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

I fell in love with her the first time I saw her dance – it was our third or fourth night out together and we were at a club in Soho. ‘What’s Luv’ by Fat Joe came on and it was as though she passed into an alternate state of effortless motion, traversed a portal and arrived in the Groove Dimension, a place where gravity and time operated differently. It was a dimension I had trouble finding my way into, then and ever since.

Her name was Nancy and she was an AP in the BBC history department. She had the high cheekbones and sad eyes of a French chanteuse – she was film-star beautiful, but wore it lightly, as though her beauty was something she had never noticed about herself, and I admired her as she passed me in corridors on endless outings to smoke cigarettes in front of the White City building.

We first spoke at a BBC Christmas party. I was wearing a blue party wig and my opening line was, ‘Oh yeah, I’ve seen you around.’ Later she would impersonate it in a voice of gormless, obviously feigned disinterest. She told me she was working on a programme about Martin Luther King. I tested her on key dates in the Civil Rights Movement – the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the date of King’s death – and when she answered I had to confess I wasn’t sure if she was correct since I didn’t know the dates myself.

We went on a date at a pub in Willesden, where Nancy mentioned her active role in campaigning against the war in Iraq and told me about her chant, to the tune of ‘Who Let the Dogs Out?’: ‘Who let the bombs drop? Bush, Bush and Blair!’ She expressed an admiration for the film-maker and journalist John Pilger, though she allowed that it was a shame about his hair. I took it as a reassuring sign that she was political but still had a healthy sense of perspective. On a second date we played word games over dinner and – this is a little weird in hindsight – did binary arithmetic on the restaurant’s paper napkins. She teased me and I had the feeling of not being taken too seriously and having to stay on my toes. Later, when we fell in love and I marvelled at my good fortune, I sometimes wondered whether, as with John Pilger, she’d been able to see past the hair.

We saw each other through the following year. When I was staying in Hollywood, making my overtures to the Scientologists, she passed through on assignment with her own BBC project. Despite my visits to LA over the years, I was still learning the city, and with Nancy I felt I was imprinting it with our budding romance. Then, for a chunk of time, I was living at a legal brothel in Nevada for an immersive documentary. It could have been awkward for the relationship – in fact it was a little awkward, especially when I had to show her a rough cut of me getting a half-naked ‘sensual massage’ with one of the working girls – but she was much too cool to be seen to let it bother her. ‘You know, you are flirting with her,’ she said, as though it was a matter of only technical interest. It was one of many occasions between us when she outmatched whatever sangfroid I imagined myself capable of, and hinted at a capacity for detachment that was – if I’d thought about it – slightly terrifying.

She moved in a few months later, in late 2003, and then, when I gave up my TV job to travel around America for a book about meeting up with the subjects of some of my old shows, she left the BBC to come with me. For six months we traversed the country in a 1993 Dodge Dynasty – Nancy would do research and transcribe tapes in the evening while I wrote up my notes. In Mississippi we stayed in a converted shotgun shack that had once been home to a plantation worker who’d raised eight or ten children in it; now, along with a number of similar structures, it had been refitted for tourists as part of a plantation-themed novelty motel of questionable taste. Here Nancy sat at a piano and, more than a year into our relationship, revealed that she played to an almost professional standard.

At the end of the trip we settled in Los Angeles. She found work making television documentaries while I sat in our apartment, growing demented under the pressure of writing, constantly staring down the barrel of the fact that it didn’t come as easily as I thought it should, freaking out that the book was showing signs of being no good, and thinking that I was thirty-four, the same age my father had been when he wrote his bestseller and travel-literature classic The Great Railway Bazaar. Often he would call and offer advice: ‘Lou, let me take a look. I know a thing or two about books. If you want help. I don’t want to impose.’ I wondered if I was writing as an act of impersonation. I fended him off. At the same time I realized his input probably would have been helpful, but I couldn’t bring myself to accept it.

In the evenings, as I worked, Nancy would play Chopin and Mendelssohn on a Yamaha electric piano I bought her for her thirtieth birthday. In the winter, torrential monsoon-like rains flooded the Los Angeles streets and beat down on our small rear balcony that overlooked a motorcycle repair shop and a Sizzler. One night we watched Sunset Boulevard and I delighted in the strange synchronicity of listening to the downpour as the disillusioned journalist and screenwriter in the film is forced by similar Hollywood rains to move from a guesthouse into the mansion of the ageing star – like Michael Jackson, she too had a chimpanzee as a pet – and the romance that ensued between them led to her descent into psychosis and his death. The film struck a chord with me – it seemed to deal with so many themes I had explored: stardom and delusion and love – and maybe too I identified with the central characters, the grandiose has-been and the jaded hanger-on. Like them, I felt a little like a leftover, a refugee from my TV career, though I was happy that night, watching a film that was so strange and funny and sad, with Nancy.

Eight months after we’d settled in LA we found out she was pregnant. We decided to move back to Harlesden, the cacophonous polyglot corner of west London where my house was, and where I’d hosted Jimmy Savile. Albert arrived on Valentine’s Day, 2006. After a heroic forty-eight-hour labour at Northwick Park Hospital in Harrow, he was delivered by emergency Caesarean. The medical team hailed from points all around the world and the radio was playing and, with the music, I remember thinking it felt a little like a mechanic’s garage: they were working under Nancy’s bonnet, and then he emerged, huge and handsome, though understandably upset, his head faintly conical from all the hours of battering at Nancy’s cervix. For a moment there was a weird feeling of self-recognition: this was what the start of life looked like, I thought, how I once was, how everyone once was, but the emotion I had I didn’t recognize as simply love so much as awe and mystery and responsibility and pride that we had produced something so perfect.

With Nancy and one-day-old Albert.

Having a child brought out a latent bourgeois side that I hadn’t known was there. I started worrying about littering and anti-social behaviour. I would take photos of the piles of rubbish at Willesden Junction and email them to local councillors. The bins had been removed in the wake of the 7/7 bombings, presumably to forestall further attacks, but no one had given any thought to what would happen to the rubbish, which people now left in piles where the bins had once been. The bushes on the embankments were decorated like Christmas trees with crisp packets and energy-drink cans. The road bridge was illuminated with graffiti. I called the council to complain. ‘Is the graffiti racist?’ asked the man. ‘Er, I don’t think so,’ I said. ‘In that case there’s not much we can do about it.’ It crossed my mind to go down there one night with a can of paint and make it racist so they’d remove it. I would have to write anti-white slogans since the alternative didn’t bear thinking about. Still, it wasn’t ideal. It might look like I was trying to claim victim status or stir up racial tension.

All this went on in my head.

I had a great fondness for the area. Unloved, unfashionable, in need of a little care and attention, it felt like a metonym for the world’s disadvantaged and overlooked. At the same time, it was hard not to feel abraded by the day-to-day jostle and noise of living there – foul-mouthed schoolchildren, Polish and Romanian builders sat on their front garden wall drinking between jobs, teenage drug-dealers. Its historic music venue, the Mean Fiddler, had closed and been turned into a hostel for the homeless. The junk shop at the corner of our street became a kebab joint – Master Kebab – with strip lighting and a kind of kiln built into the countertop where they baked fresh naan. Outside there was a little pipe that dripped effluent onto the pavement. Even the McDonald’s closed down – which seemed ominous: I’d never heard of a McDonald’s closing down; I thought they only opened. I studied the houses in our street for signs of other families moving in. Builders went to work on a house diagonally opposite ours, and my brief sense of hope was dispelled when I saw that a bell with seven buttons had been put up – the dreaded ‘multiple occupancy’.

But I also wondered who was this person – this stranger – who had taken up residence in my own soul, who cared about people’s front gardens and whether there were empty tins of Red Bull on our front wall and mattresses in the street and the civic fabric, the crumbling streets and endless betting shops and mobile phone mini-marts and places advertising ‘money transfers’. I began to resent him, and then in a circuitous way I came to blame the area for incubating the uptight litter-exasperated man inside me.

Weekends revolved around the local park and endless hours pushing roundabouts and swings. Sisyphus himself would have goggled at the monotony of the amount of pushing I did. At least the boulder didn’t cry and scream. He didn’t have to talk to the boulder in a funny voice and say ‘Red light! Stop!’ The boulder didn’t keep taking off its mittens and then cry because its hands were cold. Presumably it just kept rolling up and down the hill, mute and cooperative. Then we’d warm up watching videos of toys – penguins sliding down ramps and jack-in-the-boxes – that were supposed to turn your child into a genius. At bathtime, I’d squeeze his thighs to make him laugh, and the way his head tilted back showing his toothless gums melted my heart. His room was blacked out to help him sleep. We’d put white noise on a detuned radio to drown out other sounds, though sometimes the radio would find stations on its own, filling Albert’s room with surging, staticky foreign-language broadcasts, which miraculously tended not to wake him. Even after he was down I’d creep in and check on him, marvelling at his beauty and the unlikely trust the universe had vested in us by allowing us to have him.

For a year or two, a little gaggle of drug-dealers set up shop at the corner of the road. I felt an urge to dob them in to the authorities, but I was also aware of a slight sense of hypocrisy, given how many hours of my teenage years were spent trying to score in similar areas of south London. Occasionally – once every six months or so – street fights would break out outside the house. Of an evening, trying to watch the latest box set with Nancy, I’d become aware of noise outside. If I’d had enough to drink I’d venture out in my dressing gown and pyjamas to remonstrate with the teenagers over the road. Sometimes they recognized me from the TV – Somali kids saying, ‘You’re that bloke! Lewis Froo! Ah! Ha ha!’ – which somehow made it worse. I started a local chapter of the Neighbourhood Watch. I put up the stickers but couldn’t be bothered to hold any meetings. I kept a written diary of all the activity outside our house, making notes about trivial incidents – ‘fourteen-year-old offered me “ganj” ’, ‘seven to ten teenagers, violence seemed to be in the offing,’ ‘said my child was trying to sleep. Subject said he would “put me to sleep” if I didn’t shut up.’

With so much going on at home, the unexpected dividend was that I was more focused at work. Coming out the front door and clambering onto my bicycle, I felt a surge of relief mixed in with a contradictory sense of missing my family already. Nights on location were like restorative trips to a high-end spa. Later, when I moved on to darker stories about crime and mental illness, cultists, and paedophiles confined in a maximum-security mental hospital, my guilty secret was that the trips were blissfully stress-free, remote from my daily concerns. My contributors’ lives of chaos and despair dwarfed my more banal worries, and the accoutrements of filming were, after the chaos of home, luxurious: long flights in which I could read unmolested, meals in decent restaurants, consecutive nights of uninterrupted sleep.

The demands of domestic duties seemed to keep me balanced – I was forced to weigh my neurotic desire to get involved in story development against a home life involving a baby who didn’t nap when he was supposed to. Albert would become increasingly manic and wild-eyed through the course of the day, while Nancy would make phone calls for emotional support that I did my best to give, inadequately and self-consciously, in a quiet BBC office surrounded by co-workers.

My life had a centre of gravity. There was a non-negotiable quality to the needs of the family that was stabilizing. As time-consuming as they were, it eliminated the possibility of choice. There was a war on: a benign war being waged against a relentless adversary, liable to attack at any time, in any place, with his capricious needs for snacks, amusements, nappies, changes of clothes – in which I, a small but doughty nation, was in an alliance with a mercurial superpower who sometimes doubted my commitment to the fight.

In saddling up again, none of us had quite known what kind of programmes we’d be making. In fact it’s embarrassing to acknowledge how much presumption I showed waltzing back into my old job, having had a perfunctory meeting with the BBC2 channel controller Roly Keating at which I said little more than, ‘I’d like to come back.’

‘Any ideas?’

‘Not really sure. Maybe slightly more serious than the old stuff. I was wondering about child soldiers in West Africa.’

Roly’s only request was that, instead of the floating title of ‘Louis and’ or ‘When Louis Met’, we should now christen our specials ‘Louis Theroux’ colon – which didn’t seem a lot to ask, given that’s my name – and also that we would now, for reasons to do with scheduling, be working at the length of an hour rather than fifty minutes. A contract was drafted, for ten programmes over three years, and so, like Doctor Who, I regenerated back at the BBC, albeit in the same body – give or take some fat on the midriff and some hair on the shoulders – and instead of a young glamorous sidekick, with a new production team.

We were working now out of Bush House, the huge art deco megalith on Aldwych, which gazes with faded imperial grandeur up Kingsway. Inside was like a cut-rate United Nations, a labyrinth of low corridors and cramped offices dedicated to tiny language services. After a few months of the usual faffing and false starts, we finally got an idea going about gambling in Las Vegas, and then another about the Westboro Baptist Church, an extreme religious group in Kansas. The Church was then – under the influence of its bigoted and contrarian pastor, Fred Phelps – engaged in a campaign of pickets of the funerals of celebrities, and soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, at which they would hold signs of unbelievable crassness and insensitivity: ‘God Hates Fags’, ‘Fags Eat Poop’.

That film, which came out under the name The Most Hated Family in America, was a hit – watched by millions, and briefly a water-cooler talking-point. With the support of my young family at home and a talented group of co-workers, I felt I was finally hitting my stride as a programme-maker.