos of an unregenerate rock beast approaching the winter of his dotage. I imagined living with him in his Hollywood house, doing tequila shots for breakfast. I’d also read he collected Nazi memorabilia, which sometimes suggests unhealthy political interests. Bernard Manning, the northern comedian given to racially charged humour, was another perennial – bunking up with him at his place in Manchester.

And then the name of Jimmy Savile came up.

It’s a little hard to see him through the miasma of everything that has been uncovered since, but the first thing to recall about Jimmy Savile was that – to many of us – he was weird and creepy even then.

I’d grown up watching his wish-fulfilment show, Jim’ll Fix It, which aired on Saturdays and which was, in fact, the creation of its long-time producer Roger Ordish. He’d presented an odd figure in his tracksuit and with his pageboy platinum hairdo, affecting the style and air of someone younger than he was. Later, he’d worn suits and dressed more conservatively, but the hair was still dyed and he still passed himself off as a curiosity, an un-fancy man of the people and self-described con artist or pirate.

On his show he was a granter of wishes – ‘fix-its’ – to those who wrote in with a special request: to drum with a favourite pop group or to indulge a whim like, as a boy scout troop famously did, asking to eat packed lunches on a rollercoaster. He was also on the radio when I was growing up, a weekend oldies show, and he presented ads for road safety (‘Clunk click every trip’) and British Rail (‘This is the age of the train’). Not to mention his indefatigable charity work, running up and down the country and raising the millions required to build a new spinal injuries unit at Stoke Mandeville hospital.

His private life was famously obscure. For almost as long as I can recall – certainly since my early teens – I’d heard there was something sexually untoward about Jimmy Savile. But one didn’t attach any more significance to these rumours than to the idea that a certain film star had a furry animal removed from his rectum or that a rock star collapsed on his way to a gig and had his stomach pumped of six pints of semen. Later, when it was said (as it was by many) that ‘everyone knew’, I took it to mean that ‘everyone knew there were rumours’. But the phrase ‘everyone knew’ was misleading and suggested a wider circle of complicity than was warranted or fair.

One day in 1999 I’d been at a lunch for a women’s magazine I was freelancing for. Most of those present were in their late twenties and early thirties and it came out that every one of us had written in to Jim’ll Fix It as children. One had asked for ‘Jim’ to fix up his bedroom with new furniture and gadgets, because he’d seen the same fix-it done the previous week. Another had written in, offering to make a cup of tea for Jimmy as his fix-it. This one had actually been granted. I recounted writing in, aged eleven or twelve, asking to shoot my teachers at Tower House with Bugsy Malone-style splurge guns. This request, not surprisingly, had gone unfulfilled.

Back in the office I told David about the conversation. He turned out to be a trove of weird Jimmy Savile facts. ‘He’s got a cell at Broadmoor where he sleeps,’ he said. ‘He keeps his mother’s clothes in a closet and gets them dry-cleaned once a year.’

I mentioned that I’d heard rumours that he was a paedophile or even into necrophilia. This was all discussed in a spirit of unreality. Naturally one assumed that if he’d really been a paedophile or a necrophile, then forty-plus years in the spotlight of British entertainment would have brought something solid to light.

An AP, called Leeanne, went up to Leeds to visit Jimmy at his penthouse for a recce, to test his appetite for filming. It was surprising in a way that he agreed to do a recce, which is basically a kind of documentary audition. He was famous enough that he might have viewed it as beneath his dignity. She spent an afternoon with him, filming on a little camera as he showed her how he would make two cups of tea with a single bag. He prided himself on his thriftiness. His two This Is Your Life red books were on display. He announced that he was the only person to have been featured on the programme more than once – a first taste of the unverifiable Jimmy Savile self-mythologizing. The flat was furnished with the mementoes of a life dedicated to show business and charity fundraising: certificates and trophies were everywhere. It was also visibly a bachelor’s den. Most of the furnishings were merely functional; the smaller items were informative and commemorative rather than decorative – the detritus of forty years in the business.

He took Leeanne to Harry Ramsden’s, the fish-and-chips chain, where he paid for their meal with a collection of loose change, counting it out with theatrical frugality. For the meal, they were joined by two friends of Jimmy’s – local Yorkshire characters of an unstarry sort.

Jimmy was clearly keen to be involved. He came across as to-the-point and businesslike but also obliging on Leeanne’s recce tape – up for answering questions and showing off his Rolls-Royce, which had the licence plate NNNN. ‘It stands for nice natural naughty nookie.’ ‘Discos open and close,’ he said. ‘Hospitals never close.’ He was seventy-two, or in his argot, ‘thirty-six twice’.

He spoke of an encounter with Cherie Blair – ‘When The Cherie came to see me, I put a fixed penalty parking ticket on her car’ – and his connection to Chequers, which he said was only four miles from Stoke Mandeville. ‘I spent eleven Christmases and eleven New Year’s Eves there,’ he said. This segued into chat about his hopes for the documentary. There were jokes about turning the camera off and what would happen.

‘What if Louis wanted to dye his hair like yours?’ Leeanne asks.

‘Yes, but that’s not real,’ Jimmy says, in words that – when I see them now – I allow as perceptive.

In his bedroom, Jimmy gestured at the double bed and said: ‘There it is – the altar.’ Leeanne’s voice from behind the camera – its brightness and cheeriness – is striking throughout the tape and at this moment she asks: ‘Why do you call it the altar?’ ‘Because that’s where the sacrifices happen,’ he says.

Still, he seemed a marginal figure and I continued to hesitate. What was he actually doing? What would we be filming? I was used to doing stories about weird people – but weird people with a sense of vulnerability, which in the end made them relatable and sympathetic. This didn’t apply to Jimmy. I was worried he was simply irritating. What hope did we have of making him interesting? I watched a documentary made in the early seventies, entitled The Amazing World of Jimmy Savile. Shots of Jimmy riding his bike, going to church, talking about his OBE and his relationship with ‘The Man Upstairs’. It was boring beyond belief.

We started filming another UK-based project: a profile of the owner of Harrods, the multi-millionaire Mohamed Al-Fayed. His son Dodi had been dating Princess Diana when she died, and Fayed blamed her death on a racist conspiracy orchestrated by the royal family. Having been promised access, we took occupancy of a small back room at Harrods while we waited for him to appear. We filled time with interviews with his support staff. Fayed enjoyed collecting pedigreed businesses – like Harrods and Fulham Football Club – and he was the same with people, accumulating soigné names. Princess Diana’s stepmother, Raine Spencer, was on staff. An ex-BBC royal correspondent, Laurie Mayer, was doing PR. We interviewed both, to little avail. After two days, Fayed finally appeared, taking us on a tour of a central staircase that he had expensively remodelled on an Egyptian theme. He denounced Prince Philip for fifteen minutes, then disappeared. We pulled the plug.

One morning I read a story in the papers about Jimmy attempting to comfort a depressed tiger at a zoo. There was a photo of the tiger with its paws over its ears. The implication was that Jimmy’s help was making the beast feel even more desperate and forlorn. The idea that Jimmy’s good works were increasingly regarded as ludicrous and seized on as an opportunity to lampoon him helped focus my thinking. I saw there was pathos in the prospect of a huge celebrity coming to his life’s final chapter – an illustration in grand form of the indignity and decay that awaits us all. That sadness, which contrasted with the slightly irritating qualities of show business and banter, might make for an intriguing portrait.

My hesitations and the resulting delay meant that by the time I arrived at Jimmy’s penthouse in Leeds he was a coiled spring of excitement – like a rodeo bull waiting for the gate to go up.

‘Is that the Spice Girls?’ a voice said through the intercom. Then, through the letter slot of his penthouse door: ‘I don’t believe you exist!’

The door opened to reveal an old man in a Nike tracksuit, his white hair pulled back in a ponytail, and an unlit cigar in his hand. He bore a resemblance to Jimmy Savile, but a much older version whose platinum locks were now thin and indistinguishable from the ordinary white hair of an OAP. ‘You’re better looking than me, you can’t come in,’ he said. ‘Anybody better looking than me, that’s it.’

Preparing for filming, I’d made a decision to try to be more aggressive than usual in my questioning. In the months between having the idea of filming with Jimmy and our arrival I’d acquired a new executive producer. David Mortimer had been kicked upstairs – or possibly to one side – and replaced with Kevin Sutcliffe, who’d come out of the BBC’s flagship current-affairs programme, Panorama. Kevin was from Blackpool, marinated and seasoned in the rough-and-tumble world of news coverage, and he had put me on my mettle to be more than usually feisty. We were all aware that Jimmy, the experienced broadcaster and leathery self-caricature, would be in full Jimmy mode and that it was up to me to try to knock him off balance, to stop him disappearing into his comfort zone of catchphrases.

Quickly it became clear it would be unlike any other filming I’d ever done.

In a marathon session of interviewing that lasted several hours without a break, I poked around his penthouse, asking questions as I went, while Jimmy kept up a perpetual stream of jabber – about his physical fitness (‘fitter and stronger than a butcher’s dog’), his lack of interest in a conventional family or social life, and his friends in high places (Margaret Thatcher, the royal family). His level of energy and backchat was unflagging. It was like a big game: tantalize and retreat. He wanted both to be asked about the mysteries and contradictions of his life and then pointedly not answer. He was keen to be seen as well connected (pointing out a place-setting that appeared to come from Buckingham Palace) and at the same time he enjoyed ostentatiously parrying and deflecting the questions that followed, using bits of prison or mafia slang – ‘Because when you’re not a grass, you’re not a grass; Omertà!’ – and references to himself as a mob boss: ‘The Godfather’ and ‘Il capo di tutti capi’, which he pronounced in Yorkshire-Neapolitan.

When I pushed him harder on some of his evasions and ellipses, letting the silence play out, he looked into the camera, saying, ‘He’s on the ropes! He’s on the ropes!’ in a way intended to take control of the moment. Then he said, ‘And there’s that Louis smile again!’ I wasn’t sure I’d been smiling. But alongside his gift for being combative without ill will was a knack for being friendly without benevolence. In presuming to assert that we were still on good terms, he was in fact leading the mood, like a hypnotist: acting as if everything was happy and friendly in order to make it so.

The most striking phrase from the morning came on the subject of his relations with women. He viewed them as ‘brain damage’. He said it with enough irony to give himself some deniability. ‘Wonderful,’ he went on. ‘That’s what makes them interesting.’

We’d budgeted the morning for the tour of the penthouse, but past lunchtime we were still going. I asked about virtually anything I could put my hand to. Jimmy seemed to enjoy the idea that everything was up for grabs – that his life was an open book. The stubs on his chequebook. The contents of his drawers. I noticed that there was no computer. Jimmy did not do email. He made a point of saying that he was not part of the high-tech generation, in a veiled way appearing to fend off the idea that he could ever be accused of having anything inappropriate on a hard drive. Around that time, figures like Gary Glitter and Pete Townshend were being accused of downloading images of child abuse on their computers.

When the time came to see his bedroom he duly referred to it as ‘the altar’. With the recce tape in mind, I asked: ‘Why do you call it “the altar”?’

‘Because I go to sleep in it and I smile and it’s nice to be there.’

‘Yeah,’ I said, stalling while I pondered this unexpected reply. ‘That doesn’t sound like an altar to me.’

‘It just sounds like one to me.’

‘Really? The altar – is that because you sacrifice people on the altar?’

‘No, no, no, no, no, that’s negative, I’m positive.’

As the day wore on, with our stomachs empty and no let-up in the questioning, the mood became more captious and irritable. We were in danger of getting bogged down in a rhetorical slugfest, exchanging blows, both of us trying to grind out a points victory. I was a little confused about whether we were generating any usable material.

When the time came to drive to a cafe in Otley, in a moment I’m fairly sure he thought was off camera, Jimmy suggested I take a ‘more positive’ approach to my questioning. ‘Instead of negative things which keep cropping up, try and work out two or three things that I can give you a piece of wisdom . . . A lot of people on their way up, for instance, what’s it like for somebody today to get into the business? Or something like that.’

Moments later we were in the car, with me driving and Will filming, heading towards the cafe. Ordinarily, a contributor might feel he was off the meter when driving to a location, so Will’s grabbing a small handheld camera and continuing to shoot while the crew followed in a separate vehicle was, in a sense, a statement of intent: Jimmy wouldn’t get to relax.

Jimmy was in the back seat. He was exasperated. The constant questioning was wearing on his nerves.

‘It’s a lot easier to make negative TV shows than it is positive ones,’ he said. ‘And if we are doing nice things and good things and happy things, imagine how many millions of people you will cheer up. And they’ll say, “That Louis Theroux, he’s a fabulous geezer. He doesn’t just do interviews with unusual people that leave us with nothing except, ‘Ho! How unusual they are!’ Look at the wisdom he extracted.” ’

‘It can’t all be positive, though, can it? That’s just not reality.’

‘Right,’ said Jimmy, his manner becoming brusque. ‘Make it as negative as you like. That’s all right. See you in court. Take a few quid off you same as I take a few quid off anybody. Money has no conscience.’

I didn’t think too much about this exchange and the suggestion that he might resort to legal action if he didn’t like the finished documentary; I simply enjoyed it as a bit of barbed repartee that we had managed to capture on camera.

After a cup of tea at the Otley cafe, we drove back to Jimmy’s penthouse. Now, off camera, Jimmy struck me as more direct, less playful – he talked about TV longevity and, for some reason, Ruby Wax, whom he called ‘The Rube’.

That night I called my exec, Kevin. I told him I wasn’t sure how well it was going. Jimmy was subjecting me to a barrage of banter. At the same time, I had the feeling there was almost nothing he wouldn’t endure to carry on filming. ‘I feel as though I could kick him in the balls and he’d just keep going,’ I said.

Day two followed in the same vein. In his kitchen, after I asked him playfully about a stash of spirits I’d discovered in his – the famous teetotaller’s – cabinet, he gave me a mini tutorial about how to conduct an interview. I was too aggressive and accusatory, he said. Picking up on a phrase from the previous day, he said: ‘Next!’ And then, at my exasperation, he practically sang: ‘I love it! I love it! I love it!’ He was packing for a two-day cruise, and he itemized the contents of his overnight bag, making sure I noticed a packet of condoms. ‘Hope springs eternal in the human breast, especially when you’re single,’ he said. What was more striking was that he hadn’t packed a change of underwear. ‘Wash it in the sink,’ he said, ‘let it dry overnight.’ I didn’t believe this, incidentally. You only needed to look at his teeth to see that hygiene wasn’t his strong suit.

We took the train down to Liverpool docks – at my invitation, en route, Jimmy made a verbal inventory of his accolades and honorifics: OBE, knighthood, papal knighthood. We arrived at a star-studded celebration of the relaunch of the cruise ship, the Caronia. John Prescott gave a speech. Random celebrities milled about: Michael Buerk, Kenny Lynch, Liz Dawn.

Towards the end of the day, as the festivities were winding down, Jimmy took me and Will up to his cabin – he stalked about, jabbing his cigar at its luxurious features: it was, he said, one of only two penthouses on board, the best lodging to be had.

A bell rang to announce that the ship would soon be departing. Jimmy saw us out of the cabin, and we passed a smiling crewmember carrying a jacket with gold epaulets and a peaked naval cap – he seemed a figure of some authority, an officer or maybe the captain. ‘Mornin’, guvnor,’ Jimmy said, looking suddenly shifty. On instinct I mentioned Jimmy’s boast of having one of only two penthouses. The naval man looked confused as Jimmy nodded at him in pantomime fashion and said, ‘That’s right, yes.’ ‘No, that’s not the penthouses,’ the man said. ‘The main penthouses are on the next deck.’

Jimmy barely missed a beat – ‘Servants quarters! It’ll do for me!’ – but I felt I had scored a small victory, redeeming the preceding hours of fruitless filming, by showing his habit of brazenly and untruthfully self-mythologizing, albeit over a trivial exaggeration.

Back in the office, a meeting was convened to figure out whether it was worth continuing with the idea – me, Kevin, Will, and my old exec, David, who came down from the lofty citadel of his new job. We looked at the rushes – the atmosphere in the room was reminiscent of a team sent to survey the wreckage from an accident. The material wasn’t like anything I’d seen before and Kevin seemed unimpressed. He commented that he wasn’t seeing the unselfconscious Yorkshire miser he’d enjoyed on the recce tape. Jimmy was more ‘on’ around me. ‘I wanted to do Cliff Richard,’ he said with the air of someone whose confidence in an idea is ebbing.

But David saw reasons to keep the faith – whether because he enjoyed the fractious quality of the encounter or possibly just because he knew Jimmy was still enough of a name to pull in viewers. And so, with various misgivings, and with a redoubled sense of the need to get through Jimmy’s showbiz armour, it was decided we would go on.