Telegraph Magazine: The flying theroux brothers
Meet Marcel and Louis, the sons of the best-selling author with careers soaring
up, up and away.
When the Therouxs were growing up, Louis idolised
Marcel, whom he believed to be the coolest guy he knew. This so annoyed Marcel
that he employed a cunning 10-year-old's psychological mind-controlling
technique on eight-year-old Louis and persuaded him to become interested in
activities that he secretly mocked, like bird-watching and the cubs. `Yeah, you
got really into the cubs - you even bought a whole new cub outfit, Lou,' laughs
Marcel, who obviously still finds it funny. `Then Marce got into being a
post-punk, and I had to get into funk, which I didn't even like,' says Louis
seriously. `Shut up Marce, stop laughing,' he shouts, starting to laugh himself
as Marcel grabs my tape-recorder. `It was too weird for us to be ploughing the
same furrow,' continues Louis. `We are dangerously similar and that can be a
mind f***.' Meet the Theroux brothers, the sparring sons of American travel
writer and novelist Paul Theroux. We are sitting in Marcel's flat in Notting
Hill Gate, where Louis is staying while on a trip from his home in New York.
One-liners and insults are thrown about like lances, and as you dodge the
crossfire, you can only be grateful that you didn't have to sit around the
Theroux household breakfast table.
Yet they are a good double act.
Unlike the offspring of most famous parents who have to shrug off the family
name on their own (think of Martin Amis or even Zoe Ball), this month they mount
a joint assault on overcoming their father's reputation, and making their own.
The first episode of Louis's four-part solo television series, Louis Theroux's
Weird Weekends, has already been shown (BBC2, Thursdays, 9.30pm). In March,
Marcel's first novel, A Stranger in the Earth, will be published by Phoenix
House.
If you watched Michael Moore's TV Nation, the Emmy-award-winning
American cult magazine show, you will remember Louis. He was the funny,
nerdy-looking one with the deadpan style and affable manner who acquired a cult
following as he headed off to interview white supremacists in trailers in
Montana and investigated the Avon saleswomen who worked in the Brazilian Amazon.
He was, it seems, a TV natural. `Yeah, well I guess I do feel more relaxed
talking to people on camera than when a camera isn't there,' he says. `It is
like having an arbiter, a court of appeal.' Marcel interrupts to agree. `He is
just so Louis on TV. I was gutted when he got his break on TV Nation, but I
couldn't be jealous when I watched it because he was so good.' When TV Nation
ended, the BBC wasted no time in signing Louis up for Weird Weekends. A second
series has already been commissioned.
Louis explores fringe American
subcultures in a style he describes as `somewhere in between Alan Whicker and
John Noakes. I have an anxiety about being normal, so I surround myself with
people who are a bit off-centre to normalise me,' he explains, as Marcel begins
to snigger. Louis investigated male porno performers in the San Fernando Valley,
winning a walk-on part as a park ranger in a gay porn film (his screen name was
Sir Lancelot); and evangelised with singing Jesus freaks in Dallas, giving an
impromptu solo rendition of George Michael's Faith. It is, as Marcel calls it,
`Gonzo TV'. `Instead of an objective, po-faced reporter, you've got Louis being
irreverent,' he says. `I haven't seen his new series, but I know I will laugh my
arse off when I do.'
Marcel was born in Kampala in 1968, Louis in
Singapore in 1970, when their parents were nomadic English teachers. The family
moved back to England when the boys reached school age. After attending
Westminster School, they read English, Marcel at Cambridge and Louis at Oxford,
both graduating with firsts. Marcel went on to Yale, returning to London to work
in TV, while Louis worked first for the American satirical magazine Spy and
later as a fact checker for Simon & Schuster in New York. In 1993 their
parents divorced. Anne Theroux, who now works for the BBC World Service, has
just finished writing a book about her life with Paul, which she gave them for
Christmas.
As Marcel grew up he came to idolise his father. `He had a
very powerful image of exotic lands,' says Marcel. `He thought himself an
amazingly cool guy, and he is, but it is important not to mythologise your
parents. You need to see that they are real people with faults.' Paul once told
Marcel that if you get a book published your problems are over. `That was
bullshit,' says Marcel. `Dad's written 30 and look at him.' Writing a novel was
something Marcel had always wanted to do. `For a long time I didn't know what to
do because I was frightened of failure. The thought of my father reading it was
crippling, but then I decided that I had to try and it has got to be better than
being a BBC cameraman.' A Stranger in the Earth preserves elements of the
satirical styles of Evelyn Waugh, P.G. Wodehouse and William Boyd in a time
capsule, and releases the hero Horace Littlefair into multi-cultural south
London in a bid to save the urban fox. It is a clever, funny tale with a faintly
hangdog humour that gives the reader a sense of being gently tickled, but
without knowing exactly where. It is surprisingly unegotistical for a first
novel - neither an account of first love nor of drug-taking urban life. `I
wanted to write a novel that was unhip,' explains Marcel, `about the
unfashionable south London I remembered as a child, where I grew up, about
contemporary life in as unknowing a way as possible.'
Marcel only
allowed his father to read his novel when it was finished. `He sent me an e-mail
listing the parts he liked. But I realise I can find his approval as crippling
as his disapproval,' he says, unabashed by his honesty. `There is no normal way
of dealing with having a parent who is well known. It is really hard. You just
have to make a mark on your own.' Louis nods. On this, the Therouxs seem to
agree. And then they start telling me about an idea they have had for a TV
programme called The Boys from the BBC. `It's the Gallagher brothers meets the
Dimbleby brothers,' says Louis, as Marcel begins to guffaw. `We've got bushy
eyebrows, and we are feuding siblings who will go off to somewhere like
Mauritania and report on the slave trade, bickering on camera while we do it.
It's a ridiculous one-line-pitch idea that would never work.' I'm not so sure.
(1998 (c) The Telegraph plc, London)