It is rare for a television personality to achieve national treasure status while being indelibly associated with skinhead gangs, Neo-Nazis, vehement Zionists and Neil and Christine Hamilton; yet the path forged by Louis Theroux to successful
"It’s interesting to note that if you came to see Louis Theroux this evening, he’s not actually here. I say this, not simply out of modesty, but also to explain how the shows work. I sometimes get accused of being faux-naïf – I read that in reviews all the time. I think part of that is that people think that on screen I’m too feckless, and too bumbling, to actually make the shows that I appear in. And yet actually, in all honesty, I am actually too feckless and too bumbling to make them and so the persona, such as it is, is a real one. I talk about bumbling a lot, and I feel a bit odd every time – I feel like bumbling is one of those things that if you’re going to do it, just do it. Don’t talk about it, especially if you make it sound like bumbling is an asset. Calculated bumbling is not good. And yet, in a weird way, my career is based on a certain amount of bumbling.
But how do you bumble authentically while immersed in situations you can predict or control? If that’s your job to disarm people by being non-threatening, how do you achieve that authentic kind of incompetence? There is an answer and I’m going to give it to you – it’s by putting yourself in danger. I am actually not a brave person…well, I’m a little bit brave, under certain conditions. And one of those conditions is that I’m being filmed. The great thing about being brave when you’re being filmed is that it’s preserved forever. You can be brave, a little bit brave, maybe once every two years, and then it’s recorded for posterity, and you can thereby cultivate your reputation for being a danger seeker and a brave person. Like on one occasion when I had to go to a skinhead rally in Florida, and I was genuinely terrified throughout the entire experience. But eventually the footage was all cut together into a fairly decent scene where you could see me bumbling in a very authentic way."
"People think that on screen I’m too feckless, and too bumbling, to actually make the shows that I appear in"
It is rare for a television personality to achieve national treasure status while being indelibly associated with skinhead gangs, Neo-Nazis, vehement Zionists and Neil and Christine Hamilton; yet the path forged by Louis Theroux to successful documentarian is as riven with oddities as the questionable beliefs of his subjects. Given his first break on television by filmmaker Michael Moore –who chose him thanks to his possession of a "very British quality of basic, affable incompetence" – Theroux has made intimate studies of some of the world's most disagreeable sub-cultures, casting the vicious, the bigoted and the occasionally insane characters he encounters into the sharpest relief by the simple method of remaining avowedly unthreatening and objective. Discussing his oeuvre at a talk for the Idler Academy in Notting Hill, Theroux expounded on what is widely considered his greatest asset – his mastery of the art of bumbling.
Text Tish Wrigley
