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

When I picked up the ringing phone and the voice said, ‘Louis? Jerry Kupfer. TV Nation,’ I put my spliff down and stood up, not feeling equipped to conduct a high-stakes professional conversation. I didn’t normally answer the phone high and I was regretting doing so now. I tried to gather my thoughts – he was talking about ‘the millennium piece’, an idea I had discussed with Michael and Chris Kelly, and when could I fly. It seemed I was being offered the job of presenting the segment and I did my best to reply appropriately and sound on-point and alert.

It was to be a satirical investigation cross-referencing the predictions of various apocalyptic groups for when the end of the world was going to come and how it would take place. I would be leaving the following night. It was weird and surreal – the idea of me being a TV correspondent. I was struggling to process it and after I put the phone down, I realized I had been so clouded with anxiety and dope that I probably hadn’t sounded keen on taking the job. I called Jerry back. ‘I just want to say how pleased and excited I am,’ I said. ‘You caught me off guard. Thank you for this wonderful opportunity.’

‘OK!’ Jerry said. ‘That’s good to hear. Yeah, good to know you’re excited. I didn’t know if I caught you in an off moment.’

‘Ha ha! No!’ I said. ‘I’m very much . . . on! And excited! Thank you!’

Truthfully, though, I was mainly panicked and worried.

It was now several weeks since my first interview with Michael. There had been a follow-up interview, at which, afflicted with toothache, I was aware I’d been less effervescent. Michael had mentioned a possible segment about hockey fights. ‘That sounds amazing,’ I’d said but maybe without enough conviction – Michael was exquisitely attuned to body language – and afterwards he’d told Chris, ‘He doesn’t seem very enthusiastic.’ Dubious about my knowledge of US culture, he’d also pointed to his ballcap, which had a ‘p’ on it.

‘What does this stand for?’

‘Philly?’ I said. I am still not sure whether this was the right answer.

After that, it had all gone a little quiet, though Chris had mentioned the millennium segment. It had been offered to Merrill Markoe, the author and comedian who’d been a writer on Late Night with David Letterman, but she’d been worried that talking to religious loonies might disturb her mental equilibrium. Then the performance artist Karen Finley had been in the frame, but it was said she’d wanted to bring her baby and partner, making the flights prohibitively expensive.

And to be fair, seriously, why was I being offered a network TV job? Weird-looking, gawky, socially awkward, unqualified, anxious, twenty-three years old . . . Yes, I was cheap and keen and, in being British, a sop to the BBC paymasters, but I was very far from conventional TV material. I thought of all the people I knew who were funnier than me . . . school friends like Adam and Joe and Zac, family members, random people down the pub. I tried to reassure myself that my sense of curiosity about the story itself would see me through. I had no idea whether I’d be any good at asking questions on TV but I did know I was excited to meet the various religious groupuscules making their lonely cataclysmic prophesies. I thought back to university and my interest in offbeat sects, millenarians and chiliasts, the fanatics that flourished during the English Civil War . . . I’d once bought a copy of The Pursuit of the Millennium by Norman Cohn, a landmark overview of apocalyptic religious movements – one day I planned on reading it – and maybe that enthusiasm would carry the day . . . Or, you know, maybe it wouldn’t.

The next afternoon, having given notice on my legal fact-checking job, I went into the TV Nation offices with my bags packed to pick up my tickets and have a quick briefing chat with Michael. We sat in a conference room with a couple of the writers. On the wall were segment ideas on index cards. ‘Pets on Prozac’. ‘Move the Show to New Jersey’. And also: ‘Apply as Hit Men to Whack Salman Rushdie’. That was mildly encouraging.

Michael screened a rough cut of a segment he was working on in which he visited the Serbian Embassy and they explained the Balkan conflict using slices of pizza. An embassy aide, reaching over for some pepperoni, said, ‘I think I would like a slice of Montenegro because my mother is from there.’

This was supposed to be my speed-education in presenting fact-based comedy on TV, and Michael began throwing out pieces of advice: how to play to the camera in reaction shots and elicit small moments of humour. ‘That Monty Python guy, on PBS, Michael Palin. He’s great but we’re not doing gentle comedy, Americans don’t want that. You’ve got to kick ass and take names. Get in there and shake it up. This camera guy – I’m not happy about how he shot this. He needs to stay on the interviewees, he’s coming back to me too much. You can always repeat your own lines but the gold is in what they say so you make sure you get that.’ There was more advice but it was flying by and for some reason the main pearl of wisdom that stayed with me was to be careful not to interrupt or talk over my interview subjects as it made the segments hard to edit.

I was going to San Francisco. US union rules meant network TV shows had to fly writers and correspondents business class. This somehow exacerbated my sense of unworthiness – there I sat with my sparkling wine and free packet of socks, thinking about all the money that was being spent on a segment I would probably end up making a complete hash of. I looked at sheets of funny questions written for me by the TV Nation writers. Of a Christian fundamentalist I was supposed to ask: ‘Let’s say I worship the devil. Should I be worried?’ I couldn’t imagine having the gall. Then I began to fixate on how I would remember all the questions – could I carry a little notebook? Or maybe a clipboard? I thought I’d seen people on television doing that.

I arrived at San Francisco airport to find a limo driver holding a card with my name – the first time I’d ever been privileged to such a welcome.

At breakfast the next morning I met up with the segment producer.

‘Hi, Daniel!’ I said.

‘David,’ he said.

‘David, of course. Such an interesting subject,’ I said. ‘Really keen to get started. Have you read The Pursuit of the Millennium, Norman Cohn’s landmark history of late medieval apocalyptic movements?’

‘No,’ he said.

Looking back, I am struck that David must have thought it strange to be saddled on a network show with a presenter with literally zero hours of television experience. But he showed no disquiet. Entirely professional, he said he was excited to have me on board.

‘Ve fing is,’ he said now, betraying a very slight speech defect, ‘ve important fing is to have fun.’

For the first day of filming we were in the San Francisco Bay Area to speak to a radio evangelist named Harold Camping, based in Oakland, who was predicting the end of the world for later in the year. Camping’s outfit, Family Radio, had listeners in the thousands. He’d written a book, 1994?, outlining the biblical basis for his prophesy, with the question mark to indicate the small possibility that the apocalypse would not materialize.

We arrived at his radio headquarters: me, David the director, Chris Kelly – who’d flown out on Michael’s orders to hold my hand through the four-day shoot – and the sound recordist and camera operator. Inexperienced as I was, I felt self-conscious around the crew, imagining them sizing me up as a jumped-up chancer. Presumably they had worked with hundreds of presenters and could recognize a greenhorn when they saw one.

The sound recordist miked up Harold Camping. We sat in his office, me with my questions folded in the inside pocket of the thrift-store jacket I was wearing. Craggy and deep-voiced, Camping must have been in his seventies, and he droned on and on about his bible studies and how he’d arrived at the conclusion that 1994 was God’s appointed year of doom. ‘The evidence in the Bible points to the fact that September 6 of 1994 will be the last day of the final tribulation period,’ he said. Christ was coming back – on the Tuesday or possibly the Thursday and ‘every mountain and island’ would be ‘moved out of their places.’

Bearing in mind Michael’s advice, I waited for Camping to finish what he had to say before asking follow-up questions. But there weren’t many breaks in the torrent of theology. And so Camping had free rein to deliver long rambling biblical monologues, instead of the peppy tongue-in-cheek repartee I’d been hired to provide.

Camping took me on a tour of his radio studio, pointing out the collection of Christian records – some of whose tracks had been marked with little stickers to indicate they had ‘too much beat’. I asked a couple of the silly questions that had been scripted for me: ‘Are you any relation to the beast spoken of in the book of Revelation called “Camping”?’

‘Heh heh,’ Camping said.

That night, I felt relieved to just have got through the day but, without anyone saying it, I could tell I wasn’t doing very well.

‘Good just to be underway,’ David said as we rode up in the hotel lift.

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘I always fink everyfing relaxes when you’ve got somefing in ve can.’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘One small fing. I would just say you could maybe interrupt if someone is really going on?’

‘Oh, OK, will do.’

The next day we flew down to San Diego.

On the plane, David passed along a packet of information about our next group. They were called the Unarius Academy of Science, and their predictions involved a cargo cult-style prophesy of a vast number of flying saucers landing in the near future, bringing gifts of technology way beyond our mortal imagining and ushering in an age of peace and tranquillity on Earth. They didn’t seem to have many members.

‘They make their own films,’ David said. ‘Very far-out space films wiv wacky special effects. They’re rahver fun.’

The Unarius headquarters were on a low-rise commercial strip in El Cajon, a small city in the mountains some miles east of San Diego. Their spokesperson was a past-life regression teacher, Lianne Downey. Lianne was in her early thirties, fawn-like and bright-eyed. In her teacherly dress with sparkly jewellery and big earrings, she had the air of an intergalactic primary school teacher – which, with her advanced extraterrestrial-derived wisdom, is perhaps what she felt like.

‘We’re not predicting doom and gloom or fearful of doom and gloom,’ she said. ‘In the year 2001 we expect the first spacecraft to land from another planet in our galaxy.’

She laid out a vision involving the arrival of thirty-three space ships, which would stack one on top of another like a cosmic game of Jenga. In its strangeness it was oddly appealing – not that I believed it, naturally, but there was something intoxicating about her conviction. To someone like me, who struggled daily with uncertainty about far more banal matters, her complete faith in something so silly felt enviable.

Before arriving I’d learned that the Unarians enjoyed dressing up in space-themed costumes for big celebration days and also to make their visionary films. I thought it might be funny to interview them while dressed up in one of their outfits. I raised the idea with Lianne. She seemed a little surprised but took me to a storage room where they kept their costumes. I settled on a blue nylon space suit with a little gold hat – I looked like a bellhop at the Hotel Liberace.

We were joined by Lianne’s superior at the Unarius Academy, director Charles Spiegel. Charles was in his seventies and had been married to one of the founders of Unarius, Ruth L. Norman. Ruth had been a glamorous, larger-than-life figure, reminiscent of Glinda the Good Witch in The Wizard of Oz, in puffy skirts, with diadems and wands and sparkly jewellery. Charles, in sober suit and tie, lacked her over-the-top clothes sense, but he had brought an unlikely accent of outlandishness by styling a wholly unconvincing wig.

The plan was for us all to drive to the future landing site of the intergalactic federation fleet. Charles, Lianne and I would be riding in the Unarius ‘space caddie’ – a bright blue Cadillac with a model of a flying saucer fixed to the top and the message ‘Welcome Your Space Brothers’ written on the side – and the crew would follow behind. We took off, appropriately enough, like a rocket, leaving the crew vehicle in our dust. Alas, it was several minutes before we realized we’d lost them and – this being before mobile phones – had no way of contacting them. As we travelled, Lianne and Charles were wondering aloud – given the screw-up – which of their various past lives they were now reliving. They couldn’t seem to agree, and were becoming irritable. In the back seat I was having flashbacks to long car journeys growing up, feeling hot and bothered, my parents arguing, not to mention the nylon space suit which, in the heat, was becoming itchy and increasingly unfunny.

Having failed to rendezvous with the crew, we drove back to the Unarius headquarters and there I sat in my space uniform, wondering about my next move. Charles and Lianne disappeared. It was strange and depressing: comedy and high jinks had curdled into a feeling of being lost and forlorn. A woman who was plainly mentally ill wandered into the building and began asking me questions about the space brothers, which I didn’t feel well qualified to answer. Finally, what felt like hours later, the crew called, from a payphone. They had found the landing site and would meet us there.

We drove out again and when we arrived, the light was going. We had about fifteen minutes and captured a short sequence of me at the landing site: an expanse of scrubby desert.

‘It doesn’t look as though it would be the ideal landing place for a spacecraft just because it’s so uneven,’ I said.

‘Oh, the technology they possess – the space brothers – is entirely in advance of anything we know,’ Charles said.

‘Is it OK to call them aliens?’

‘No! They’re not aliens. They’re homo sapiens, like you and I. They have the same anatomy.’

‘They’re homo . . . ?’

‘Sapiens.’

The mix-up with the crew and the ensuing delay blew out the schedule. We were able to film the Unarian choir singing a bizarre space song about the flying saucers coming, but an interview with a small cult in Los Angeles, scheduled for the following day, had to be cancelled and I felt guilty – I couldn’t help feeling it was my fault due to my failure to stay in contact with the crew vehicle.

We were now three days into the shoot and clearly it wasn’t going brilliantly. I probably should have felt bereft. But the truth was I had such low expectations for myself that by my own lights I was doing sort of OK. I hadn’t burst into tears on camera or shat my pants. In a way, I was ahead of the game.

On day three, we flew to Montana then drove several hours through a wild landscape of snow-patched fields and lonely farmhouses, and in the distance the Bitterroot Mountains, to the far west of the state, arriving late in the afternoon at a small trailer. This was the headquarters of the Church of Jesus Christ–Christian, a white supremacist Christian group. There were only two of them: Archbishop Carl Franklin and Pastor Wayne Jones. They came to the door in matching uniforms modelled on those worn by the Nazi Brownshirts. They were vague on when the apocalypse would happen and when Jesus was coming; they just knew it would be soon and who he was coming for: specifically, white people, with other races banished to other planets.

‘We teach the gospel of the Kingdom, which Jesus teached,’ Franklin said. ‘He did not teach a gospel of so-called brotherly love with other races . . . He came only for his own race, the white race, the Aryan or Adamic race.’

Jones chipped in, ‘Each race will have its own territorial imperative, its own place. There will be no integration.’

‘And will it be on Earth?’

‘No. See, the Earth was the inheritance of His children only.’

‘So only the white people get Earth,’ I clarified. ‘So the planet the black people get, will it be better than the white people’s planet, about the same, or not quite as good?’

‘Well, it’ll be whatever they make it.’

‘So they could make it as nice as they want?’

‘Exactly.’

‘So what about if there are white people on Earth and Earth’s not doing so well and they see the black people have done a good job on their planet, would they be allowed to maybe emigrate?’ I asked.

‘No, there is no interracial mixing. No.’

It was a paradoxical mood – as the conversation progressed, the Nazi Christians settled into an attitude of teacherly indulgence. They seemed grateful for some attentive company, and my questions, ludicrous as they were, had a soothing effect. Later, I found out that the two of them had a long history in far-right politics – they’d been involved with Aryan Nations, as chief of staff and chief of security – but in that moment they came across as a pair of lonely bachelors, enlightening their visitor in a friendly way on the secret knowledge of their theology.

We retired to their small kitchen, where they made me tea. They talked about Star Trek and Star Wars – they believed that the mythology of the two franchises contained a great deal of historical truth about the grand cosmic plan.

‘Star Trek does actually represent some of the battles that were fought when Lucifer actually came to the Earth and declared himself a God.’

‘How about Star Wars? Pretty accurate?’

‘Pretty accurate.’

By now, I had the impression I had cast a kind of benign spell over them and that there was almost nothing I could say that would break it. I sang a space hymn that the Unarians had taught me, and wondered whether our rapport was now strong enough that it could possibly cause them to recant some of their racism.

‘I have one teensy-weensy, eensy-speensy bit of Jewish blood,’ I said. ‘Do you think I might be allowed to stay on planet Earth?’

‘You will have some place to call your own,’ Jones said.

As I left, putting on my woolly hat and stepping out into the cold dark Montana night, I said, ‘After the race war, when we’re all on other planets, maybe we can keep in touch by phone.’

‘Communications are unlimited when things are put back right,’ Franklin said.

Over the years I’ve been tagged with the epithet ‘faux-naive’ – sometimes unfairly, I feel – but that encounter with the two millenarian neo-Nazis was one time when I definitely earned the description, lobbing fake-sincere questions that ostensibly attempted to put a humane gloss on a weird space-Nazi vision, thereby satirizing it. After the encounter, back at the hotel, the sound recordist came up to me. He looked a little pale.

‘I’m Jewish,’ he said. ‘Kind of weird spending a couple of hours with people you know would like to see you annihilated. But I thought you handled it rather brilliantly.’

The camera operator, an older guy from the Bay Area, also sought me out. ‘You’ve been on this journey the last few days and I’ve seen you grow,’ he said. ‘I’ve worked with a lot of correspondents. Your voice, your inflections are beautiful, because it’s the voice of an ordinary person.’ Then, perhaps feeling he’d overdone the compliment, he added: ‘I find all the voices of ordinary people beautiful.’

In characteristic fashion, I toggled from the insecurity of the preceding days to an overweening feeling of self-satisfaction. I began to think what a shame it was that such rich material would have to be whittled down to an eight-minute segment. It seemed to me we had enough interviews and moments to deliver a spin-off project, possibly of feature length. That night, at our hotel in Missoula, Montana, Chris and I got drunk as a celebratory valediction to the shoot. I overslept the next day and very nearly missed the flight back to New York.

After I got back I fell ill, possibly related to the stress of the preceding week. I called in to say I was unwell.

‘Don’t worry,’ Jerry Kupfer said. ‘Take your time, no need to rush in.’

Later I realized that I’d been in a holding pattern – kept away from the office while they decided whether I’d done a good enough job to be offered more work.

On day three Jerry called and asked if I wanted to come in to the office.

I was hired.