There is a temptation, when interviewing Louis Theroux, to act a bit like
Louis Theroux interviewing somebody else. Louis, I want to ask, with my face
set in an expression of mildly comic determination, how real is the Louis
Theroux we see on our screens? The goofy, baffled, excruciatingly polite
interviewer? Is he for real? “Uh . . .” begins Theroux, and the temptation
is to leave it at that. Perhaps I could freeze-frame, focusing in on those
guilty, raised, bushy eyebrows and that gangly frame, like a very English
cross between Shaggy and Scooby-Doo. Perhaps I could leave him dangling, and
encourage conclusions to be drawn.
Later, Theroux tells me that he reckons this wouldn’t work. “Actually,” he
says, “you editorialise with a lighter touch on TV. You do. You have the
luxury of letting people tell the stories. In an article, you need to nail
your colours to the mast a bit more. If somebody is short and has a big
nose, you have to say so. It’s much easier to offend.”
One of the great strengths of Louis Theroux is that he rarely offends.
Everybody seems to like him. In this country at least, he has become a
byword for a certain kind of technique, a style of dealing with the famous
or weird, or the famous and weird. At 37, he is a telly institution — a feat
that seems all the more remarkable when one considers that he hasn’t,
recently, made much telly. After emerging from Michael Moore’s TV Nation,
he blazed into public consciousness in 1999 with his fantastic Weird
Weekends series, all about porn, and Nazis, and how peculiar Americans
were.
A couple of years later, he returned with his sublime When Louis Met . . .
celebrity interview series, which was all about how peculiar celebrities
were. His greatest triumph was probably filming Neil and Christine Hamilton
when they were wrongly accused of sexual assault. There were a handful of
documentaries in 2003, which veered back towards things like porn and Nazis,
and since then, nothing. Where has he been? “I took a couple of years off,”
he says. “Well. Almost three, actually. You start doing something because
you enjoy it, and then you have this pressure to replicate previous
successes. You’re just trying to feed meat into the sausage machine.” He
says much of his time was spent writing. With his girlfriend Nancy, he also
had a baby, Albert.
Theroux finally returns to our screens with two programmes — a reminder of his
best moments followed by a documentary on the casinos of Las Vegas. He
approaches the city as he approaches most of his subjects — with a
wide-eyed, baffled willingness to learn. He is the outsider, the perplexed
novice. You’d never guess, I say, with smooth Theroux-style cunning, that he
had already lived there for six months.
“Hmm,” he says. “Well. I lived there on and off, but I didn’t go to the strip
very much. I never spent, you know, significant time in a hotel casino. So,
as far as gambling goes, I was a neophyte.”
Neophyte is how he seems. Theroux teams up with high-roller Alan (who loses a
lot of money), middle income gambling freaks John and Tim (who also lose a
lot of money) and Martha, a doddery old lady slot- machine addict (who
reckons she has poured away $4 million). These people are all plainly nuts,
and Theroux is great with nuts. He has the skill of confronting them with
their nuttiness, but in such a manner that they still don’t stop talking.
“It’s all about hiding your response,” he says. “They are gamblers, so how
surprised can you be?” He uses the same technique, he says, with everybody.
“I would say a neo-Nazi is probably more scary than Paul Daniels, but I’ve
never found it too difficult. As abhorrent as I might find it. If they say
that they hate Jews, or that blacks should be hanged, well . . . where are
you? It’s not like hearing it in the chip shop, is it?” Theroux thinks he
benefits from his cross-Atlantic origins. “As a British person in the US,
you are the beneficiary of all kinds of prejudices. In the UK, there is an
emphasis on not putting ourselves forward too much.” You can tell he has
spent a while thinking about all of this. “I think I’m lucky in that I am
perhaps a bit more American than I seem on the outside. In the US, there is
an emphasis on a positive outlook. It’s unselfconscious. You set out in good
faith, earnestly, for success. They say it’s to do with the Quakers.”
He’s a Yank, in other words, in Brit clothing. He is the English-sounding son
of a very American export — the travel writer Paul Theroux. The father, says
the son, was a profound influence. “He is a real American. We had summers in
Cape Cod, chopping wood and building bivouacs. That counteracted a lot of
British traits.”
It must be satisfying, I suggest, to have soared in profile beyond being his
father’s son. Indeed, to many in our own TV nation, the younger Theroux must
now be the better known. “TV is a different kind of thing,” says Louis,
carefully. “There’s a more immediate profile, and it may be greater for a
time, but it falls away very quickly. My dad has probably left a deeper
imprint on the culture.”
How true is that? Louis Theroux’s documentary style may have been pioneered by
the likes of Nick Broomfield and, to some extent, his old mentor Michael
Moore, but neither had quite his success at winning hearts and minds, both
of his subjects and his viewers. It is not accidental that he rarely
offends. He seems keen, genuinely and perpetually, not to.
“I don’t like people to think that I’m just exploring them and then pissing
off,” he shrugs. “I’m still in touch with Keith Harris and Jimmy Savile. I
had lunch with the Hamiltons last year. Some people have been offended in
the past. Sometimes I think we like to assume there is a bit more good faith
on our own part than is really the case.”
Were Louis Theroux conducting this interview, I suspect he’d pause there. The
camera would keep rolling, but Louis wouldn’t talk. He’d wait, perhaps
nodding slightly. Certainly, he’d be grinning. A few too many seconds of
silence would pass, so that things grew really awkward. Eventually, the
other Louis — the subject Louis — would bite his lip and look into the
camera. And that would be the end. Just there.
The Weird World of Louis Theroux, Sun, Jan 28, BBC Two; Gambling in Las
Vegas, Feb 4, BBC Two
