Louis Theroux

Presenter0:01

BBC Sounds, Music, Radio Podcasts. I'm Lauren Laverne, and this is the Desert Island Discs Podcast. Every week, I ask my guests to choose the eight tracks, book, and luxury they'd want to take with them if they were cast away to a desert island. This is an extended version of the original Radio 4 broadcast, and for rights reasons, the music is shorter than the original broadcast. I hope you enjoy listening.

Presenter0:45

My castaway this week is Louis Theroux, a BAFTA award winning documentary maker. He's been taking audiences into other people's lives for over twenty years. Known for his immersive approach, he shares experiences with and sometimes lives alongside his subjects who frequently exist on the margins of society.

Presenter1:04

Audiences might tune in to see him as an Englishman abroad. His mild, quizzical T V persona is usually a stark contrast to his extreme surroundings, but they tend to leave with a sense of common ground with his subjects, whether they like it or not. He's filmed with criminal gangs, religious and political extremists, addicts and prisoners, and says you have to get to know the people at the heart of the story. Usually, that means getting to like them. Louis Theroux, welcome to Desert Island Discs.

Louis Theroux1:34

Thank you for having me.

Presenter1:35

So you've been making documentaries for over two decades now, and your subjects often live lives that seem strange to the outside world. What's the appeal of doing that work?

Louis Theroux1:45

You know, it's not something I have a brilliant answer for. I think it runs so deep with me that to some extent I can't quite explain it. I just know that it's a comfortable place for me and has been ever since I was a child, really. When you are on a hillside in Idaho with a a gun nut, let's say, and he's predicting the end of the world, suddenly things like electricity bills or small marital arguments don't feel so important.

Presenter2:12

Yeah. And you I mean you're known for this very placid on-screen presence. How important is it for you not to judge the people that you're working with?

Louis Theroux2:22

You know, I think there's a misconception around that because I feel as though almost all the programmes I make are in a sense journeys of judgment. It's not as though I arrive among the neo-Nazis, let's say, and say, well, I've heard a lot about Nazis, but I don't really know what I think about it. You know, there's definitely some preconceptions that I carry with me. But I attempt to interrogate the process of decision making or the psychological quirks that lie behind extreme lifestyle choices or stories around mental illness. It's more to do with attempting to see how people deal with really difficult situations.

Presenter3:02

And what do you see as your place in the documentary?

Louis Theroux3:05

I am the audience surrogate. I have to represent a kind of normal-ish set of assumptions. I think it's something to do with attempting to form more than usually close journalistic relationships with people in difficult situations. But it's not friendship and it's important to remember that. I'm there as a journalist. I'm not a social worker. And at the end, you have to follow the truth.

Presenter3:30

Now obviously I'm here interviewing an interviewer. What kind of interviewee are you, do you think? And as an expert interviewer, do you have any advice on how I get you to open up?

Louis Theroux3:40

I think I'm I'm a pretty obliging interviewee, but I think what I do have is certain defence strategies.

Presenter3:49

Go on.

Louis Theroux3:49

I would avoid the question probably, but I wouldn't try and do it too nakedly or obviously. And then I'm just quite comfortable with my line of defense on certain subjects. And I think as a journalist too, other journalists sometimes see me as fair game. So they they sort of think, well, I'm going to Louis Theroo him.

Presenter3:54

Mm.

Louis Theroux4:07

And um so I have to be prepared for that.

Presenter4:10

Noted. Thanks very much, Louie. It's time to go to the music. Tell us about your first disc today.

Louis Theroux4:15

I love Marvin Gaye, especially in my 20s when I was digging into vinyl in second-hand shops in in New York. I would explore a lot of old well soul records in general, but Marvin Gaye especially. This is from his favourite album of mine, I Want You, and it's a track called All the Way Around.

Speaker 14:38

I wanna do it, let's get it But hi

Louis Theroux4:41

You're gonna act this time around before you take it

Speaker 14:44

Down to the skin.

Louis Theroux4:45

Let's give and understand

Speaker 34:48

Yeah.

Louis Theroux4:49

Thank you.

Speaker 34:49

Didn't understand my philosophy

Speaker 34:57

You just ran away from me.

Speaker 15:01

Mr. Bay Ooh, I missed you many fall. I miss you. You're the best I feel.

Presenter5:11

Marvin Gaye and all the way around. Louis Theroux, I was interested to hear you talking about the film that you made about Scientology because you said you wanted to tell the truth, which struck me as a very definite article, and you know the truth rather than a truth.

Louis Theroux5:27

I think what I mean by telling the truth is just these are journalistic endeavors, so that comes first. At the same time, I'm attempting to tell a story that will engage people. And I mean, I think what it comes down to, if I can boil it down, which I don't really like to do because it's sort of demystifying, but I just sort of think that we are all much more complicated than we let on. And we sort of go around judging people, and we go around sort of stigmatizing people. But actually, if we sort of opened up our minds like cabinets, you just see so much weird stuff in there. I mean, stuff that would be deeply embarrassing and hard to justify. I mean, I think the whole idea of us having stable personalities is kind of flawed. And the idea of us having consistent desires is flawed. We're full of these contradictory impulses, some of which are quite dark. And I think the more that I can get into places that disrupt that. So I think the idea of am I trying to tell the truth? Well, that's part of it. But I'm genuinely trying to take viewers to a place that's got some self-conflict that involves them being made uncomfortable.

Presenter6:38

You've described your need to be liked as lamentable and your desire to interview people as an emotional prophylactic. What's going on there, do you think?

Louis Theroux6:45

God, where did I say that? Was that in an interview?

Louis Theroux6:49

I wish I knew. I mean, I think it's a weakness in me that I do like to be liked. I think there's a lot of strength and power in not being easily shamed. I I tend to think that's where Trump gets his power from. He seems unshamable. I think I'm quite easily shamed. I'm not saying I want to be more like Trump, by the way, but I'd like to be less easily affected by um what other people say about me.

Presenter7:14

Time for some more music. It's your second disc. Why have you chosen it?

Louis Theroux7:17

Okay, so when I was growing up, I grew up in South London and my parents, this was in the days of vinyl, and they had a copy of Jesus Christ Superstar. It was very battered, the album, and it skipped and there were certain bits that repeated constantly, but we listened to it endlessly, my brother and I, and this was our favourite track, was Heaven on Their Minds.

Speaker 17:40

Mind is clearer now.

Speaker 37:44

Yeah.

Speaker 17:44

Last.

Speaker 37:45

Don't do well, I can see that we all soon will be.

Speaker 37:56

Be a few strip away.

Speaker 38:00

The middle of the

Speaker 38:01

From the man you will see Where we all soon will be

Presenter8:11

Jesus!

Presenter8:14

Murray Head with Heaven on Their Minds from the album Jesus Christ Superstar, composed by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice. So Louis, take me back to the first time that you wrapped your ears around that album. You were born in nineteen seventy. What were you like as a kid?

Louis Theroux8:30

Well, I was a contradictory character because I was the second of two brothers and I was sort of allowed to be the naughty, silly one and I w was sort of boisterous and I was a bit of a joker and at the same time I was quite sensitive. So I I oscillated between being naughty and out of control and then coming home and saying to my mum, you know, I don't think they understand me at school.

Presenter8:56

Oh, that sounds like you are vibrating on quite a high frequency there.

Louis Theroux8:59

Is that the diagnosis? Is that a clinical term?

Presenter9:00

Is that a clinical term?

Presenter9:02

Well, it just sounds quite stressful. You're sort of up there emotionally.

Louis Theroux9:05

I don't know what to uh put it down to, but I tend to think that actually it served me uh quite well in work because I am acutely tuned into how both how I'm feeling but how other people are feeling. But then occasionally I I I feel compelled to say something or do something inappropriate.

Presenter9:25

So you just like to disrupt it every now and again, throw in a dead cat or whatever.

Louis Theroux9:28

Yeah, and then if people are upset by it then I get upset. So it's all a bit contradictory.

Presenter9:34

Your mother Anne was a BBC World Service radio producer, and your father's the novelist Paul Thoreau. What were they like as parents?

Louis Theroux9:41

Well, I feel grateful to have had them as parents and to still have them. And they were sort of children of the 60s in the sense that they were sort of rebelling against what they'd been brought up with. They came from church-going families. My dad, a Catholic family in Boston, Massachusetts. My mum, South London, Anglican family. And so they were a bit more free-spirited. It was all flares. And my mum was a working woman, first-generation university educated. So there was, I think, a feeling that we're going to not make the mistakes of the past. And, you know, that we're groovy and the kids can be groovy. I mean, they didn't use the word groovy that much, but that was the sort of feeling. Does that sort of make sense? It was like, when you're old enough, you can choose if you want to have a religion. And I remember sometimes thinking, why haven't we been baptized when all my cousins have been baptized in America? And my mum saying, well, when you're old enough to decide, you know, you can decide whether you want to be baptized. It was that sort of attitude.

Speaker 110:23

That's

Presenter10:44

intellectually bohemian, perhaps.

Louis Theroux10:46

Yeah, book learning was very highly prized. Well, reading in general and a sort of global perspective, because they'd met in Africa and also lived in Singapore. The World Service where my mum worked was often on. And there were a big thing was knowing the capitals of foreign countries. That was my dad's sort of I don't know, if he'd gone on Mastermind, that would have been his special subject. And so the feeling was, you know, there's a vast world out there. We don't belong to any particular tribe other than possibly the Republic of Letters.

Presenter11:19

You've described your father as complex. Did he seem mysterious to you?

Louis Theroux11:24

Not really. I think he he was a very hands on dad in the sense of, you know, sort of hugging and, you know, loving and and and um he worked at home, so he wa he wasn't a distant figure, although he did travel quite a lot. But I remember I would come home and he'd be behind his desk wreathed in pipe smoke, and I'd sort of look in on him and um he would work, I would say, every day of the week, including weekends. He'd be at least for a few hours up there, tapping away on his typewriter. And then I would get little insights into his other life through reading his books.

Presenter11:59

What's that like then? Having that kind of access to a part of your father's personality that most kids don't? Um.

Louis Theroux12:08

Well, it's an odd thing reading a s a kind of graphic sex scene in a novel that your dad's written doesn't blow your mind, but it's a bit like rrrr I wonder if my dad's done that when you're sort of seven or eight years old. And and there's quite a bit of drug taking in in some of the travel books, and in some of the sort of semi-autobiographical ish novels, there's quite a bit of extramarital sex. So you know, I think there's worse things in life, but you do have to process it a bit.

Presenter12:40

Tell me about your extended family. I read that you had a grandmother who told you some rather morbid stories.

Louis Theroux12:46

My mum's mum, Betty Castle, we were very close to well, to both of them. We'd go and stay with them in Dorset. So my English grandma I don't know, she just had a taste for macabre stories.

Louis Theroux12:58

I don't know. There was we'd go on the beach and she'd say, If you ever see a a rusty spade, you must be careful because you could accidentally jam it into your foot, and then uh you'll get some kind of blood poisoning and get lock jaw and you'll never be able to eat and drink again. So it was that kind of thing.

Presenter13:17

And did you like her stories?

Louis Theroux13:18

Yeah, I loved them. There would seem to be some sort of

Louis Theroux13:21

I don't know, moral to them or or it's something about um people not following the lesson or just the i the inhumanity of man to man.

Presenter13:30

Let's have another track, Louis Theroux. What's your third disc and why have you chosen it?

Louis Theroux13:34

I'm a big fan of The Smiths and in my university days I listened to them a lot and this was one of my favorite tracks, it's Panic.

Louis Theroux13:46

And it's on the streets of London.

Louis Theroux13:50

When it comes to Birmingham, I wonder to myself.

Speaker 313:57

Will life ever be same again?

Speaker 314:01

On each side streets which are sled down I wonder to myself

Speaker 314:08

Hopes may rise in the grass mere.

Speaker 314:12

Can you hear me?

Louis Theroux14:13

You know the safety, so you run down To the safety of the town

Presenter14:18

The Smiths and Panic. Louis Rue Apparently you asked to go to boarding school, why?

Louis Theroux14:24

Well, I think it was assumed because my brother had asked and um I asked him about this recently because we only lived about a half hour cycle ride from Westminster where we went and um I don't know for sure but I think it was partly due to us reading books by Enid Blyton. We started with the Saint Clair's books and then we moved on to the Mallory Towers books and it's a bit embarrassing to to admit this because

Louis Theroux14:52

I don't think they're written.

Louis Theroux14:54

Maybe I shouldn't say this. I don't think they're written for boys, certainly as a boy.

Presenter14:58

How would you describe them for anybody who hasn't read it?

Louis Theroux14:59

Okay, so they are a bit like Harry Potter, but with no magic. So they're all set at girls' boarding schools, and they're about girls having midnight feasts, and sometimes they start pranks. Always there's an episode where a girl swims too far out to sea and nearly drowns, or some gypsies, her term, not mine, I think they ended up helping catch someone or a child pretending to be an aristocrat and turning out to just be a kind of again her term, low-born. I mean, I could go on and on. There's always a wacky French teacher and they play pranks on her. It's that kind of thing.

Presenter15:39

I mean I'm not sure.

Presenter15:41

French teacher

Presenter15:45

So you and Marcel were fans of uh the Mallory Towers books?

Louis Theroux15:48

Yes, and the St. Clair's one, we came to those first. And I think based on that we thought, well, maybe that's what boarding school's like, endless midnight feasts and French teachers.

Presenter15:56

I'm ready.

Presenter15:57

I mean, was it? I know that you said San Quentin prison reminded you of Westminster.

Louis Theroux16:02

It did a bit, yeah. Well, there's something about uh uh a lot of males, be they, you know, boys or men, in a confined space, something about the improvised physical fabric, which is all higgledy piggledy. And then

Louis Theroux16:19

I hesitate to say this, a certain level of situational homosexuality.

Louis Theroux16:24

Which I think I hope I'm not scandalizing anyone is relatively common definitely in prison and to an extent in all male boarding schools. I mean, I could go on, there's quite a lot of other similarities. Cliquishness and a sort of Darwinian atmosphere. But you don't go around stabbing people at Westminster.

Presenter16:44

It's a different kind of survival of the fittest.

Louis Theroux16:45

It's more of a metaphorical melee based on being verbally cutting, being able to take people down.

Presenter16:55

So you said you spoke to Marcel about that recently and said, you know, why did we go to boarding school half an hour away from our house? What did he say?

Louis Theroux16:58

Go to the

Louis Theroux17:02

I think he copped to the fact that it had been his suggestion. I mean, there's always a temptation to throw your parents under the bus and say, What were they thinking? Didn't they love us? But I think it was c it was more coming from him. And then because I just slipstreamed behind whatever he wanted to do, you know,'cause I looked up to him. When he said Westminster and boarding school, I just said, Yeah, great, let's do that.

Presenter17:28

After you left you took a road trip around the US. What was your relationship to American culture then? Because obviously, you know, your dad was American and you'd spent time there growing up, so you must already have have had a connection to it.

Louis Theroux17:40

I grew up thinking of myself really as as English, I suppose, or British, but I think along the way my dad was managing to smuggle in certain American values. And then in the summer when we spent time on Cape Cod with the sort of American family, he would try and sort of instill a few more kind of outdoorsy, manly American values, because he'd been an Eagle Scout and he knew about tying all kinds of knots and camping and starting fires. I think he had mixed feelings when he saw that we were turning or rather like our schooling, which he had imposed on us, was turning us into effete little English twerps. So we didn't have a very typical experience of American culture. He used to let us drink a lot of Coke and eat American breakfast cereals, which then weren't in the UK. My friends used to say, oh, it must be amazing. I'd love to go to LA and it must be amazing. What's it like in New York? And I just would think, I have no idea. All I know is being really bored at a house while my dad writes, you know, we were in the middle of the woods and we would just count the minutes until a cousin or an uncle would come over and just spend our time basically driving each other mental and hacking paths through the woods and just basically going out of our minds.

Presenter19:02

Well, it's time to go to the heart of the American City now, I believe, with your next disc. Tell me about this one.

Louis Theroux19:08

Well when I was about 17 or so my friend Joe Cornish gave me a compilation tape and it had a track on it by Eric B. and Ruckim paid in full and this was really a big moment for me because although I'd known about rap before then this was the first time I listened to a rap record that felt I don't know just really poetic and and interesting and different.

Speaker 119:31

Thinking of a master plan. Thinking of a master plan. Thinking of a master plan. Cause ain't nothing but sweat inside my hand. So I dig into my pocket, all my money spent. So I could deep up, still coming up relent. So I start my mission, leave my residence. Thinking how could I get some debt presidents? I need money. I used to be a stick-up kid. So I think of all the devious things I did. I used to roll up. I used to roll up.

Presenter20:05

Eric B. and Rakim, paid in full, remixed by Cold Cut. Lou Thrue, there's quite a lot of home video footage, I suppose you'd call it, of you and Joe Cornish, who you mentioned introducing to that track, and and Adam Buxton, all friends together at school, messing about with camcorders quite a lot in your teens.

Louis Theroux20:22

Yeah, I really owe them a lot because they were just very switched on about not just music but films and comedy and loved doing little sketches and improvising bits of comedy and making films and I suppose until then I hadn't really thought of myself as a performer, but just being a little part of it I think built my confidence up a bit. Although I remember thinking I'm not actually even the funniest member of my little group of friends. So in that way it was slightly preying on my mind when I first got the call to do T V.

Presenter20:56

Well, we'll come to that. First, tell me about uni. You studied modern history at Oxford. What did the place do for you?

Louis Theroux21:02

Well, basically, I worked. I just applied myself. And um and something terrible happened, which was at the end of my first term, one of the tutors took me aside and said um something along the lines of Yeah, you you've got you've got what it takes. We think you're material for getting a first. That's where we see you going. And until then it hadn't really been in my mind. And then as a result of that, I began thinking, Well, I suppose I'd better not let him down then.

Louis Theroux21:34

And basically studying really did dominate my experience of being there.

Presenter21:40

And how did you do? Did you get the first?

Louis Theroux21:42

Yeah, I did.

Louis Theroux21:43

And I sometimes think I slightly wasted my university experience by studying too much. Obviously I did, you know, go to parties and, you know, of a Friday or a Saturday I was often to be seen going up and down the Cowley Road looking for the house that music was coming out of, you know.

Presenter22:03

You know I remember that kind of scout.

Louis Theroux22:04

Kind of scavenging parties when there was no one else that I knew there, but I just had a knock on the door or wander in. But I think at some level.

Presenter22:07

Where the

Louis Theroux22:15

I've had a background level of anxiety that goes through my life, and um one of the ways I would assuage it was by doing well at work, and and and that that applied then and to some extent it still applies.

Presenter22:31

Yeah.

Presenter22:32

So tell us how you got your break in T V. It came after Oxford, when you were in the US.

Louis Theroux22:38

Well

Louis Theroux22:39

Until then I'd been like a greyhound racing round a track, chasing the furry object, whatever it is.

Louis Theroux22:46

Knowing sort of what I was supposed to do, and then suddenly it's like, right, you're off the track now, and you just don't know. I didn't know what to do. So, for lack of other options, I went to America. I had a US passport through my dad, and I'd done a bit of student journalism at Oxford, so I ended up on a local paper in San Jose. I more or less stuck a pin in a map and sort of went there. And then that led to a job on a magazine in New York. And then some friends said that Michael Moore, the documentary maker, was starting a new TV show co-funded by the BBC, and he was looking for a British correspondent. I should come along and have a chat. And although I was completely unqualified and would never have seen myself as someone who could do that, I think that's what he quite liked. I think that the level of incompetence that I brought to the job was for him a big plus. And I was confused because I wanted nothing more than to do the job well. I mean, I remember I had a jacket that I bought from a thrift store, like a second-hand shop, and I had one sort of shirt with a collar. So I tried to look like a correspondent, and I looked absolutely hopeless. I was doing my best impersonation of a polished TV performer. I don't want to completely trash myself. Like, I did have a certain journalistic focus. You know, I could ask a series of questions and I did listen, but I think what he realized was that this sort of bookish, to all intents and purposes, sort of English person set, you know, when contrasted with a Ku Klux Klansman or a kind of millenarian cult member in Montana, was quite funny.

Presenter24:29

What did you learn working for him?

Louis Theroux24:31

He had habits of work that were very unusual to do with bringing documentary values to T V. And his attitude was you go and find someone who's up to no good, really. I mean, I'm oversimplifying, but that kind of defines a great amount of the Roger and Me approach. You don't go and find sad auto workers who've been laid off. Because the subject of Roger and Me is his hometown of Flint that's been decimated by layoffs in the auto industry. And you don't go and tell sob stories about them. You go find the people who are up to no good or who are sort of their fellow travellers or their useful idiots and just hang out with them and sort of ask them silly questions and it sounds a bit unkind maybe, but get them to say something stupid that's sort of funny. And I'm aware I'm being a bit reductive, but that was sort of the approach that I took with me for a while, was go after slightly dodgy or questionable people and be very polite and disarming, but look for comedy in whatever they say.

Presenter25:32

Time for some more music. It's your fifth disc. Tell us about this one.

Louis Theroux25:35

When I was living in San Jose, I uh used to buy a lot of secondhand records and one of them was The Freewheel in Bob Dylan. And I love this track. It's the sort of the ultimate passive aggressive love song. Don't think twice, it's all right.

Speaker 125:50

Well, it ain't no use. Sit and wonder why, baby.

Speaker 125:55

Even you don't know by now.

Speaker 125:59

And it ain't no use to sit there and wonder why baby.

Speaker 126:04

It'll never do somehow.

Speaker 126:07

When your rooster crows at the break of dawn

Speaker 126:13

Look out your window an' I'll be gone

Speaker 126:17

You're the reason I'm a traveling

Presenter26:19

Yeah.

Presenter26:21

But don't think twice, it's all right. Bob Dylan, and don't think twice, it's all right. Louis Therooo, the first series of Weird Weekends, aired in nineteen ninety eight. How did you sell it to the BBC?

Louis Theroux26:33

Um I remember after T V Nation ended, the the show I'd worked with Michael Moore on, they'd signed me to a development deal, so I had to come up with ideas. But Weird Weekends was basically a kind of a long-form version of segments that I'd done at T V Nation. And um the producer who'd been assigned to sort of work with me came out to New York one day and took me for lunch and said, Well, they've decided to commission The Weird Weekends idea, which wasn't my title, incidentally. I thought, yeah, it's a bit reductive, isn't it? And the alliteration. I think I lobbied for like, well, couldn't it just be unusual weekends or something like that?

Louis Theroux27:11

And then he said it's called Louis Theroux's Weird Weekends. And I said, Well, why have they put my name in the title? No one knows who I am. That's ridiculous. And they said, We're going to make four of them, and they're 50 minutes each. And I said, Well, fifty minutes seems too long. You know, used to making nine-minute segments. And four, couldn't we just make one and see how it goes? So I sort of tried to haggle them down. And I remember him looking at me like, You don't really understand how T V works, do you? You basically grab as many commissions as you can.

Presenter27:41

Yes, you were being handed an enormous opportunity at a very young age. You filmed in America. There were subjects in including survivalists, UFO believers, porn stars, born again Christians. Why in the US, not the UK?

Louis Theroux27:55

Well, by then I'd figured out that the contrast of me as a sort of British person against an American backdrop was key to how it would all work. So the idea was definitely conceived as me exploring extreme worlds in America. And I think the development between TV Nation and Weird Weekends was in making 50 minute shows I suddenly realized, well, I can't just be going out making fun of people for 50 minutes. And I think I had a degree of guilt or a sort of complicated feeling when I was doing stories that it was a bit weird just to sort of try and elicit ridiculous statements and a bit unkind. And so I tried to infuse Weird Weekends with a little bit more kindness and a sense that actually these are people who have real humanity and whose lifestyles are putting them on the edge in a way that might be silly in some ways, but in other ways is kind of poignant and a bit sad.

Presenter29:00

So you made three series of weird weekends and you followed that with When Louie Met, which was broadcast on BBC Two, and there you really entered the lives of your subjects, one of whom was Jimmy Saville, who you made a documentary with in 2000. Many years later, after the horrendous truth about him had been revealed after his death, you revisited that documentary. Why did you choose to do that?

Louis Theroux29:26

Well, I um

Louis Theroux29:29

I was I suppose a couple of reasons. One was I was being asked about it the whole time, and it was almost becoming a distraction.

Louis Theroux29:38

But more than that, I suppose I felt that I um wanted to figure out what how it was that I'd missed what I'd missed. Um I wanted to do a kind of personal and professional stock taking and to sit down with victims and talk to them about their experiences.

Presenter30:00

And how did that experience affect you?

Louis Theroux30:05

Well I mean, I think it it's been traumatic for the country. In a way the um the the process of making the programme was more um a little bit more cathartic.

Louis Theroux30:18

Of this sort of these feel like the victims can at least give you the permission to um

Louis Theroux30:28

Feel okay about things.

Louis Theroux30:31

Well, I want to say this right because it p partly what it is is

Louis Theroux30:37

It's something very conflicting about reading about um crimes and and and and predatory activity, while also knowing that this was someone who you sort of quite liked.

Louis Theroux30:50

and trying to square that in your own mind. And and and what you find is, not always, but sometimes victims of serious sexual assault experience a similar ambivalence. Some experience just pure loathing.

Louis Theroux31:04

And then some experience something more complicated. And I think in talking about

Louis Theroux31:09

Complicated emotions, that's um that's uh that's a helpful thing.

Presenter31:17

Time for some music. Let's hear your next track, why have you chosen this disc?

Louis Theroux31:22

Well, I met my wife at a BBC Christmas party in late 2002, and on our third or fourth date together, we were at a nightclub and this track came on. And although I knew that she was very special and that I was falling in love with her, there was a kind of catalyzing moment when I saw her dance. I'd always thought of myself as a reasonably good dancer, although many would disagree. But when I saw her, I just thought, wow, the way she moved, I don't know, she just seemed to transcend and go into a different dimension of physical movement. So I have a special soft spot for this song, which is What's Love by Fat Joe, featuring Ashanti.

Speaker 132:08

Got to do it, got to do it, yeah. It's about us, it's about you.

Presenter32:16

Got to do it, got to do with it, baby. What's love? Uh

Presenter32:42

Fat Jove featuring a shanty and What's Love. Louis Thru, that's the second hip-hop track you've chosen, and I think you actually have rapped in the past, am I right?

Louis Theroux32:53

Well, I've rapped among friends, and I did once rap during an episode of Weird Weekends about the Dirty South rap scene. I don't consider myself a rapper.

Presenter33:05

So you're not gonna emcee for us right now. You're not gonna split some bots.

Louis Theroux33:07

What was the um My money don't jiggle, jiggle, it folds. I like to see you wiggle, wiggle, for sure. It makes me want to dribble, dribble, you know. Driving in my fiat, you really have to see it. I could go on.

Presenter33:21

I mean, I'm enjoying it.

Louis Theroux33:21

Six feet two in a compact, no slack, but luckily the seats go back. I got a knack to relax in my mind, sipping some no, I feel fine, and sipping on red, red wine. When like it's like when I dunno, yeah, it's a little embarrassing. As a rap fan, I always feel I'm kind of sort of committing sacrilege by doing it so badly. I didn't even write that rap, it was written by Reese Bigelow. I mean, I had some input. It was a collab. It was a collabo.

Presenter33:52

You became a dad to the first of three boys in 2006. What sort of father are you?

Presenter33:58

Um

Louis Theroux33:59

Well, you should really ask them. I'm quite a silly Dad. Nancy says I'm too silly. I mean, I'm definitely down on my hands and knees doing the Lego or the Duplo or the Mega Blocks or whatever it is. I'm kind of a classic Dad joke Dad. I do travel a bit for work, so I'm conscious that I'm occasionally an absentee dad. We'll find out in about twenty years, probably, how good a dad I am, when their misery memoirs come out.

Presenter34:27

Around the time you had your family, you also made a move into serious documentaries, gambling, serial murderers, gang members, big game hunters, drug addiction, all different subjects that you've covered. Why did you choose to change tack?

Louis Theroux34:42

It wasn't really a conscious decision. I think I became aware that the imperative of being funny was in danger of holding us back from doing the best stories. We did one about a brothel that had quite a bit of darkness to it, and then San Quentin Prison. Then there was one about a mental hospital for paedophiles. And I think maybe the biggest transition was when I did a program about people with dementia in a care home facility in Phoenix. And it was the first time I'd ever done a show in which really no one was doing anything but their best. And I think since then it's become my MO to always look not just for it's not really that the story's about the person with whatever the condition is or the mental illness. You're looking at families and relationships. And they're all almost equal partners in the story and you just see how they're all grappling with it. You know, it's not that there's a person with dementia, there's a family that's grappling with dementia. And I was pleased with how it turned out. And after that I thought, wow, this whole other realm of storytelling is open to us.

Presenter35:51

Is it difficult to stop yourself becoming too involved with the lives of of those people sometimes? Do you do you kind of take on a relationship with a subject and sometimes find it difficult to let go?

Louis Theroux36:04

Uh, I hope I don't sound too cold blooded if I say no. I mean, I think it's a clear line that I'm there as a journalist. I like to try and be a friendly presence and I take an interest in the people and afterwards I will a few months or a year or two down the line see how everyone's doing. I think the only times where there is a feeling of

Louis Theroux36:32

Difficulty or awkwardness is when you worry that you might in some way be contributing negatively to the situation. I'm thinking of a time when we made a program in Cedar Sinai Medical Center about patients who were facing life-threatening conditions and

Louis Theroux36:54

Due to, I think, a a misunderstanding, we ended up filming a scene where a family was informed that it was likely that a a very loved son and brother would probably

Louis Theroux37:08

Never wake up from his um non-responsive state. This was a as you can imagine, an absolute bombshell for them. And and and part of it was why is the crew here filming this? And we left the room immediately. But it it's those situations where you think a contributor is not signed up to what's going on and you think you've actually added to the pain in some way.

Presenter37:39

And how do you deal with that? What what's the impact of something like that on you?

Louis Theroux37:44

Well, you feel bad and and you just uh and and I should say it usually falls to either the the director or the producer that I work with to make the necessary apologies to make sure it doesn't happen again and to to fix the situation. And I think a common misconception, by the way, is that I'm sort of there by myself, you know, and and uh and obviously people if they think about it they know that I'm being filmed so there's a crew there. I think sometimes I get a little too much both credit and very occasionally blame for what happens in the programs. They are absolutely collaborative endeavours and in fact it's the directors that as it were own the programmes. They're in charge on location, they drive the edit and so I feel sometimes a little bit fraudulent because I sort of think people think that I do more than I do.

Presenter38:39

Time to go to the music. Tell me about your seventh disc and why you've chosen it.

Louis Theroux38:44

Well, as a family, we have spent quite a bit of time going back and forth from London and California, Los Angeles specifically, and this is a beautiful song about California by Joni Mitchell.

Speaker 338:58

Sitting in a park in Paris, France, Reading the news and it sure looks bad They won't give peace a chance That was just a dream some of us had

Louis Theroux39:09

Still on lanes to s

Speaker 139:11

Seek. But I wouldn't wanna stay here, it's too old and cold and settled in its ways here.

Speaker 139:18

All the California, California, coming home I'm gonna see the folks I dig I'll even kiss a sunset pig California coming home

Presenter39:34

Johnny Mitchell and California. Louis Thru, making documentaries can be quite intense. How easy do you find it to leave work and de-stress?

Louis Theroux39:44

Well, most of the time, very easy. And I think the guilty secret of many people who work in T V and have young families is that uh it can be quite relaxing on location compared with the chaos of home life. And I I mean, I think the stressful part is probably before you go away.

Louis Theroux40:08

And so I'll do a lot of displacement activity like cooking, mainly chopping onions, making some pasta sauces or something, just to keep busy, taking rubbish out, you know, tidying the Lego, finding lost bits of puzzles, that kind of thing.

Presenter40:26

Twenty years of making documentaries behind you and under your belt. Which subject do you think has changed you the most?

Louis Theroux40:38

Well, I I don't really like to bring it up again, but I suppose going through the whole experience of making the first Jimmy Saville programme, and then well, I should say this right, because I knew that there was something that I hadn't seen. I had an idea I hadn't really figured out what his

Louis Theroux41:00

Private life revolved around, but I never imagined it would be as dark as it turned out to be.

Louis Theroux41:08

I'd remained in contact with him a little bit after I'd made the first programme. So while I'm sort of still quite proud of the first programme, I'm I'm I'm I'm still a bit confused about how I was

Louis Theroux41:23

able to sort of experience him as a somewhat um likable person in the in the sort of year or two afterwards, after making it. That that did uh that is something I kind of think upon.

Presenter41:38

And how has it changed you?

Louis Theroux41:45

I think um

Louis Theroux41:51

It c it put the BBC under an enormous amount of pressure for very understandable reasons. And I think when people are under pressure you see them either at their best or at their worst. And, um

Louis Theroux42:06

On occasion I thought I saw people.

Louis Theroux42:12

in a human way trying to protect themselves. And I think I saw people again in a sort of understandable way looking to cast blame. And I don't mean necessarily at work, I sort of mean generally throughout society. I don't know, as much as I cover dark subjects, I'm actually quite a positive person and tend to see the best in people. So when you have experience of people doing things that are you know, nakedly self-interested or unkind, it sort of kind of darkens your view of the world a tiny bit.

Presenter42:51

Do you do things differently now because of that?

Presenter42:55

or see things differently now.

Louis Theroux42:58

I mean, in a journalistic way, I think I'm part of the whole process of being educated about how sexual abuse takes place and the way in which it often can take years to even realize that you've been abused. And I think, as odd as it may sound, I sometimes come up against the fact that I'm not err as emotionally I don't have a level of emotional self-knowledge that um

Louis Theroux43:36

That I maybe should have. I'm maybe like a lot of men in that respect. So there's a slightly naive view that maybe is common to some men, that if abuse happens, you recognize it as abuse straight away. And of course, that's really not how it works in a real world setting. So I think it was something that I maybe had to learn. And that I'd like to think that I bring that understanding now.

Louis Theroux44:05

to my work and also just as a human being.

Presenter44:09

It's time to cast you away to a desert island, then, Louis. How do you think you'll get on?

Louis Theroux44:13

Not that well, if I'm honest. I don't do well in in solitude, and it's odd because I'm not massively outgoing. Social arrangements make me a bit anxious, so I rely on my wife for a lot of that. And she's really outgoing and funny, and so she's got this wide circle of great friends, and sort of brings me along, and then I can sort of be part of that circle. Whereas on a desert island, she won't be there, so I'm gonna struggle. And I also go a bit out of my mind. You know, I can't work out if I'm thinking my thoughts, or my thoughts are thinking me, and I think I'd start falling apart quite quickly.

Presenter44:54

Let's go to the music then. Uh this is your final disc for you.

Louis Theroux44:58

It shows a happy thought.

Presenter44:58

Chosen.

Louis Theroux45:00

Um well, I love a bit of Bossa Nova and this is a kind of Bossanova classic written and performed by Antonio Carlos Jobim with some jazz flute by Herbie Mann and it reminds me of my kids because it's one of those tracks that they've latched onto as well. They call it the sort of Baba Doo Dem song because it's got some sort of uh scat singing at the end. It's one note sombre.

Speaker 345:24

This is just a little sound button Built upon a single note

Speaker 345:30

Other notes are bound to follow, but the root is still that note This new one is just the consequence Of the one we've just been through As I'm bound to be the unavoidable consequence of you

Speaker 345:48

There are so many people who can talk and talk and talk and just say nothing or nearly nothing I have used up all the scale I know and at the end I've come to nothing or nearly nothing

Presenter46:00

Antonio Carlos Jovim and Herbie Mann One Notes Samba. Lutheru, it's time to give you the books, the complete works of Shakespeare, the Bible, and one of your choice. What would you like?

Louis Theroux46:11

I would like um In Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust. I read the first volume as a teenager and I loved it and I thought one day I'll read the rest of them and of course that's never happened, so I'd like to do it. And so much of it is about someone recollecting his life in tranquillity and it feels apropos to sort of use my solitude to sort of do that.

Presenter46:36

I can also give you a luxury item, what would you like?

Louis Theroux46:39

Well, I was thinking about a a puzzle, like a jigsaw puzzle. I googled it and there's one that has forty thousand pieces. I was once on a cruise with Anne Whitticomb for work and and one of the things they did on board was everyone would sort of walk past this table that had a puzzle on it and uh just do a few bits, you know, through the days just to pass the time. And it felt very civilized. I also used to do puzzles with my grandparents down in Dorset, so it's got nice associations for me.

Presenter47:08

And finally, which track would you like to save from the eight that you've told us about today?

Louis Theroux47:12

I for some reason I'm I'm going to take Heaven on Their Minds from Jesus Christ Superstar, and I don't really know why. I've listened to it all my life, and I've never really got tired of it, so maybe it's just an evergreen, maybe it never gets old.

Presenter47:28

That must be it. Louis Theroux, thank you very much for sharing your desert island discs with us.

Louis Theroux47:33

Thank you for having me.

Presenter47:44

I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Louie. Personally, I'm not a Jigsaw fan. As I'm sure you know by now, there are over 2,000 editions of Desert Island Discs in our back catalogue that you can listen to anytime via BBC Sounds. But we couldn't resist the opportunity to play you a short extract of the interview with Louie's dad, writer Paul Thoreau, recorded in 1976 with the creator and first presenter of Desert Island Discs, Roy Plumley.

Speaker 148:11

As a youngster, what did you want to be?

Speaker 348:14

I wanted to be a doctor, actually, or a kind of medical missionary. I saw myself going to distant places and doing good. You did, in fact, start to read medicine. Yes, I was a medical student for about four years, but gave it up. Because in the States, one is discouraged. You know, American doctors don't operate on you unless you've swallowed a lot of money. Then they remove it in a major operation.

Louis Theroux48:34

It's major operation.

Louis Theroux48:36

Yeah.

Speaker 348:38

It was also more positive than that that I really wanted to be a writer and I saw writing as incompatible with being a doctor. So with a certain amount of reluctance I gave up being a doctor. So you switched to reading English with a view to writing. What happened after Graduation Day?

Speaker 348:55

Well this was uh in 1962. I thought I was going to be drafted into the army.

Speaker 349:00

And so I decided uh that I would go as far away as possible, not to hide, but maybe uh an alternative uh occupation, you see. Uh so I decided on Central Africa, uh went there and even got letters from my draft board saying um report for your physical in Boston, you know, on Friday. I'd remark saying um you know, owing to the spring rains your letter only just arrived, I can't be in Boston. Where were you? I was in Nyasaland, actually, which later became Malawi. Mm-hmm. Doing what? Teaching. And then shortly after I arrived they had uh what for them was a revolution, which is not a revolution at all, but it was it was just a a little bit of uh you know spot of trouble in the capital. But a lot of people were uh deported and uh some people were persecuted. The upshot of it was that I was um uh kicked upstairs and I was made headmaster of a school and I eventually ended up uh on the inspectorate. But in Africa you see everyone did much better, moved much higher.

Speaker 150:01

Yeah.

Speaker 350:01

There's a story that you were eventually thrown out because you were accused of conspiring to assassinate the President.

Speaker 350:06

Yes, unfortunately. It's not a true story. It was a misunderstanding, a frame-up. It would take much too long to tell. It's an interesting story, if I may write it.

Presenter50:16

My word, Louis Theroux's dad, Paul, speaking to Roy Plumley back in nineteen seventy six. I'll be back next week when my guest will be the legendary makeup artist Pat McGrath. I do hope you'll join us.

Presenter50:39

Why, you

Presenter50:41

While you're here

Presenter50:42

Have a listen to this, Richard. Forest 404. An environmental thriller for BBC Sounds. I'm so sorry. Meet Pan. She lives a few centuries from now after a data crash that wiped out most records of life. So when she finds an old recording of a rainforest, she has no idea what it is. Forest 404, nine-part thriller, nine-part talk, nine-part soundscape. Starring Pearl Mackey, Tanya Moody, and Pippa Hayward with theme music by Bonobos.

Presenter51:15

Subscribe now on BBC Sounds.