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

It should have felt like a kind of redemption – my own show. From a state of directionless obscurity I had been vaulted into a realm of possibility I hadn’t ever dared imagine. And one part of me saw it this way. But another, greater part was dubious, suspecting that the transformation was not wholly earned and therefore not really mine. I wasn’t exactly sure what the shadowy execs at the BBC who were taking a chance on me imagined they were buying and I worried I was on a conveyor belt trundling towards something I’d never aspired to be – a presenter on BBC2, making light-hearted documentaries that pandered to a superior view of America as a benighted haven of misfits and morons, with the further paradox that I was myself half-American and something of a misfit, with occasional moronic tendencies.

David Mortimer had explained that I should be thinking of ideas in the ‘popular documentary’ genre. ‘You’re probably aware of the boom in popular documentary programming,’ he said, like a man at a corporate seminar. I had never heard the term before. I was wholly unaware of the alleged boom. When I finally got around to watching some examples of ‘popular documentary’, I didn’t like them. The travelogues with comedians and raconteurs were self-satisfied and lifeless. They didn’t follow any of Michael’s rules of style – they were well lit and they looked nice and nothing weird or surprising ever happened in them.

The only example of British television I found in anyway relevant to what I hoped to do was a couple of episodes of a series called The Ronson Mission, hosted by a comic journalist called Jon Ronson. It followed him around the UK on absurd quests. I’d only seen two episodes on VHS, one about mega-fans and another in which his mission was to increase the ratings of his own show. There was something about the weirdness of Ronson that I enjoyed, his sly subversiveness mixed with awkwardness, and the feeling the shows had of always being in motion. I mentioned The Ronson Mission to David and he was dismissive. ‘That didn’t do very well,’ he said.

Meanwhile I’d also been continuing my education in independent documentaries, immersing myself in films that pushed the boundaries of subject and approach: Todd Phillips’ documentary Hated, a portrait of the disturbed punk rocker GG Allin. There was a scene in it in which a super-fan peed in Allin’s mouth as a birthday treat, causing Allin reflexively to vomit. You didn’t see that on a BBC2 ‘popular documentary’. The same director made another film about the pornographer Al Goldstein, called Screwed, which had a scene on an adult film set that was both funny and imbued with a surprising dignity and pathos – an actor reeled off a list of theatrical credentials in mainstream productions before the film cut to a ludicrous bit of dialogue (‘Would a blow job go well with that?’ ‘A blow job would go great with this’) as a precursor to an energetic sex scene.

In those days, in New York, those so inclined could investigate the world of niche film-making at a legendary video store in the East Village called Kim’s. Kim’s is gone now, rendered obsolete by the Internet and streaming, but in an era before YouTube and WorldStar and Twitter it was like the nether regions of Web 2.0 in physical form. Racks of underground films organized by director, esoteric documentaries on bizarre subjects. Chicken Hawk, an access-based documentary about NAMBLA, a group that advocated in favour of paedophilia; Blast ’Em, about obsessive fans and paparazzi who stood in gaggles outside stars’ homes in New York; Dream Deceivers, about a pair of teenagers in rural America who attempted suicide under the influence of a Judas Priest record. One of them lived, but with the bottom of his jaw missing so he drooled and had to be subtitled during his interviews.

In general I was drawn to the sort of stories of strangeness and deviance that were the opposite of how I was living my own life, which was domesticated and quiet.

Sarah and I were still in the same studio walk-up in Chelsea and also, by this time, married. We’d tied the knot one cold December day at New York City Hall in a gambit intended to make it easier for her to work in America, though clearly we were in a real relationship. The term ‘a small ceremony’ doesn’t really do justice to the minimalism of the occasion. We didn’t tell any friends and family. We were the only ones present, and to make it legally binding we had to ask a passing stranger to witness the event.

Even afterwards, I didn’t think of myself as married; I imagined that if we ever did decide to marry ‘for real’, which I thought we might, we’d get married again. It was a little confusing. If you are ever thinking of marrying someone, I don’t recommend marrying them before you marry them.

Now able to work lawfully, she found a job as a writer on a trivia quiz website called Riddler – the Web was just then taking off as a force and everyone seemed suddenly to be finding work at e-zines and dotcoms – while I rented a cubicle a short walk from our apartment. I spent my days there, staring at my laptop, at least part of the time trying to think of ideas for my putative BBC TV show. Most of these revolved around my persisting fascination with macabre and taboo themes. Jumping off from the work I’d done at TV Nation, I wanted to go further into the realm of deviance and the really weird.

The undercurrents of American culture fascinated me. The backward-looking, the bizarre. Drawing from the then-flourishing world of zines – self-published fanzines, like Donna Kossy’s Kooks; Jim Goad’s Answer Me!; another called Snake Oil, which ran tongue-in-cheek appreciations of miracle workers and carried the slogan ‘For Fans of Kooky Kristian Kulture’ – I found a wellspring of stories on hidden worlds of misfits but also a Middle American milieu so aggressively retrograde and antithetical to my own bourgeois, liberal upbringing that it struck me as exciting and transgressive: snake handlers, infomercial celebrities, preachers taken over by the personalities of millennia-old cavemen, people who cut off their own body parts for sexual thrills.

In my days working on a paper in San Jose, I’d been turned on to Adam Parfrey’s Apocalypse Culture, a book-length anthology of outrageous behaviour and assorted diablerie on the American fringe, loosely themed around the idea of pre-millennial disquiet. I had reason to pick it up again recently and found much of it, frankly, repulsive and awful, but I’m a father of three now whereas back then I was a dyspeptic young pup who viewed revoltingness as a positive quality. Articles about Nazis and sexual predators felt like forbidden literature. The interview with Karen Greenlee, ‘The Unrepentant Necrophile’, in which she talked candidly about having sex with corpses while working at an undertaker, made a particular impression.

I was also reading widely in more mainstream magazines, and a few articles caught my attention as possible source material for documentaries: a long piece from the New Yorker by an author named Susan Faludi, which looked at the stresses and emotional strain attendant on making a livelihood out of the vagaries of one’s erections; and two stories about the militiamen and survivalists in Idaho and Montana – one by Philip Weiss, another by William T. Vollmann – that depicted them as rather romantic figures, confused idealists making a stand for their idea of freedom. All three of these articles were imbued with a combination of emotions, finding human qualities of pathos and warmth and, on occasion, an almost mythic level of commitment to causes that were on the face of it ludicrous and laughable.

It was quite a weird time. I was freelancing the odd article for British magazines. I was writing odd bits for low-budget cable TV pilots that never went to series. Meanwhile, in a tiny circle of programmers and producers in the UK, it seemed I was viewed as a coming man of TV presenting and being paid to write my own ticket on BBC₂.

I bumped into a friend, a young editor I’d known at Spy called Larissa.

‘What are you working on?’ she asked.

‘I’ve got a development deal with the BBC. They say they want to do a series with me, so we’ll see.’ It sounded like something I was making up.

Sporadically I emailed ideas to David Mortimer for series with me in them, long incoherent rambles with statements of intent and philosophical underpinnings. Not much came back and I sensed his real attention was elsewhere. And truth be told, so was mine.

With time on my hands, and enough of a safety net with the BBC offer, I had decided I wanted to take the leap of following a dream I’d been thinking about for a couple of years: to write for an American sitcom.

With the doors of the BBC documentary department swung wide open to me, I can understand the idea of turning my back on them to pursue a career in sitcoms – a world where I didn’t even know where the doors were – may seem quixotic, and especially with the twenty-five years of work as a TV documentary presenter weighing against the counterfactual version. The best I can explain it is that I was conscious of wanting to move away from my ordinary life, my upbringing, London, my parents, and that even the BBC represented something too close to where I’d come from. I craved success on my terms, that wasn’t academic or literary or British. Possibly, too, I still felt the need to prove myself. Somehow me being on TV as myself felt like cheating. In my mind I was as much the subject as I was the creator of the segments I’d done at TV Nation and whatever gifts I had were in some way accidental and unintended. But if I could write my way into a job in Hollywood it would all seem more earned.

I began work on a spec script for a new sitcom called NewsRadio. I had chosen NewsRadio partly because I liked it, it was quite new, and because its showrunner, Paul Simms – oddly enough, a Spy magazine alumnus who I’d been told looked like me – had previously worked on Larry Sanders, HBO’s groundbreaking sitcom about a fictional chat-show host, that featured celebrities playing themselves. NewsRadio had potential, but it also wasn’t so good that the idea of writing on it seemed unrealistic.

I brought a monastic level of commitment and purpose to my spec script. It took one whole day to figure out how to do the formatting on my computer, with all the indentation and spacing. I’d been told that a half-hour script should take a couple of weeks to write, but I honed mine over the course of two months at the end of 1995, going through ten or more drafts. When I had finished, I showed it to my comedy-writer friends. ‘The good news is it looks like a sitcom script,’ was one of the more positive remarks. Conventional wisdom held that you were supposed to write two scripts and use them to get an agent. But by now I was so spent I didn’t have it in me to come up with a second one. You also weren’t supposed to send a script for a particular show to that show – the writers would be so attuned to lapses in voice, they’d see everything that was wrong with it. But having decided to break the agent rule, I thought I’d break the other rule too. I labelled the final draft ‘first draft’ then sent it off to Paul Simms.

I also submitted some ideas to David Mortimer at the BBC, just to keep that plate spinning. There was one for a millennial-themed magazine show, provisionally titled The End of the World News. It would have segments about women who had sex with corpses and super-fans who peed in people’s mouths. Another, Brief Lives, took its cue from John Aubrey, the seventeenth-century diarist. It would be ten-minute profiles of random weird people I found intriguing. There was an idea for a travelogue in which my brother would appear – he’d been working as a camera operator and reporter at a start-up local TV channel. The conceit was that he would be shooting our TV show, which would take us to trouble spots around the world, but he’d also be appearing in it. Thinking of the then-popular band Oasis and two famous TV-presenting brothers, I’d pitched it as, ‘The Gallaghers meets the Dimblebys!’ Hence, The Gamblebys. On his reworking of my pitch document, David had renamed it The Boys from the BBC.

The last idea was for an immersive documentary series, a longer-form version of my TV Nation segments. Borrowing from a programme I’d watched as a child called In At the Deep End, I’d added the device of following my attempts to participate in the worlds I was reporting on. In each episode I would get hands-on in a different weird subculture – take a role as a porn performer or make contact with a space alien. Riffing on the popular cookery programme Ready Steady Cook, I joked we might call it Ready Steady Kooks. David renamed this one Louis Theroux’s Weird Weekends.

In spring 1996, David Mortimer flew out to New York and took me to lunch in a posh restaurant called Canard something where the butter pats were shaped like ducks. David always enjoyed those professional duties that involved a sense of occasion – especially when he was in the role of bestower of largesse – and he drew out the reveal like a judge on a talent show, as he spread some duck-shaped butter on his crusty bread.

‘So they have decided . . . to commission . . . Louis Theroux’s Weird Weekends.’

‘Oh, OK, great,’ I said. ‘Yeah, I thought they might go with that one.’

‘So.’ Big smile. More buttering. ‘Are you pleased?’

‘Yes. Of course. That’s great.’

Truthfully, though, I was already having the usual bouts of anxiety and seeing a vastness of downside.

‘Do you think it has to have my name in it? Louis Theroux’s Weird Weekends. No one really knows who I am.’

‘Well, it builds brand recognition,’ he said. ‘We have another one we’re working on, Ray Mears’ Extreme Survival. It’s how the commissioners like to develop talent in the popular documentary genre.’

‘So there are four of them?’

‘Yes.’

‘Fifty minutes each?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you suppose there’s a case for just doing one to begin with? And then sort of seeing how it goes?’

I don’t recall his response to this remark but his expression, if translated into English, would have said, ‘You are a tiny child who doesn’t have the first clue about how TV works.’

David flew back to London, presumably to make plans to start production imminently, while I disbelievingly commenced a one-man Bataan Death March towards making my own series – a series that, for some reason, had the name of a nonentity in its title. I felt disappointed in myself and intensely self-conscious about having been commissioned.

A few days afterwards, I returned to the studio apartment to find the message light on the machine flashing.

‘Hey, Louis. This is Paul Simms at NewsRadio. I read your script and I, ah, liked it. So give me a call.’

It’s a little strange to admit, but in my entire working career – BBC commissions, BAFTAs, academic plaudits – that call engendered the most profound feelings of relief and gratitude.

A month or two later, and Louis Theroux’s Weird Weekends was postponed, possibly indefinitely, and I was making my new life as a comedy writer in LA.