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

Growing up, if anyone had suggested I might one day be on television, I would have looked at them, quizzical and confused, racking my brains to imagine what set of steps could possibly lead to it happening. It wasn’t that the people on TV seemed remote. If anything, the reverse: they were familiar – they turned up in your home, their faces beamed onto a piece of furniture, sometimes on a daily basis. But there was no sense that you could ever aspire to be them.

One of my earliest memories is of watching an episode of the daytime legal drama Crown Court with my au pair. She told me the surprising fact that, although we could see the people on the television, they couldn’t see us. Years later I was able to confirm this is quite true.

I probably watched too much TV. From the earliest days grazing on Play School and The Clangers, Pipkins, and Chorlton and the Wheelies on through Blue Peter and Swap Shop and then Jim’ll Fix It, It’s A Knockout, and Beadle’s About, television was a constant companion. During the holidays there was a show called Why Don’t You? that had the paradoxical brief of encouraging viewers to stop watching TV and do something else, develop a hobby like falconry or trainspotting. I never did the things they suggested, though. I was fine just watching the programme.

It may be that I missed out. But I also tend to think that deprivation and narrowness bring their own compensations. The hours of watching Open University or Eastern European expressionist cartoons with atonal music or even test cards because nothing else was on were an education of a sort, the beginning of an understanding of storytelling and a shared language that connected you to friends at school. The strange images and random phrases from programmes you liked or remembered were like flotsam and sea wrack – rubbish that could be reconstituted and repurposed, as jokes and impressions, or just to provide the reassurance of something recognizable and familiar. Held prisoner by the television, a kind of Stockholm Syndrome set in and I fell in an ambivalent love with my captor.

As I grew older and my tastes became more decadent, one of my pleasures was TV that went wrong. A game-show contestant called Floyd on an American episode of The Price is Right who got nervous and fluffed his prepared anecdote. ‘He-hey! Floyd! I didn’t quite get that!’ the host said. My brother and I would impersonate it and collapse in giggles. An episode of Record Breakers in which a truculent child contradicted the house expert – and keeper of the records – Norris McWhirter, who everyone knew had a photographic memory, presuming to tell him that he’d given the wrong weight for the Cullinan Diamond, drawing him into an undignified squabble. The following week the presenter Roy Castle came on with a pile of reference books and, in grave tones, assured viewers that the child had been mistaken – figuratively crushing him with the books – and order was restored.

Later, I loved programmes like The Kenny Everett Video Show and The Young Ones that broke the rules by drawing attention to their own artifice. Kenny Everett would wander off the set, showing the wires and cameras you weren’t supposed to see. It felt daring and transgressive. The Young Ones made jokes about its own fictional nature, diving down rabbit warrens, using what would now be called ‘meta humour’.

Sometimes I’d enter TV competitions hoping to experience the vicarious fame of having my work featured. I drew pictures and sent them in to the art programme Take Hart. They didn’t get on. I also entered two different Blue Peter competitions, one to design a logo for the UN’s International Year of the Child and another to do an illustration for an anniversary card for the Natural History Museum. Every time they read out the address, ‘That’s London W12 8QT’, I couldn’t find a pen in time to write it down.

If I ever did send them in, they didn’t win. Nor were they shown in a wide shot of entries-that-didn’t-win.

I couldn’t even get my stupid pictures on television. That’s how not-on-TV I was.

Aged three, already worried.

I was the second of two sons and I had the space and licence to be the silly one. My brother, Marcel, was the prodigy, the dauphin of the kingdom of literature: a precocious reader, a writer of poetry, a star actor at school. I was light relief. This was the natural order of things. Everyone had his place: Marcel’s was reading about Greek myths and Beowulf. Mine was knowing all the words to the nursery rhyme ‘Solomon Grundy.’ My English grandma, who had a gift for simplifying people’s characteristics, pegged me early on as someone who was ‘good with his hands’. It took me years to realize it might not be a compliment.

A word that got used a lot about me was ‘boisterous’. My mum would sometimes recall a performance at my pre-school. We were singing ‘Peter Hammers with One Hammer’, with accompanying gestures, and she noticed that instead of hammering my own knee, I was hammering the knee of the boy next to me.

I had a very loud voice. I was adenoidal, my Ms sounded like Bs. A family impression had me quailing after my mother, ‘Bub? Bub!’ They took me for tests to see if I might be deaf. I was probably three or four, given headphones for the first time while the doctor dropped tiddlywinks into a jar then whispered numbers into my ear that I had to repeat back. When the results came in, the verdict was: not deaf, just loud. Another impression my dad used to do involved me saying, ‘But why does the man have his mouth open?’ It was based on a dimly remembered incident on a bus or a train or somewhere in London when I’d embarrassed my parents by making loud enquiries about a fellow passenger who was, presumably, mentally ill or had weak jaw muscles.

My ‘But why?’ questions were my sallies at a world full of mystery and strangeness, and often they drew attention to taboo subjects, things you weren’t supposed to say: the homeless, people with disabilities, the mentally ill muttering to themselves on streets. And yet I was also very worry-prone, finding causes for anxiety in the most unlikely scenarios. That I would never be able to read and write. That I would be unable to pay my taxes when I was grown up. That ‘Winkie’ – of the nursery rhyme ‘Wee Willy Winkie’– was out ‘running through the town’ and specifically running towards my bedroom with undefined malice in mind. That our family was going bankrupt. That I wouldn’t learn how to maypole dance in time for the summer fete.

Many of my anxieties focused on events at school. When I was still at primary school my mum went in to explain to the teacher that I was perhaps more fragile than they realized and needed special attention. The teacher was sympathetic but confused – she didn’t recognize me in the description. On the way out, my mum passed by my classroom and through the door she could see me running along the tops of the desks.

My parents met in East Africa – in Kampala. My dad was American, a lecturer in literature at Makerere University and already a published novelist. My mum, English, was studying to be a teacher so she could take a position at a girls’ school in rural Kenya. They fell in love, married, and my brother followed less than nine months afterwards. Later they moved to Singapore, where my dad had taken a job teaching at the university, and it was there that I was born, in May 1970, at Gleneagles Hospital, and issued a US passport.

We moved to England when I was one year old. My mum joined the BBC as an arts producer for the World Service. She was a feminist, a proud working woman, and we had live-in au pairs. There is an early photograph – from a newspaper feature about mums that work outside the home – that shows her resplendent in flares and a short-sleeved jumper, with puffy shirt sleeves poking out, as she strides off to her BBC office in London’s West End. I am looking on from the doorway with my brother and our au pair Catherine.

My dad worked from home, tapping away on a manual typewriter, wreathed in pipe smoke. Photos of him from that time show he too was a prisoner of the era: long sideburns, big-collared shirt, a tight little tank top that his mother-in-law had knitted for him, and jeans that were as loose around the ankle as they were tight around the crotch.

Mum going to work. I’m in the puffy shorts on the left.

Until I was four, we lived in Catford, a scruffy area of south-east London, in a small terraced house. My memories of this period are dim and of the surreal do-I-really-remember-this? variety. I thought there were tiny musicians that lived inside the radio, and my favourite toy was a tin robot that shot sparks from its chest.

The family fortunes changed in 1975 when my dad wrote a bestselling travel book, The Great Railway Bazaar. The success was enough to make him a literary celebrity at the young age of thirty-four. The impact on my parents must have been huge: recognition, financial security. In my world it meant seeing him on the flyleaves of copies of the book, and international editions arriving from around the world, with foreign stamps that, for a while, I collected in an album. Gradually our lifestyle changed. The car, a Singer Gazelle, was replaced with a canary-coloured second-hand Renault and then a sleek new Rover that was the least reliable of the three and often failed to start or broke down.

Dad in The Great Railway Bazaar era.

We moved to Wandsworth, which was, back then, a little rough but more central and leafier than Catford, with trees and commons and Victorian housing stock built for people with servants who lived below stairs. Our house on Elsynge Road felt mysterious and grand, organized over four storeys, with weird nooks and draughty sash windows and creaky stairs and folding shutters. It had been chopped up into bedsits and still showed signs of multiple occupancy, but my parents began fixing it up. They got it carpeted, and the chimney was refurbished, they painted an upstairs bedroom avocado and wood-panelled the entire ground floor. And it was here, seated on the bottom of a flight of slatted wooden steps, aged five or six, that I had the strange realization, thinking about my parents’ lives before I’d been born, that I had not always been here, alive, on earth, and by extension that I would, one day, not be here again. For a moment I was filled with a weird giddy feeling of cosmic insignificance mixed in with a tang of fear, and then I heard a voice saying ‘DPYN’ – an acronym that stood for ‘Don’t Pick Your Nose’ that my parents used with me, and the moment was gone.

I attended Allfarthing Primary School, which was full of kids in Bay City Rollers t-shirts playing rounders, beanbags that smelled of chocolate, and road-safety films that they showed on a portable screen in the assembly hall. The school was famous for its choir that, by tradition, appeared on Blue Peter every Christmas. Though it went unrecorded in annals and history books, 1978 was a year of great moment in our house, when John Noakes rested his hymn book on my brother’s head on national television. I dug up the tape from the BBC archives as a gift for his thirtieth birthday. You can freeze it and see my brother’s face looking angelic. The year I was due to go on, there was an industrial dispute and all the Christmas programming was cancelled on the BBC. We still got Blue Peter badges, but it seemed all too typical – me missing my shot at the big time. Another piece of evidence that I was at best a warm-up act to the main performance.

As a consolation for missing out, the school arranged for the choir to make a recording at a professional studio. We were singing ‘Zulu Warrior’. ‘Here he comes, the Zulu warrior / Here he comes, the Zulu chief!’ I didn’t sing that bit. I just had to chant, ‘Chief – chief – chief – chief’. What stays with me, though, is the recollection of being asked, after one of the takes, if I wanted to see the control room. I went in, marvelling at the banks of buttons and knobs. I peered through the internal window and was surprised to see the choir singing again, doing another take without me. Only years later did I realize – in an innocuous version of recovered memory syndrome – it must have been a ruse to get me out of the studio, though to this day the question of what was wrong with my chiefs – whether they were too loud or possibly offbeat – remains a mystery.

It was also around this time that I composed what may turn out to be my most enduring contribution to posterity and the arts. Ill and off school, I had an idea for a poem called ‘The Beggarman’. It was about a man . . . who begs. He comes to town and plays on an old Mandalay and people put money on his tray. That was one of the rhymes. Then one day the beggarman leaves town and no one knows where he’s gone. It was the saddest and most mysterious poem ever written, so far as I was aware. At the bottom I drew a picture of the beggarman holding his Mandalay and showed it to my brother. He told me a ‘Mandalay’ isn’t an instrument, it’s a city in Burma. So I changed it to mandolin and ‘tray’ to ‘tin’.

I don’t know what became of the manuscript of ‘The Beggarman’. It is a text only known from references to it, like the second book of Aristotle’s Poetics. But it represents an ideal for the kind of sad beauty and wistfulness I’d hope to achieve in all my work.

My dad came from an immigrant family of slender means, half Italian, half French Canadian. He’d grown up in Medford, a shabby suburb of Boston, with seven siblings all shouting and crying and hugging. My mum came from a south London family of worrywarts, steady and conscientious, but occasionally brittle and overly concerned about appearances.

My parents were very different, ill matched in some ways, him more emotionally expressive and freewheeling, her more steady and contained. But I suppose that was also the yin-and-yang of what kept them together, until they separated. Both were first-generation university-educated and placed a high value on literature and the written word. They encouraged us to view the artistic life – and specifically fine writing – as the highest calling, and reading as an essential part of our moral and intellectual sustenance. The house was full of books. Editions of Yukio Mishima, Graham Greene, Patrick White, Albert Camus, Anthony Burgess. Without them saying it – without them needing to say it – we were encouraged to think of ourselves as perhaps slightly better than other people, whose children didn’t read Tolkien or know who Shakespeare was.

I didn’t question the indoctrination. I was too young to. But it could be a little confusing, especially when it conflicted with signals from outside the home. Later, when we were sent to a fee-paying prep school, the children all advertised their Tory leanings. I knew my mum supported Labour. I kept it quiet. We were not patriotic, nor were we royalist, we did not support a football team, nor did we watch sports as a family.

On religion, my mum said she was agnostic. I wasn’t sure what this meant. ‘Is that the same as being atheist?’ ‘No, it means I don’t know,’ she said. But she had a soft spot for squishy spiritual thinking and there were books about Gurdjieff, the Armenian mystic, on her study shelves. Once or twice she spent the weekend at meditation retreats.

They had both been raised in churchgoing households but were lapsed. I once asked my mum why they never had me baptized. She said she thought it would be better if we chose our religion when we were old enough to make up our own minds – something I haven’t yet got around to doing. When my brother was about seven, my mum gave him a book on the world’s major religions. Partly this was to broaden his cultural horizons, though I also have an inkling she was hoping he might pick one out.

‘Mum, I’ve decided. I’m becoming a Hindu.’

‘Great! That’s a lovely religion!’

She was conscious of trying to counteract the lazy assumptions that were then part of the cultural climate and which her parents had occasionally been guilty of trafficking in. ‘Do you know, Africans think we’re backward because we sit in baths and not running water,’ she would say. ‘Buddha was preaching the idea of pacifism long before Jesus was.’

My dad seemed to find British people in general ridiculous, though he also admired a small selection of British and Irish writers of an older generation, like V. S. Pritchett and William Trevor. He had a non-specific English accent he would put on to amuse himself, loosely based on a cleaning lady we had called Mrs Tarpy. ‘Wayew, the sun’s trying to come ou’, innit?’ ‘I go’ a new compu’ah!’

We were, in many respects, a seventies-style family. My parents were attempting, in a way that was in equal parts ridiculous and admirable, to find a new way of doing things that was less constrained than their own upbringing. I think they were both conscious of not wanting to live the narrow, untravelled lives of their parents.

There was a copy of The Joy of Sex that used to lie around the house, showing line drawings of an old hairy man and a young woman making love, and Our Bodies, Ourselves, which encouraged readers to look at their vaginas with a mirror and a speculum . . . ‘Touch yourself, smell yourself . . . taste your own secretions.’ I was less puzzled by the vagina concept than by the speculum.

My father published short stories in Playboy so there was also, conveniently, a stash of pornography in the house. I borrowed these and I find it hard to believe he never noticed them becoming more battered throughout the eighties. It’s possible he thought I was reading his fiction.

I think my parents felt that whatever we were old enough and interested enough to read, we were old enough to deal with. When my brother turned eleven or twelve, my parents gave him a copy of Colin Wilson’s Order of Assassins, an omnium gatherum of grisly murders, for his birthday. Evidently they had their limits because either he or my mum tore out one chapter. But thereafter, Marcel rejoiced in telling me about Jack the Stripper, a serial killer whose MO was to choke prostitutes to death using his penis – not something you necessarily need to know as an eight-year-old.

Later, drugs became part of the conversation, and I overheard my mum saying to my brother, ‘When the time comes and you’re a little older and you want to get high, you can do it with us.’ So when, aged fifteen or so, I told my dad that I’d been smoking spliff with friends the night before, I slightly expected him to say, ‘Hey, cool, man! Did you dig it?’ Instead he flared his nostrils and said, ‘You know, Lou, that’s not very smart. The school will throw you out if they find out.’

Along with the vaguely hippy-ish ethos went a certain relaxing of the rules on monogamy. My mother had a policy of being OK about sex on location when my dad was away and, to be fair, in the early days his trips could last as long as several months. Eventually his relationships with other women became more consuming, and the strain too much for the marriage to bear. But, like most parents of that era, they were figuring it out as they went along.

Looking back, I’m conscious of being able to pick out a number of different narratives that cover some of the facts, all equally true and at the same time contradictory. There is one that celebrates the free-spiritedness and open-mindedness my parents brought to their duties, a benign neglect that allowed us to find our own fun and meant they weren’t overly worried about us having long hair or staying out late or reading weird books or watching films with sex in them. Then there is another version of the story that sees them as part-timers, preoccupied with their work, delegating their responsibilities to au pairs, intermittently present, under-interested, and unmindful of the impact their semi-detached relationship with each other was having on us.

I go back and forth but in general I’m grateful for the space my mum and dad allowed us. They were ahead of their time in some ways, mindful of the need to promote tolerance and understanding about other cultures, trying not to carry on the unexamined racial attitudes of their parents.

In the years that followed – thinking about their infidelities, the discord, and the way it ended, and the sense I sometimes had of being an afterthought and someone marginal – I would occasionally feel confused and resentful. But those feelings have ebbed away as I and they have grown older, and now I am mainly thankful – for the curiosity they shared about the world, for their love of knowledge, their good humour and indulgence, and more than anything that there was never any doubt how much they loved us.