The secret of my success: Louis
Theroux
Louis Theroux is the host of cult series 'Weird Weekends' on
BBC2.
Going to America was my biggest break. It was just after I left
university, and everyone else I knew was planning to go to London and get into
journalism; I, on the other hand, had no career plan at all.
I thought
America would be an adventure, and a liberation, in that if I got myself away
from everyone and everything I knew, I'd have more of an insight into who I was
and what I wanted to do. I slept on my brother's floor in Boston and then I
found a book called the Directory Of Internships, and picked out the interesting
ones, from journalism to advertising to TV. In the end, a local newspaper in San
Jose was the only one that accepted me. When I arrived I discovered, to my
horror, that it was a free-sheet; but I met a lot of people there who were
interested in the strange and offbeat, and who encouraged me to write about
bizarre psychics and other weird subcultures. It's where my interest in all that
kind of stuff really began.
After a year I went to Spy, the satirical
magazine, on another internship. It was quite a hard shift; I had journalistic
experience, but I spent the first two months reorganising the bookshelves. But
it was good, in that I was surrounded by a brain trust of informed, amusing
people, most of whom ended up as scriptwriters on Frasier or Letterman or The
Simpsons.
I'd never planned to go into TV, but I was invited by Michael
Moore to work on his TV Nation show. When I got there I was more excited than
I'd ever been in my life, pitching stories and eventually presenting them
myself; it wasn't so much that I was a TV natural; more that the BBC, who were
part funding the series, wanted a British correspondent. Weird Weekends
eventually grew out of those segments.
When I started on TV my idea of
comedy was to find bad people and take the piss out of them. Many would claim
I've never evolved beyond that, but my great revelatory moment was finding that
comedy came not from making fun of people, but having fun with them - exploiting
the clashes of culture and personality so the joke's on me as much as them. It's
like making the wrong decision to find out what the right one is - that's really
what my whole career's been based on.