He has exposed the lives of the famous - and infamous - in his documentaries. But until now, Louis Theroux has kept his own personal life under wraps. As he publishes a memoir, he talks to Mick Brown about coping with anxiety, going to couples' counselling and being a 'goofy' dad.
What I'd really like to do, I say to Louis Theroux, the master of the immersive documentary, is move in with you for a couple of weeks, hang out, talk with your wife and kids, look in your wardrobes, get to know you better ...
"Wow," he says, without missing a beat. "I would love that. When do you want to move in? You could have your own room. I'm assuming you're married. Your wife is charming, I'm sure. Kids? Bring them too ..." He laughs. "Facetiousness noted. I like that."
To be honest, we only met for the first time 10 minutes earlier, so it's not going to happen. So here we are instead, sitting in the lounge of a London hotel. Theroux, 49, is tall and rangy, shaggy-haired, dressed in a short-sleeved shirt, jeans and Converse sneakers and sporting a full beard. He tends not to shave when he's not filming, he explains and the length of the beard is usually a barometer of how recently he has been in front of a camera.
For a person whose job is listening, he is engagingly talkative, open - almost apologetic for being so. He is erudite and particularly fond of quoting Nietzsche. And he can also be very funny. At one point I raise the subject of the American writer Joan Didion. "I've got her in my bag!" he exclaims, rummaging in his backpack. "Are you all right in there, Joan? (Squeaky voice) 'I'm fine.' "Do you want to come out? (Squeaky voice) 'Yes please ...'" and he pulls out a volume of her essays.
Theroux has written a memoir, Gotta Get Theroux This - an absorbing and surprisingly candid book for a man who, while happy to probe the lives of others, has always been careful to guard his own privacy. It is his second book (his first, The Call of the Weird, was published in 2006) and he explains he had originally planned a "behind the scenes" account of his work, avoiding his personal life. It was his wife, Nancy Strang, who on reading his first draft, remarked that the random bits of personal information were more interesting than some of the anecdotes about making programmes.
"Then I showed it to my dad, and he said, 'You need to talk about your upbringing.'" He shrugs. Writing it, he suggests, was an agony. Television is a collaborative process."I work with very talented people whose job it is to make me look good. But writing there's this awful thing that you're really brought up against yourself in ways that are sometimes very rewarding and other times depressing, where you think, 'Oh my God, I'm a fraud. I'm writing all this stuff and it's absolute s***.'"
Theroux grew up in South London. His father is Paul Theroux, the novelist and travel writer. His mother, Anne, worked for the BBC World Service. He has an elder brother, Marcel, a novelist and broadcaster. A liberal household. His parents, he writes, were attempting, in a way that was "equal parts ridiculous and admirable", to throw off the constraints of their own upbringing. A copy of The Joy of Sex used to lie around the house. His father was often away on his travels and his mother adopted a policy of turning a blind eye to his infidelities while on location. The marriage ended in 1990, when Therou was in his early 20s. By then he had passed through Westminster School and had graduated from Oxford with a first with honours in modern history.
He sips his coffee and says that this year constitutes "a weird kind of anniversary". It is 25 years since, as a young journalist working on Spy magazine in America, he was hired by film-maker Michael Moore to contribute to Moore's satirical news series, TV Nation. Theroux was the innocent abroad, the gawky, awkward Englishman coming up against American peculiarity. He later transitioned to the BBC and much of his work continued to strike a comic or slyly sardonic turn. But there came a point, he says, where humour became an obstacle to engaging with stories that were more challenging.
There are not many laughs to be found in the subjects he has engaged with more recently - post-partum depression, paedophiles in prison, assisted suicide. Underlying them is a sense of being prepared to give people the benefit of the doubt. "Even the person who you think, 'They should be locked up for life.' That's not all there is to be said about them."
Theroux has thought carefully about what makes him so good at what he does. There is his appearance. He wears glasses, he's a bit spindly and awkward. He has a big nose and an anxious air (his words, not mine). Characteristics that, he says, have been a bit of a liability and, as a young man, did him no favours in his romantic pursuits but proved strangely reassuring to neo-Nazis and UFO contactees. His natural impulse, he says, is to be obliging, to try to win people over.
"That's just how I've always been. My parents instilled in me this sense that you really need to be polite, offer to do the washing-up when you're staying with people and take your shoes off and be attentive. And this almost British attitude of 'I can't possibly do anything that could lead to me putting my hosts out of their way." Then there's the technical stuff. Start filming before you arrive at the door, so there isn't a sense of occasion. Do your research, but don't show you've done it.
"You need to be willing to be the stupid person by asking the obvious question."
All of this is, of course, a process of seduction to get to the heart of the story. And with that, inevitably, there sometimes comes the whiff of betrayal. The British politician Ann Widdecombe, whom Theroux featured in a documentary in 2002, reprimanded him for his "impertinence" at raising the question of whether she was a virgin and later complained of having felt deceived, saying, "He pretends to be dumb and he's not."
"I think for the most part there's an understanding," says Theroux. "You're not there to become bezzies and exchange Christmas cards for ever afterwards. You're there to tell the story honestly and reflect a point of view at the end of it. But sometimes misunderstandings occur, people take issue with what you do and occasionally there are casualties - and they're necessary casualties."
Writing his book, Theroux came to a realisation that his television career has provided both an escape and "a little bit of a crutch", for someone who has never been altogether sure of himself and who has come to recognise, that for much of his life trying to figure out his own feelings - about pretty much anything - was "like being on a ham radio, trying to make out a signal though a fog of static. Not always. I don't want to make it sound like I go through life like a dead blank, but this slight sense of emotional disconnection ..."
What I got from the book, I say, was a rumbling, just-below-the-surface-of-the-skin anxiety. He nods. "That's true as well. Thinking one thing, changing my mind, thinking the opposite. Also veering between sort of anxiety and triumphalism. It's odd." He ponders on this. "I don't want to overdo it ... I think I'm a pretty functional, healthy person for the most part. But I am aware that I worry a lot." He thinks that probably came from his mother. Her side of the family were worriers.
"From when I was 4 or 5, I was literally worrying about Wee Willie Winkie running through the town. Imagine - your first reaction is, 'That sounds like a dodgy character. What's he doing running through the town?'" He pauses. "And at primary school - we're going to have to do maypole dancing. Maypole dancing! I don't think I know how to do that ... Immediately it preoccupied me."
He used to consider it a flaw that he didn't hold strong opinions. At prep school, he says, everyone was posh and thought they liked Margaret Thatcher. "I knew my parents didn't really like her. But I didn't have a clue what I thought." Later on, at Westminster, everybody supported the miners' strike. "I didn't really know what was going on. And then much later I began to see that as an asset ... I think in my journalism I've tried to make it one."
This sense of "slightly drifting through life", as he puts it, has extended to his personal life. He has always been reluctant to discuss his first marriage, to a woman he names in the book only as Sarah - a pseudonym, he explains, to protect her privacy. They first met as students at Westminster, beginning an on-again, off-again relationship that drifted along for almost 18 years, culminating in a "minimalist" wedding in New York, where they were living at the time. Theroux suggests it was something of a marriage of convenience: she needed to work; he has American citizenship through his father. There were no friends or family at the ceremony and a passing stranger served as witness.
"Even afterwards," he writes, "I didn't think of myself as married. I imagined that if we ever did decide to marry 'for real', which I thought we might, we'd get married again. It was a little confusing." The marriage ended in 2001 - shortly after Theroux had made his programme about Jimmy Savile and after Sarah had pronounced "there's nothing real about you" - a phrase "that went around in my head for years afterwards" resonating in an awful way with a put-down that Savile had delivered: "Ah, insincerity. Your speciality."
He met his present wife, Strang, in 2002 at a BBC Christmas party - she was an associate producer in the history department and is now a director. Their early courtship survived an awkward interlude when he was living in a legal brothel in Nevada for an immersive documentary and they started living together late in 2003, moving to Los Angeles for eight months before settling in London.
"Whatever sense of equilibrium and emotional intelligence I lack, she has in spades," Theroux says. "She makes up for all the lack of emotional insight that I have. She brought me out of myself - you can ask any of my friends."
Their first son, Albert, was born in 2004 and a second, Frederick, in 2008. Two other pregnancies ended in miscarriage - one while they were on the road in Yosemite - and they dealt with the losses in different ways, which he says took its toll on their relationship. "We'd been through nothing like that before," he writes. "The language of grief and the social forms it was versed in didn't seem adequate to the occasion. The sadness was completely private, between us, and even I - if I'm honest - didn't really understand what she was going through. It still seemed abstract to me, whereas to Nancy the babies had already become real."
Theroux admits that the conflict between family commitments and the amount of time he would spend travelling to make his films also became a difficult issue in the relationship. At one point, he writes of the "warning sign" when Strang told him that if he ever wanted to pursue an outside physical relationship she would understand. Did he think, I ask, that what she might have been saying was that she was thinking of pursuing an outside relationship?
"I think what she was telling me was that the relationship was in difficulties ... But I was too much of an idiot to really hear that. We weren't married. And that was part of the issue. We'd been together for seven years. We'd had two kids and I was basically doing the same job, going away. She had put her career on the back-burner and she was feeling that she'd made all the compromises and I was getting the best of both worlds of family life and successful work-life. And without saying it, she was saying, 'We need to reboot this relationship.'"
For a while they entered relationship counselling: "Like having an umpire, really. It's a space where you can talk about stuff that's bothered you for years and have a disinterested party let you know whether you're being a dick or not."
They married in 2012 and their third son, Walter, was born two years later. "What we were saying earlier about drifting through life," he says, "you can't drift through a committed relationship; that's not fair to whoever you're with and I needed someone to basically say, 'Shape up, get a grip.' And that was one of the many huge blessings that she bestowed upon me, that she had the toughness and insight to say, 'I'm not putting up with this' - and really mean it."
He describes himself as "a classic dad-joke dad. I think they find me slightly goofy. They're aware that Dad's pretty hopeless in terms of, 'Are we allowed to go on PlayStation or stay up late and watch the football? Well don't ask Dad, he's not in power. He's got so little authority that getting a sign-off from him is completely meaningless.'"
Strang is the chair of Brent Momentum (the grass-roots Labour group). Does Theroux share her political views? He sighs. "She's much more committed and involved than I am, put it that way ... I'm not a joiner. And I think it can be quite destructive to the journalistic detachment to be too involved." He gives a slight smile. "That's not a dodge."
Theroux has to be at a photographer's studio. It's a five-minute walk and I trot alongside him, as we still haven't talked about the encounter with which, whether he likes it or not, his name will forever be associated. Jimmy Savile. Theroux made two programmes about Savile. The first, in 2000, left you with the distinct impression that Savile was hiding something - even if you couldn't be sure what.
"I was trying to get the goods on him. The trouble was, I didn't know what the goods were. Everyone knew there were rumours and something we didn't know. But after he died, everyone took that to mean everybody knew he was a paedophile. Well not in my world they didn't. They passed rumours around but that's not quite the same thing."
Weird and evasive as Savile was, Theroux had actually grown peculiarly fond of him. "In the normal course of things, quite liking someone you're doing a project on wouldn't be an obstacle, it would be an asset. But when the person turns out to be a serial sex offender and a paedophile, that brings up all kinds of strange emotions."
Theroux says he has complicated feelings about that period. "There's some sense of guilt, and I can't always feel how warranted that is." The most concrete thing he can attach it to is the two women who wrote to him after the first programme was shown, saying they had been Savile's "girlfriends" - and that one of them had been 15 at the time. "It didn't strike me as the letter of someone saying, 'I want to blow the whistle on something.' Not to mention that they were both in their 40s, and perfectly capable of going to the police, writing to the director-general of the BBC or whatever. What I didn't, at the time, think they were doing was saying, 'We were assaulted by Jimmy Savile, and we want the world to know.'
Savile died in 2011 and a year later the truth about him came out. In 2016 Theroux made the programme Louis Theroux: Savile, in which he spoke to a number of Savile's victims.
Savile, he says, was "a scab I couldn't stop picking. I sort of feel like I've been willing to step up and take the Savile business on the chin. I wouldn't say I'm happy to do that. I think there's a risk that it distorts what my whole body of work represents; there's a danger it distorts what Jimmy Savile represented to me when he was alive and distorts what place I represented in his life. There are hundreds of people for whom he would have been more important and vice versa."
Did he come to hate Savile for the part he played in his life? "It's very weird. I can't quite say that I hate him. I'm not one of his victims. In the end it's for his victims to feel that."
When he made his second programme, Theroux dug out some unused rushes from their original encounter 16 years earlier - "just us driving around, chit-chatting. One of the odd things was, I just felt the same way towards him. Mentally and rationally I thought, 'Oh you're guilty of all these crimes.' But I didn't feel a strong revulsion towards him. I just thought, 'He looks like an old fart, a faintly ridiculous ageing DJ with weird hair.'"
He pauses. "Is that odd? I don't know ... I'm trying to be honest with you about what I felt."
We have reached the studio. Thinking back on the original programme, I say, one of the oddest things was the night he spent - at Savile's invitation - sleeping in the bed of his dead mother, "the Duchess". He nods.
"When I asked him, 'To what do I owe the privilege?' he said, 'I don't know. Instinct.' You could say it's a kind of desecration in an odd way. He venerated her in the full sense; dry-cleaned her clothes once a year, kept her room intact and would talk about her in a way he would talk about no other woman - although he talked affectionately of Margaret Thatcher and one or two others. But I would say she was the only woman he ever loved. And then he said, 'And you're going to sleep in her bedroom.' Very odd."
And did he sleep well? "I did actually." He thinks about this for a moment. "There was a candlewick bedspread."
Gotta Get Theroux This: My Life and Strange Times in Television, by Louis Theroux, is out now (Macmillan, $35). Louis Theroux visits New Zealand early next year, appearing at The Civic on Friday, January 10.
