It was fun going back and seeing how far I’ve come
Louis Theroux is back on screen with a look back at his body of work spanning 25 years. KERRI-ANN ROPER finds out more...
LOUIS THEROUX is taking a trip down career memory lane. Or as he likens it in his head to, “climbing a mountain and then you take a pause after you’ve had a decent interval of walking and then you sit on a bench and you’re like ‘Wow, we’re a long way up”’.
He is not wrong. His latest project, a BBC2 series titled Louis Theroux: Life On The Edge, shines a spotlight on his 25 years in the TV industry.
Four, hour-long episodes, each with a different theme, Beyond Belief, Family Ties, Law and Disorder and The Dark Side of Pleasure, will see him revisit some of his most memorable stories.
Louis, 50, also unearthed unseen footage from older series such as Weird Weekends, which ran from 1998 to 2000.
“It was really fun going back and opening up the treasure chests of old programmes and seeing how far I’ve come in a way,” he says during a Zoom video interview.
“I think in general what I’m struck by is, how many, because I still feel like a novice in some respect. I still feel like I’m learning how to do this. I still have a lot of professional anxieties whenever I’m starting a new project or just continuing an old project, and so to see how many programmes I’ve made and how many of them still hold up is really pleasing”.
He has covered Jimmy Savile, US neo-Nazis, Michael Jackson and Scientology in his series and TV specials over the years. Not forgetting, of course, his America’s Most Dangerous Pets film, which featured zoo keeper Joe Exotic now famed from Netflix’s lockdown hit series, Tiger King. And his When Louis Met... series which included a memorable encounter with magician Paul Daniels and wife Debbie.
But still, looking back, there were small elements of surprise.
“I didn’t expect (it), but in the first three episodes, how much they are portraits of America, and all the stories being about America, and the themes”, he says, listing them. “(They) all sort of say something, you know.
“I’ve always made a lot of programmes in America, but I’ve never made it explicit what they say about America and here I feel like we’re able to do that.
“It’s made me feel like I’m maybe a more serious documentarymaker, which is a good feeling, something I’m not used to”.
Last year, Louis published his autobiography, Gotta Get Theroux This, which charted his career from fledgling journalist in the early 1990s to BBC regular.
Off screen he hosts a podcast called Grounded with Louis Theroux, which BBC Sounds, says has been its biggest hit on the service during lockdown.
Featuring interviews with stars including Helena Bonham Carter, Sir Lenny Henry, Boy George, KSI and Miriam Margolyes, Louis says working on it has been “one of the pleasures” of lockdown.
“Being able to have long-form chats with people like Boy George and Lenny Henry via Zoom – these are people who back in the day I tried to get for When Louis Met, a celebrity series, and who probably very sensibly turned me down – and now I’m at a place where I feel I can tell those stories of interesting people in the public eye.
“That’s another area of enquiry I’d like to go further down,” he adds.
“Just the idea of long-form chats in which you are getting to the truth with people in a way that’s comfortable for them and just connecting with people in different spheres of life in a way that feels unforced and unformatted and free form.”
With everything he has covered in the last 25 years, I ask him what story he still wants to tell.
“What I have never done is a story about radical Islam and the issue of Islamic extremism,2 he offers.
“I’ve tried a couple of times and not got that far down the road.
“I thought for a while there may be a way of telling the story from the perspective of Isis returnees and I even proposed that about a year ago at the BBC and for one reason or another it got pushed back. I would still like to tell that story.
“You know the Shamima Begum type of story, the world of people who were caught up in Islamic
fundamentalism... and how we deal with that now and the world of that ideology.
“I think all of that is massively interesting and obviously socially important, and really upsetting as well”.
Louis with ‘Tiger King’ Joe Exotic
Begum is one of three east London schoolgirls who fled to Syria to join the so-called Islamic State in 2015, and is fighting a legal battle against the UK after she was stripped of her British citizenship.
And what about lockdown and the coronavirus pandemic, is that a story he thinks he will document one day?
“The short answer is I think I might do, but it would be probably in print. I’ve been keeping a diary.”
There may be, he muses, a “glut of books” written in the next year or year thereafter about all this.
“If I did anything on lockdown I think the only way for me of telling the story would be through the medium of a book or print in which I would excavate the weird tensions...
“You know in lockdown I was just here with my family, working, but just trying to get through the day, without one of us losing (our) minds due to this feeling of there not being enough hours in the day, kids being home-schooled or not home-schooled, would be more accurate.
“We have three boys and my wife (Nancy) and I both work, and had professional commitments and we’re trying to get meals, get everyone fed, keep the house in some semblance of order, get clothes cleaned, do two jobs that are very demanding and then make sure the kids aren’t on screens the whole day. It was extremely stressful.”
Louis says he’s proud of this new series.
“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.”
Louis Theroux: Life On The Edge is on Sundays on BBC2 at 9pm.