As he revisits his career in a new four-part series, TV’s top documentarian looks back at his evolution from accosting cult members to making films on eating disorders and dementia
It is a strange feeling looking back at a much earlier version of yourself on television, a queasy mixture of recognition and distance, approval and shame, and above all an inescapable question: who is this plonker? Bespectacled, gawky, socially awkward and only 23 years old, I had been a surprising choice as a correspondent on Michael Moore’s TV Nation, a US network show where I stumbled around the wilds of America meeting extremists of various stripes: klansmen, cult members, sexual adventurers.
Later, based on these segments, I landed my own TV series, Louis Theroux’s Weird Weekends. For some reason the BBC had insisted on putting my name in the title. Watching some of my early efforts again recently, with the distance of two decades, I couldn’t help passing judgment on the journalistic competence on display – whether I was asking the right questions of the porn performers and the apocalypse preppers. Sometimes I caught myself enjoying the raw, unvarnished reality and marvelling at how much we had managed to capture on tape. From time to time I saw the younger me as overly pushy and badgering, or in danger of being borderline rude. But I could see that was mostly from my awkwardness at being hired for a job I didn’t fully understand, and my worries about letting people down. Mainly I was distracted by my appearance, voice and how I came across. The way my hair is piled on top of my head. The faint mid-Atlantic twang in my accent.
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