"A Monday felt a lot like a Saturday. Every day was the same," Louis Theroux said of lockdown. Photo / Getty Images
"A Monday felt a lot like a Saturday. Every day was the same," Louis Theroux said of lockdown. Photo / Getty Images
The globetrotting documentary-maker explains how Joe Wicks (and whisky) got him through lockdown — and shares an exclusive extract from his candid pandemic diaries.
Louis Theroux got through the lockdowns on burpees and bourbon. For the former, there were Joe Wicks's routines. For the latter, he discovered the brand BulleitBourbon, and drank a lot of it. "A Monday felt a lot like a Saturday. Every day was the same," he reasons. "If you're used to wine or beer, then drink bourbon, it's like going on holiday when they give you a rental car with a tricky clutch. You find you're accelerating much faster than you're used to."
We are meeting for coffee (not whisky), on a bright autumnal morning in London. He is dry and expressive company — lots of raised eyebrows over specs, exactly as he appears in his globetrotting TV documentaries. Unable to make those, he launched his Grounded with Louis Theroux podcast last year, which topped the charts thanks to his knack for getting the most out of his similarly locked-down interviewees. Now he has a book out about this strange past year and a bit, in which he turns the focus on himself.
"It is an attempt to understand my family life, the side that doesn't get seen," he says. "Reporting on a frontier that's the site of more angst and danger than any others — my home during a pandemic. That's not a joke. People ask where I've been that's most frightening: a skinhead rally or San Quentin prison? But our deepest feelings of emotional stress are in our front rooms. I'm doing a version of a programme about myself, observing my own weirdness."
And a lot of that involves drinking. In Theroux the Keyhole: Diaries of a grounded documentary maker, he writes "Did I drink too much? Was I struggling? Did I care?" He recounts nights turning vague, watching TV and not remembering much the next day. Was his wife, Nancy, concerned? "It did worry her," he admits. But this was how he managed his mental health. "I don't speak on behalf of all men. But what I can tell from 51 years of life is, many men feel down but do not fully realise it. I'm guilty of that and there were times when the stress of lockdown was managed by the sense of, 'A drink might help?' "
His podcast also made life more bearable. The pandemic was hard for a man famed for visiting strange people all over the world, so he sat at home and spoke to famous people instead. Michaela Coel and Ruby Wax were the best of a strong bunch, the latter sharing how disappointed she is in her early work. Is he similarly self-critical?
"I've got a bad habit of having a few drinks and watching my old shows," he admits. "The last two weeks I did this a couple of times and you see room for improvement, but occasionally I think, 'My God, that's an excellent programme.' "
What about When Louis Met … Jimmy, the BBC show from 2000 that showed Jimmy Savile as a stomach-churning creep, but did not reveal the extent of the abuse horrors to come? In his book Theroux writes that Savile is someone who, "depending on your point of view, I either made a revealing programme about or failed to make a revealing programme about".
"It's neither one or the other, is it?" shrugs Theroux today. "There's plenty of ammo you could deploy in either direction. I've watched it since the revelations came out and I'm struck by how much is there. It's very far from soft journalism. We all knew he was doing some act. He would more or less invite people to believe he had secrets."
Theroux was born in 1970, son of Anne and Paul, the famed travel writer and novelist. When Theroux was 12, David Bowie was in the running to buy the rights to his father's novel The Mosquito Coast and Louis ran into school to boast. "Everyone thought I was being annoying."
Louis has three children with Nancy, his second wife — all boys, aged 15, 13 and 7. (He refers to them as Arthur, Jack and Ray in the book; not their real names.) They have little interest in his work, he says. Weren't they impressed that he'd interviewed tiger weirdo Joe Exotic for a documentary way before he became a lockdown sensation in Tiger King on Netflix? "Not as far as I could tell." He did, though, speak to the YouTuber KSI for Grounded, who gave a shout-out to Theroux's sons that made one of them blush.
Louis Theroux and wife Nancy Strang. Photo / Getty Images
Towards the end of the book he muses on how the world has been sleepwalking to disaster. "One of the points of the book is that the pandemic is a secondary phenomenon. And the primary one is globalisation," he says. "It's that feeling that the pandemic wasn't the lightning strike of misfortune: it was a bill due. How many billions of us are there? And we're taking up so much space, in so much physical proximity to one another, plus travelling relentlessly."
It became personal for Theroux in April this year when Nancy caught Covid. There is a history of asthma in her family and she was seriously ill. "When it hits you where you live," he says, "it ramps up the sense of gravity." But then he heads off on a tangent to talk about how he wears a facemask in public "because I don't want to be a dick", while a part of him can't help but question if they are doing any good. "My head is full of different voices," he explains.
This leads to a story about how his car once broke down when he tried driving it on an empty tank. He was testing a bizarre theory that popped into his brain that perhaps it didn't need petrol at all. He ended up having to walk to a petrol station in Park Royal with a can. It is this quirky, wide-eyed inquisitiveness that helps him make sense of the world — and make inroads with the world's trickiest people.
There are things he misses about lockdown. He liked the routine of being at home, loading and unloading the dishwasher, connecting with people on Zoom. He tells me he is drinking less now, even if still over government guidelines. Television-wise, he has been enjoying The White Lotus — a raucous American drama about an upmarket hotel and its ghastly guests. His favourite character is Armond, the manager who drinks a lot but can still do his job. Theroux laughs at the thought. "Maybe that's why I related to him," he says.
Theroux the Keyhole: Diaries of a grounded documentary maker is available now.
