Theroux’s tricks were wasted on drunks — they’ll talk to anyone
People talk to louis Theroux. His deceptive air of slow-wittedness convinces interviewees that they’re smarter than he is, and tougher. While he mumbles and apologises, his victims can’t see how he’s making them look like fools.
He’s the human equivalent of an elephant pit. He lures people on until they plunge into his trap. It’s a trick that worked superbly with shameless self-promoters such as politicians Neil and Christine Hamilton, and he came closer than most to unmasking Jimmy Savile as a depraved predator.
But Theroux and his subtleties were wasted on the alcoholics in Drinking To Oblivion (BBC2).
Drunks will talk to anyone. It isn’t just that booze loosens the tongue — the cases Theroux saw washed up at A&e in King’s College Hospital in london felt they had so little left to live for, they might as well answer his questions honestly. lying was a waste of energy that they didn’t have to spare.
And it felt as though Theroux wasn’t eager to waste much energy either. This was a superficial, formulaic documentary that selected its targets and visited them once a week or so, for a month, like a health visitor dropping in to take blood samples.
Theroux looked for articulate drunks, the ones still capable of selfanalysis. It wasn’t surprising that he found them: in my experience, chronic alcoholics are often intelligent and reflective people — the stupid ones usually find a quicker way to kill themselves.
Aurelie, a 44-year-old Frenchwoman who had started drinking champagne at 13 and now needed a six-pack of super-strength cider every day just to stop the shakes, was the most philosophical of the three, with a broad streak of parisienne poetry.
The cider tasted like petrol, she agreed, but said she was ‘like a rat in a cage till I have my first drink’. She wasn’t afraid of dying: ‘You get what you deserve.’ It’s hard to imagine what crimes she could have committed to deserve her boyfriend, a parkbench drunk and a vile man who constantly abused and berated her.
Aurelie had self-loathing but no selfpity. Joe, a former medical researcher, had both to an exalted degree. It was painful to watch him staggering through the streets in bloodstained shorts, bare-chested under his car-coat, but it was more disturbing still to see this 32-year-old man squealing like an injured rabbit because his girlfriend had left him.
The one valuable insight the programme produced was that deeper mental illnesses often underlie alcohol addiction. But the general shallowness of the show was revealed by the case of an antiques dealer and two-bottles-of-vino-a-day guy, who had liver disease and was told he might be dead within three months. What happened to him? We weren’t told. It appeared louis didn’t have the energy to find out.
It’s a pity he lacked the indefatigable application of the forensic archaeology teams in The Mystery Of The Crossrail Skulls (C4), as they toiled to discover why hundreds of skulls are being discovered in london’s foundations.
Dozens were found during the construction of tunnels for the capital’s new rail link. But they’ve been turning up for centuries: when work was done at the Bank of england in the 1920s, builders dug up nine of them. Just the skulls, no other bones . .. which is creepier than whole skeletons.
even more disturbing was the Bank’s decision to donate eight to the British Museum and keep the ninth for their ‘private collection’. Does that mean it’s in a vault, guarding the gold? or on the governor’s desk, perhaps with an inkwell set into an eye socket?
The real pleasure of this documentary came from the methodical way it pieced together solutions. Some of the skulls, we learned, had been washed downriver from Roman graveyards.
But one row of skulls, lying at intervals along a ditch, had probably been heads hung as trophies from trees by Celtic soldiers. They rotted, fell to the ground and lay there for two millennia.
There’s an image worthy of Game of Thrones ... which returned for a new series in the small hours of this morning. Now anyone who stayed up for that is suffering from an addiction.