A walk on the wild side:

Louis Theroux catches up with some memorable past encounters.

Have you ever wondered what happened to some of those more oddball or extreme people who Louis Theroux introduced to us in his always entertaining TV documentaries? If so, you will be interested in watching his new four-part series on Prime in which he looks back at his documentaries spanning 25 years. Louis Theroux: Life On The Edge features Theroux at home with his family in the UK during the Covid-19 lockdown talking to some of his most notable contributors via web cam, updating stories and reflecting on his experiences. “For years I’ve wanted to go back and make sense of the programmes I’ve made, to find out what happened to some of the contributors, update their stories, and see what all these many hours of making TV might add up to,” he says. “Lockdown gave me the time and space to do this. It’s been a strange and fascinating couple of months working on this. “I think we’ve been able to make the whole add up to more than the sum of the parts and to bring out surprising themes and commonalities. “And, if nothing else, it was an interesting review of how my haircuts and glasses have changed over the years.” In the first episode he looks at how the most fervent beliefs of some people – from neo-Nazis to alien killers – can bring them into conflict with mainstream society. “Even though I’m an atheist

and was raised without any structured religion in my life, or maybe because of that, I’ve always been drawn to people who seem to have very fervent convictions and beliefs – even when those beliefs seemed wrong-headed or confused or strange,” he says.

One of his earliest encounters was with a group of right-wing patriots who set up the Almost Heaven community in rural Idaho to get away from what they felt was an interfering government. One of them, Mike Cain, predicted “all-out war with the government by 2000”.

“He turned out to be rather welcoming and I grew to like him,” says Theroux. “I felt as if he had a good heart and I liked his family.”

Theroux also tracks down Lamb and Lynx, two 10-year-old blonde American twins whose mother April raised them to be an extreme right-wing pop group called Prussian Blue, who sang nationalist lyrics accompanied by Nazi salutes.

“April will never change but I never really felt the girls knew what they were doing.

“Now 19, they describe themselves as very liberal and have openly apologised for the things they said and did in the past,” he says.

“Our beliefs are part of the quest that we pass on to those around us, especially to our children, so it carries with it a weight of responsibility.

“It’s in the nature of the stories I do about belief that there is a moral dimension. And as I went on I suppose I pushed further in the direction of exploring ideas that were toxic and dangerous.

“I think it was part of growing up that I felt more confident about taking on those kinds of stories.”

A meeting with neo-Nazi ‘Skip,’ who welcomed him into his family in California, turned from being initially welcoming to menacing when Theroux, in his beguiling way, asked if he would be made quite so welcome if he knew he was Jewish.

Theroux also met black nationalists in New York.

“Most of them I spoke to had what I thought was an understandable belief in the improvement of civil rights but they also incubated an extreme fringe of true believers who took a totally over-the-top exclusionary view of other races.”

Earlier programmes show Louis visiting people obsessed with UFOs. The colourfully named Thor Templar, is head of the Alien Resistance Movement who monitor extra-terrestrials.

Proudly wearing military-style clothes and a red beret, he says that they have killed many aliens and that he, personally, had been responsible for 10 of them.

The super-slick, Marshall Sylver, who Louis met in Las Vegas in 2000, wrote a self-help book called Passion, Profit & Power!!! about how you can find the skills to create the life of your dreams. He made a fortune himself from setting up courses that people would pay to attend in the belief that he would turn them into millionaires.

“Not that long after we stopped filming there was a prosecution – nine counts of theft by obtaining money under false pretences,” Theroux reveals.

“In the end there was a hung jury, so there was no conviction.”

“I’ve always been drawn to people who seem to have very fervent convictions and beliefs – even when those beliefs seemed wrong-headed or confused or strange.” – Louis Theroux