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

‘There’s nothing real about you,’ Sarah said to me late in 2000, a phrase that went around in my head for years afterwards, resonating in an awful way with a put-down Jimmy Savile delivered around the same time: ‘Ah, insincerity. Your speciality.’ Sarah and I separated not long afterwards. That sad passage of intimacy mixed with awkwardness and grief – the open secret of knowing we were splitting up while we continued to live together – was like hurtling over a cliff edge in extreme slow motion, not so much frightening as it was surreal and melancholic: falling through the air, knowing we would at some point weeks or months in the future smash against the ground, but in the meantime watching episodes of Trigger Happy TV and The Sopranos and making each other cups of tea.

We’d been together twelve years – our very own two-person Club 18-30, if they offered holidays where you stay at home and get high and play backgammon. I felt like the embodiment of the cliché of someone ditching his long-suffering supportive partner the minute he becomes successful – my guilt so heavy that I didn’t even have it in me to call time on the relationship except in the most passive-aggressive way: by waging a devastating, attritional war of non-commitment. In the end, it fell to her to say the words, that we were splitting up. For face-saving purposes, we called it a trial separation. One afternoon in December 2000, I went out and watched a movie – Chopper at Whiteleys Odeon in Bayswater – to give her time to move out. I came back to find the flat half-empty and a note saying she hadn’t been able to find her digital camera.

It was a sad winter. I never learned the knack for being single. I have that man thing of needing someone around – not so much to talk to, which might lead to intimacy or negotiation, but just to have a friendly looking body in the house. A bit like Jeffrey Dahmer keeping the corpses of his victims propped up on chairs around the flat.

Technically, we did everything correctly. There was no one else involved. It was a mutual decision. And at some level it was confusing to me that you can be honest with someone, try to be kind, try to do everything right, share your life for years, end things by agreement, only to have it all still end up being painful and wrong. At another level, of course, it made perfect sense: at that level I was neither kind, nor right, nor honest, depending on how you define those things. But I felt I had tried hard to do things correctly and later I wondered if the urge to conduct one’s emotional affairs correctly was part of the issue.

I never had many more dealings with Sarah. I wished her nothing but the best. A few months after we’d split up David called me into his office at work, where the TV was on, and tuned in to a call-in programme hosted by Richard and Judy. ‘It’s Sarah!’ he said, and it was – her voice talking about an unnamed celebrity ex-partner who was – I can’t remember the details – possibly a narcissist or monster of ambition or a just an emotional cretin. I didn’t mind – I assume she was helping out a friend, a producer on the show, and I owed her at least that – and in fact, without the ballast of a steady home life with a long-term partner, I was about to get exactly what I had wished for: a life blissfully empty of distractions, dedicated to work, and increasingly unhinged.

We’d moved offices by now. No longer in a groovy canal-side building in Westbourne Park, we were installed in a block-like structure on an anonymous stretch of Wood Lane, next to the A40 and opposite the warehouses of Unigate Dairy. The place looked like a child with limited imagination had constructed it out of huge grey Lego bricks. Its only human feature, an internal courtyard, was closed off because shadowy figures in health & safety had decided there was a risk of objects falling from the sky – meteorites, presumably, or frozen turds jettisoned from planes.

Kevin, my exec, was no longer with us: he hadn’t died but taken a big job commissioning current-affairs documentaries at Channel 4. David had returned, combining his exec role with a lofty entertainment job that meant he was rarely around. In practice, the day-to-day running of the production fell to a new series producer, Gabe Solomon.

Without the tug of a home life, I floated around the rectilinear corridors, often chatting with the Irish TV journalist Donal MacIntyre. Donal had made a series of undercover reports, using hidden cameras, with the result that his highly secret face was now nationally famous. He too was trying to figure out a way forward, like an agent whose cover is blown and is now living out an aimless life in an apartment in Soviet Moscow.

After the success of the Jimmy Savile programme, and then another profiling the magician Paul Daniels and his wife Debbie McGee, word had come down from executives at the BBC that I should focus on more profiles. I should leave Weird America behind and make a series on modern celebrity. There was a celebratory dinner with the BBC2 controller at a west London restaurant. These occasions always feel haunted by the ghost of a notional future Daily Mail investigation into excessive BBC hospitality. One glass of wine only and check who else is having starters. I mentioned I’d been enjoying Rory Bremner’s new series. ‘You’re bigger than Rory Bremner,’ the channel controller said. An unsolicited and faintly surreal compliment. Bigger than Bremner.

I signed a new deal with the BBC for a vast number of programmes, as usual without looking at the contract, with the attitude of a man at a cliff edge who doesn’t want to see how long the drop is. Then production went into high gear, finding fresh celebrity candidates for ‘Louis Theroux’ documentaries.

After the ease of getting to Jimmy Savile and Paul and Debbie, the feeling was it should be straightforward to get some more episodes underway. Our first forays were faintly worrying, however. The light-entertainment personalities and intriguing public figures were not leaping at us with open arms. Still, the early names in these situations are usually unrealistic – channel executives suggesting you spend a week bunking up with George Bush or the Duke of Edinburgh.

‘That’s a great idea. We’ll make an approach.’

‘Or Arnold Schwarzenegger, I just think you’d really be funny with him.’

‘Yes, good one. Schwarzenegger. I’ll be beck. Heh heh.’

Trying to keep my feet in the realm of the real world, I made a list of famous people who were interesting and who might actually agree to let me tag along after them for ten days. The list wasn’t very long. One name on it was Uri Geller, the Israeli psychic. I phoned and we played tag for several weeks. Then one day, having called and gone through two different Israeli male voices, I reached the nation’s favourite spoon-bender.

‘I saw your Paul Daniels documentary and I really enjoyed it,’ he said. ‘You don’t need to send me a tape because I love what you do.’

He went on to pitch a ‘one-hour, or two-hour, or three-hour’ programme that would be made from footage from his personal archive. It could be voiced by me, he said, ‘or you could use my voiceover, which would be even better.’

‘I have people on tape admitting that I worked for Mossad,’ Uri went on, ‘which I can’t talk about myself, and talking of knocking out Egypt’s radar system due to my intervention . . . How we are going to incorporate you, I really don’t know. Maybe you can overlook the whole project, but in a serious way. I will have final approval or whatever.’ As to the idea of me doing a regular, in-my-own-style documentary about him, voiced by me ‘or whatever’, Uri was not so keen.

We tried to keep the faith. Dauntlessly, a team of two or three APs and a couple of directors pounded the phones and brainstormed possibilities. The production offices rang with the music of a never-ending roundelay entitled ‘What about?’ The lyrics went something like this: What about Tony Blair? What about Jerry Lewis? What about Carlos the Jackal? What about Cannon & Ball? What about Chenjerai ‘Hitler’ Hunzvi? What about The Krankies? This refrain sometimes continued after hours with my mum, my brother, and close friends joining in. ‘Hi, Louis, I was just thinking: what about Debbie Reynolds? What about Idi Amin? What about John McCririck?’

A blizzard of requests went out, trumpeting my ‘non-tabloid approach’ and ‘six million viewers’. Reponses varied. Silence was a common one. Also, polite demurrals. And not so polite ones. Alan Whicker sent a four-word fax: ‘Thanks but no thanks.’ When a friendly rejection came back, it felt like a result. On those rare occasions when we received an actual ‘yes’, faced with the suddenly real prospect of two weeks of filming, often we’d realize we weren’t as keen as we thought. An awkward phone call would follow in which we would explain that, in spite of having invited them, we didn’t now want them to be in a non-tabloid, immersive documentary watched by six million people.

Sometimes contributors put themselves forward, which was always a bit weird. Bill Wyman’s agent threw Bill’s hat in the ring. The football club owner and porn magnate David Sullivan volunteered himself in a letter. I thought you did a good job interviewing Jimmy Savile and I would be willing to be in your programme. Will went and recced him at his huge house in Theydon Bois, the Citizen Kane of Zone 7. He and his wife lived in separate buildings. He took Will on a tour of his quarters. ‘Every day I check the papers for what films are on. If it gets at least three stars, then I tape it.’

The DJ Tony Blackburn expressed interest, as did Malcolm McLaren, Steven Berkoff, and Norman Tebbit. Tebbit’s letter was memorable because he expressed some reservations that he might be too boring. The puppyish TV presenter Keith Chegwin was on board – he was launching a round-the-clock streaming channel from his home, entitled Cheggers’ Bedroom – but his wife Maria didn’t want to be on camera, which was a deal breaker for us.

Churning through rejections was like a groundhog day of phone calls and letters to light-entertainment has-beens and deposed foreign despots. Booking celebrities turned out to be a bit like dating. The people you want won’t have you, and the people who’ll have you you don’t want.

At work, with Will Yapp.

It was tempting to conclude I was a victim of my own success. I’d done too good a job of stripping the secrets from the celebrities I’d already profiled. Or possibly I’d exposed them in a cruel way that no one in his right mind would willingly submit to. The truth is, it’s a lot to ask of anyone to film for days on end, with or without the involvement of a puckish BBC inquisitor.

Eventually, after tireless efforts, a couple of names came on board. First, the excitable musical pioneer Ike Turner, who was mainly known for physically abusing his wife Tina. Then the multi-world-title holding boxer Chris Eubank. And a little after that, the diminutive Conservative politician Ann Widdecombe.

The Ike Turner film was a misadventure. His exquisite sensitivity meant he was singularly unsuited to a format that required him to engage in cheeky badinage with a BBC interrogator. There was a slow shrivelling of the access – at one point I was tailing him on a comeback tour but was forbidden from asking any questions because he was too stressed and anxious. In the end we knocked it on the head, if that isn’t a tasteless way of putting it.

Chris Eubank had the hallmarks of being more TV-friendly. A love–hate figure of the sports world, reviled by many for his pose of arrogance, he was also one of the greatest British boxers of all time and riding a wave of recognition and public curiosity due to an eccentric appearance on Celebrity Big Brother. He’d monologued at Big Brother, speaking directly into the cameras to confess his vulnerabilities, seemingly finding the fictional concept of ‘Big Brother’ more relatable than any of his physical housemates.

In a way he was – with his nineteen successful world-title defences and his tabloid profile – a better booking than we had any reasonable right to expect. Having put his sporting achievements behind him, Chris was now plying his trade as a kind of children’s role model, public intellectual, and style guru. Another way of putting it would be ‘professional celebrity’ but Chris had an elevated approach to his new public position. He saw himself as a teacher and truth-teller. I once read a description of him as ‘an intelligent man who thinks he’s a genius’, which has something to it.

He had several poems that he knew by heart and would declaim them when the opportunity arose, and carried little books with the sayings of Nietzsche and Oscar Wilde. More than once he recited an apophthegm of Wilde’s: ‘All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does, and that is his.’ Then, with a gleam of triumph, he would say, ‘But I did become like my mother!’ Another favourite phrase was: ‘You’ve let yourthelf down.’ He said this to me many times, in particular if he took against a line of probing – as in: ‘You’ve let yourthelf down with that quethtion.’ Also: ‘Do with me azth you will. I am defenthleth.’ He had a total confidence in his own ability to handle any kind of questioning and in fact he told me several times that he had a specific reason for agreeing to our project. ‘I want you to find the chink in my armour.’

I filmed him over several weeks, having first met him in the grounds of his two neighbouring houses in Hove that he shared with his wife Karron and their four children. He was in full Edwardian dandy persona – jodhpurs, monocle, Windsor knot – and speaking with exaggerated precision though just occasionally little glimpses of the London street kid he’d once been peeped through. We spent the whole day together, touring his house, meeting the family, driving along the Brighton seafront in his huge Peterbilt truck. Much of the time Chris pontificated about the importance of bringing positive messages to children. His upbringing had been difficult: raised in Peckham, running wild, then sent to New York to straighten out, where he was saved by the boxing gym. He was keen to stress his considerable achievements but without being seen to do so. He seemed to feel underappreciated in his home country; I sensed that he was a little put out that there weren’t statues of him on street corners.

On our second day, we took a train up to London where Chris was appearing on the light-hearted sports quiz They Think It’s All Over. He did the show in full guru and role-model mode, coming off as deluded and self-important. In hindsight, I wonder whether twenty-four hours of our continuous attention had spun him into a hypomania of grandiosity. The other celebrity panellists on the quiz – David Gower, Rory McGrath – turned on him and mocked his speech impediment and a funny little hat he was wearing. Afterwards, Chris was mournful and a little bruised. But the positive upshot was he mellowed towards me. He relaxed and became slightly more normal.

The challenge, as filming progressed, was how to get past the pontifical persona to a more honest and grounded version of the man. We had a meeting in the office to discuss ways we might do this. It was agreed that he seemed most ‘normal’ around his family and that his wife, Karron, in particular, came across as approachable and no-nonsense. We decided we should banish the big camera and the sound recordist, and with just two of us present – the director Alicia and myself – we would film an evening chez Eubank as they did their evening routine with the kids, followed by food, which we would order out, so as not to impose.

What followed was a domestic scene both familiar and bizarre, with four young children all making claims on Karron’s attention as she rushed up and downstairs signalling her exasperation, and Chris, in an almost surreal way, stood in the hallway in a handsome tailored suit and tie, seemingly doing not much of anything. I asked Karron if she wished Chris would help a bit more. ‘Yes, he’s lost the plot on that, I’m afraid. Totally and utterly. And I don’t mind telling the world about that. Useless. As most male men are I’m afraid.’

As it became clear that Karron was going to broadcast her feelings of frustration to the world, Chris’s face took on the hooded look of an Easter Island statue, and weirdly I couldn’t help feeling a degree of sympathy for him – self-styled role model to an abstract concept of the nation’s youth, dragged into an undignified domestic squabble on national TV about a more concrete kind of childcare.

Once the kids were in bed, Chris and Karron and I ate our takeaway in the kitchen. Chris was in a dress shirt, tieless now, with the sleeves rolled up. Seeming stung, he admitted to a style of parenting that was out of keeping with the modern way prescribed, as he saw it, by Richard & Judy and political correctness. He pleaded guilty to having almost never kicked a ball with his children. Then he said, ‘My father – can I remember my father playing with me? No. My father never played with me . . . I can remember my father telling me he loved me – behind a closed door, he was on the other side of the door – once.’ He paused, appearing emotional. ‘I give probably 80 per cent more to my children than my father gave me. And still it doesn’t come up to scratch. Well, what is scratch? That’s your perception. That’s your reality . . . I don’t feel guilty. I’m doing as much as I need to do.’

Afterwards, off camera, Chris said to me, ‘So you got what you wanted.’

I said my on-camera goodbyes to him and Karron a few days later at their house. I went in for a hug – ‘You’re too thpindly to hug,’ Chris said, and asked again whether I had found the chink in his armour. I told him, with a little flourish, that I had. The chink . . . was the armour. His obsessive need for self-protection was a weakness he needed to overcome. He didn’t think much of this analysis. He told me I hadn’t found the chink.

When the film eventually went out he was jubilant. ‘I’ve had all thortth of people coming up to me to tell me it’th a total win for me,’ he said. ‘You let yourthelf down with the documentary.’

Chris separated from Karron a few years afterwards. I still have a soft spot for the film, though it’s been a while since I watched it. I have a soft spot for Chris, too.

Ann Widdecombe was a difficult subject for me for very different reasons. The documentaries that had tended to work best so far were those that placed me as a straight man in a strange world – in subcultures that were alien or amongst people who were flamboyant or egotistical. Ann’s eccentricity was more low-key, genteel rather than outlandish. She was not a performer or a light-entertainment ‘turn’; she was a politician; the world of Westminster and MPs she inhabited was much more guarded, and her instinct for risk more finely tuned.

With Chris Eubank.

She was famous at that time for having been prisons minister and defending the shackling of pregnant inmates in hospitals. Later, as shadow home secretary, with her devout Catholicism informing her political positions, she had opposed gay marriage, opposed the equalization of the age of consent for men, opposed abortion, but hadn’t opposed the death penalty – a hanger and a flogger, she wanted that brought back. All of this might have made her unlikeable, but some found her uncompromising and antediluvian moral outlook appealing, possibly because of the unlikeliness of her physical appearance: tiny, rotund, with massive breasts but oddly slender limbs, and a small and delicate head that was crowned with a pudding bowl of hair. She was, as they say, a ‘conviction politician’, utterly sincere and a little unworldly.

The most intriguing factoid about Ann may have been that she was, so it was said, virgo intacta – like Edward Woodward in The Wicker Man, a possible candidate for a placatory offering to the gods. I don’t think Ann ever confirmed this but the rumour was widely circulated, based on her strict religious morals and her having never been married. I’d been told that she didn’t like addressing questions to do with her sex life – or rather her lack of one. Out of pique at this restriction, when filming commenced one morning at her house in Elephant and Castle, I made ‘the virginity issue’ an early question, figuring it was better to derail the project on the first day rather than waste each other’s time pussyfooting, ahem, around. We’d been looking at the furnishings and knick-knacks in her front room – plates with teddies on, pewter-wear, antique maps and ceremonial swords – when the subject was raised of what it was about her that had excited my interest.

‘You’re an intriguing public figure,’ I said. Then I asked, ‘What will we see in the documentary?’

‘If you tell me what intrigues you, I’ll tell you what’s coming up.’

I mentioned her outspokenness, then slid into an observation about her having announced she would never marry, landing gently on, ‘You’ve said you’re a virgin.’

‘No, I haven’t,’ Ann replied. ‘People ask impertinent questions, then make deductions. But I always tell people to mind their own business.’

‘Do you?’ I ventured. ‘I read last night a quote, and this surprised me, “If anyone says I’m not a virgin, I’ll sue them.” ’

‘As I said, I’m not going to go any further than I’ve just gone. I don’t regard it as anybody else’s business.’

‘Well, I’ll winkle away at that one.’

‘I was actually told you would not,’ Ann said, her head turning now to invoke my director Kate. ‘I said I wouldn’t agree to the documentary if it was along those lines. Frankly, I regard it as an impertinence.’

We weathered that wobble, for the moment at least, though Ann nearly pulled out a couple of days later due to a feeling that my questions were insufficiently serious – possibly it was an aftershock of the virgin question. Kate and I were summoned to an off-camera summit at Ann’s offices to get the project back on track. Ann said she’d felt badgered and bullied by my questions. She said that during one conversation, as she drove, the distraction of attempting to answer had caused her to break a traffic regulation – possibly she veered into a bus lane. For her, a stickler for law and order, it had been embarrassing and she held me responsible for beguiling her into criminal activity.

I took all of this on board and felt rather bad, particularly at the idea that I might have ‘bullied’ her – though there is an irony somewhere in the idea of a strident disciplinarian feeling ‘bullied’ by cheeky questions. She went on to mention her consternation at – as I saw it – a harmless bit of small talk when I’d spent the day with her in her Kent constituency and visited her home in a tiny town with a name like Zazie-dans-le-Métro. While waiting for someone, parked up in a car, I’d asked about the difference between the Duke and Duchess of Kent and Prince and Princess Michael of Kent. How was it possible to have a duke and duchess and a prince and princess all of the same place? Wasn’t it likely to lead to civil war? Or were they in fact the same people? She didn’t seem any clearer than I was and, I suppose, as a royalist and Kent MP, she found that a little embarrassing.

Filming resumed, though there was always the lurking sense of her having mixed feelings about the project, enjoying the attention but hating and resenting any question that hinted at salaciousness or even carnality. It was difficult for me, since I’d always regarded a person’s sexuality as a key to their personality and an exploration of intimate romantic relationships as the most reliable way of understanding who someone really is. With Ann that was all off limits, my hands were tied, and more than once I reflected on Anatole France’s observation, ‘Of all sexual aberrations, chastity is the strangest.’

The most intimate moments with Ann came during a cruise on a Norwegian liner. Kate and I had finagled tickets at the last minute – I suspect one of the aged passengers had passed away – and we flew to Tromsø to join the ship halfway through the cruise, spending a night in the nacreous summer light of the Arctic Circle before we boarded. Ann had brought her mother, Rita, who was as cheeky and playful as Ann was stolid and withholding, and also a female friend of Singaporean heritage whose name I don’t recall – no sapphic interests are implied, I think they were just friends. Rita had written a poem about Kate and wanted to read it to us on camera. It began, ‘Kate ate a cake, Kate ate a jelly’, but how it went after that we will never know because Ann kept interrupting, telling her mother to be quiet, seeming to feel that to have a family member declaiming nonsense verse on TV would be a blot on the family honour.

At the end, when filming was completed, I felt we’d got away with it, just about, and had enough material to make an entertaining fifty minutes of television, but that we hadn’t broken through the crust of her carapace of self-protection. I was aware Ann probably regretted taking part in the programme, which didn’t feel great, but I didn’t dwell on it. By now I had bigger things to worry about, and for once it wasn’t the struggle to get programmes going, but something far weirder: the fact that a programme, having got going, had unexpectedly gone too far: blown up, and become a national news story, with me in the middle of it.