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

A friend once told me she thought the problem with working in television is that it’s too much fun, with the result that it makes relationships unstable. The TV widows and widowers – the ones left behind to do childcare and cope with tantrums and keep on top of laundry – can’t help resenting their other halves off filming in far-flung locations, with buffet breakfasts and heated swimming pools. Early on, Nancy and I developed a few rules we tried to stick to in an attempt to ease the pain a little: I wouldn’t go away for more than two weeks at a time; I tried to call every day; almost without fail I would write a longish email home. But it wasn’t easy.

Since Nancy and I had met at the BBC, it wasn’t as though my being a programme-maker came as a surprise. Still, as time went on, and our commitments – also known as ‘children’ – multiplied, she made it clear she had an issue with me going away as much as I did. More than once she said, a little ruefully, ‘I always promised myself I wouldn’t get involved with someone in TV. I’ve seen it fail too many times. Husbands and wives spending too long apart. Directors having affairs with their APs . . . It never works.’

Like many couples, we fell into familiar patterns in our arguing. They were like songs – duets – without the music. Many centred on the idea that, unlike her, I had made no real concessions to family life. I was still going away, still doing the same job, as if nothing had changed.

‘I’ve sacrificed my career and changed my life but you’ve given up nothing,’ she would say. ‘You’ve had everything your way. Name one thing you’ve given up!’

‘Not true. I leave work early. I’m never back after six. I’m usually the first one to leave the office.’

‘Your workmates don’t have kids, Louis. You do.’

‘I’ve made lots of compromises.’

‘Name one!’

In the background to these arguments were certain phrases that I discovered, to my cost, I wasn’t supposed to say. But inevitably I would say them, because – to my mind – they were self-evidently true and important. One was: ‘But this is what I do, Nancy.’ There were other variations of this that were equally inflammatory. ‘I was doing this when we met.’ ‘You knew what you were getting into.’ And so on. They never failed to increase the tensions.

‘What was I doing when we met? I was making programmes, too. I wasn’t sweeping up bits of rice from under the table. “This is what I do.” Change what you do! Do something else. It’s not part of who you are. It’s bullshit.’

Another phrase was: ‘Why don’t we get more help?’

‘Get help – so you can not be a dad? It’s not about “help”, Louis. It’s about you being a father to your children.’

I suppose we all bring into our relationships certain assumptions based on how our parents were. I’d grown up with au pairs who’d lived with us in our house. Both my parents had worked. My dad had travelled for weeks at a time. The way I rationalized it, I wasn’t expecting Nancy to stay at home. I didn’t have an issue with her travelling for work – though as it happened, she didn’t travel for work as she had taken a break from full-time paid employment to be around for the kids. Still, I wasn’t expecting anything from her that I wasn’t also prepared to give. And so, to my mind, it was all equitable and fair.

Given the limitations I was working within – the fact of having commissions and needing to make programmes and suffering from the human frailty of only being in one place at one time – I did my best to keep my end up on the home front. I didn’t ‘help’ at home, since that was another trigger word. ‘I help!’ Help implied you were supplemental. ‘You do it and I’ll help.’ ‘Wow, that’s amazing, you’re helping with your kids. Has it ever occurred to you that might be your job?’

One part of me – a nasty little voice in my head – would say, So work is a luxury now. I’m selfish because I work. What happened to, ‘He’s a good provider’? I’m supposed to count myself lucky that I’m allowed to keep doing a job.

Sometimes I would look enviously around at other couples and how much licence they gave each other, how much they could get away with – long hours, frequent trips, self-indulgent hobbies. Golf? Rock climbing? Whaaaat? For a while, my brother and I got into an unhealthy habit, whenever we were together with our families, of needling and picking at each other’s supposed masculine entitlement. ‘Ooh, doesn’t do the school run! Did you hear that, Nancy? And how long were you away on your boys’ walking weekend?’ It was a little like some kind of grotesque metro-sexual update of the Four Yorkshireman sketch. ‘You got up for four feeds in one night? Looxury!’

In arguments with Nancy, I tried not to cite examples of the latitude other male partners seemed to enjoy, since that never ended well.

‘Jim and Joan have au pairs. Jim just got back from a two-month shoot in Tibet.’

‘Maybe if you talked to Joan you’d know their marriage is in serious trouble.’

Before I went away I used to make batches of kedgeree and bolognese and spoon them into little Tupperware tubs for freezing. Sometimes, on location, I would do an online Sainsbury’s shop. When I flew back – more often than not on an overnight economy flight, landing exhausted and jetlagged – I’d be aware of the need to hit the ground running. I’d walk in with my bags, feeling like a zombie. Nancy would be tired and resentful. She’d have got into her own routines while I was away. I was an interloper and an encumbrance.

‘You seem grumpy,’ she’d say. ‘Aren’t you happy to be home?’

‘No, I am happy, I’m just tired.’ My little voice would be saying, can’t I have a lie-down? ‘I might have a little lie-down. I’m just so tired.’

‘I’ve been looking after a baby and a toddler on my own for two weeks! But you’re the one that’s tired, OK, sure!’

‘It’s jetlag. It’s different.’

‘You just have no idea, do you? I make everything so easy for you. You have it all your way. You get to carry on doing what you do. I haven’t had a night away from my kids in three years. You’ve never even done a weekend on your own with the kids!’

‘Book a break! Take a week off! I would love you to. You’ve got an open offer! Just do it!’

In certain respects, we communicated better when I was away. Without the distractions of children, and with the imposed calm of distance and the interface of the written word, she would express her frustrations at the life she found herself backed into.

‘I’m really lonely, Louis.’ ‘I feel I’m basically being a single parent.’ ‘I’m in half a relationship.’

For my part, I toggled between viewing myself as being unfairly victimized and put upon for making a living and – on the other hand – seeing Nancy’s side and wanting to do my best to support her and not wanting to be the stereotype of the guy whose wife is angry with him all the time. As was so often the case, my brain was a parliament of fractious voices. There was the one saying, Why can’t I retire to a man-cave and organize my collection of jam jars with screws and nails in them, and then emerge later to have wordless sex with my wife? Is that so unreasonable? And, across the aisle, there was the honourable representative for Progressive South who found Jam-Jar Man revolting and retrograde. What is your problem that you couldn’t imagine being a house-husband and even find the phrase ‘house-husband’ a bit weird? I found certain clichés of masculinity creeping into my thinking. It was like Bernard Manning turning up at the house wearing my dressing gown and slippers. What are you doing here? Go away! That couldn’t be me. I was cool feminist guy. I was the guy who was fine with his girlfriend not shaving her armpits at university. I wasn’t the guy who complained about his wife to his mates in the pub and wondered whether there might be ancient wisdom in sexist jokes.

Making it all the more complicated was a weird kind of ambivalence about myself. In the spirit of Groucho Marx, I had never been completely OK with the idea of someone being in love with me. It seemed a character flaw in them. In turn this led me, ever so slightly, to undervalue Nancy for being with me.

This was – in an unacknowledged way – lurking in the background of everything: the sense that if I was more committed, if I’d actually proposed all those years ago, somehow that would ameliorate everything. It was the double whammy of travels a lot and never even asked me to marry him.

I liked to think my resistance to being married was part of a bohemian attitude to do with the fatuity of weddings, their role as platforms for materialism and showing off, as bourgeois status showdowns. Possibly too some buried anger at my own parents and their marriage vows, which were – as they say – more honoured in the breach than the observance. But if I’m honest with myself, I also see a deliberate withholding, a misjudged sense that it might keep Nancy on her toes and possibly also, in a spirit related to my attitude to contracts, that it gave you some leverage if you didn’t sign anything, that it wasn’t all quite official, and you could walk off the job if it wasn’t working out.

None of this was clear or consistent in my own mind. I loved Nancy. I loved my family. I wanted everything to work out. But other darker ideas and impulses hidden from me were moshing around alongside the healthier ones. And all the time the stress of children and work and daily life and feeling the impossible pull in different directions, of having to be around, of having to go away, bubbled up as the passive-aggressive anger of not quite being present.

Alongside these arguments – which were going on intermittently in the background of our lives for several years – was a sense at work that we were in danger of running out of road. One night, after the kids were in bed, I sat down with Nancy in our front room to watch a DVD of a rough cut of our programme about meth use in Fresno. Twenty minutes in, she said, ‘That’s the first time you’ve smiled.’

I didn’t think too much of it. At the end she gave a few notes – she is a perceptive critic and a hard marker – and then said, ‘I just think you should do what you are good at. There are plenty of reporters who can go to dangerous places. Your skill is building relationships.’

It may be that it took a while for the weight of what she’d said to sink in. Or that I was lacking other options. But the comment stayed with me – a sense that, in pursuing harder-edged stories, I was also in danger of losing something, that something needed to change, without quite knowing what or how.

In the spring of 2010, I turned forty. Our children were now two and four. We were getting a little more help on the home front. We’d recruited a childminder who came two or three days a week. Nancy had bounced back. She’d lost her ‘baby weight’. She had a new job. An ineffable sparkle and lightness had returned to her.

For my birthday, we’d invited the wider family – uncles, aunts, in-laws – around to our house for a big lunch. It was hot. Nancy had bought six or eight wooden lawn chairs, flat-packed in cardboard boxes, which I started to assemble in the back garden. There were the other usual chores to do with hosting a large number of guests – moving tables around, tidying, running up and downstairs. Nancy had gone into her getting-tense-because-guests-are-coming mode. Have you peeled the carrots? I thought I told you to get the houmous that has caramelized onions in it? ‘I’m just doing the chairs.’

I began feeling put upon. I was three or four chairs in, the sun was beating down, and I began wondering whose idea this party had been. Had I actually wanted a family party for my fortieth birthday? Had Nancy asked me or had she just decided that was what we were doing?

Time and my own sense of shame have obscured the details of the argument that followed. I shouted and she left. The partygoers arrived, Nancy returned, and if the photos are anything to go by, everyone had fun, reposing upon the chairs I had only recently put together, finding them adequately supportive and solidly constructed. In the subsequent days and weeks I didn’t think much more of the argument, but much later Nancy told me that was the moment she detached.

I should have known something was up when Nancy was complaining less than usual about my going away. For some reason, she was surprisingly relaxed about the two two-week trips to Israel to film in the Occupied Territories. Then the real warning sign, which completely went over my head, was her saying, ‘You know, if you ever want to pursue an outside physical relationship, I would be OK with that.’

I thought, ‘Well, that’s nice.’ Needless to say, I didn’t do anything about it.

During a minibreak at a London hotel for her birthday – a posh restaurant, cocktails, a hotel dressing gown personalized with her name on it (yep, it was pretty classy) – she mentioned that she had had thoughts about other men. The way I saw it, the only odd thing about this was that she was telling me. If I were accountable for every passing thought I had, I’d be in deep trouble. The point was that you didn’t endorse those thoughts. You let them drift away like balloons. What you didn’t do was gather them together and present them to your boyfriend like a bouquet.

I’m not sure what I said in reply, but it may have been, ‘Have you seen the dressing gown? It has your name sewn into the back.’