The undercurrents of American culture fascinated me. The backward-looking, the bizarre. Drawing from the then-flourishing world of zines – self-published fanzines, like Donna Kossy’s Kooks; Jim Goad’s Answer Me!; another called Snake Oil, which ran tongue-in-cheek appreciations of miracle workers and carried the slogan ‘For Fans of Kooky Kristian Kulture’ – I found a wellspring of stories on hidden worlds of misfits but also a Middle American milieu so aggressively retrograde and antithetical to my own bourgeois, liberal upbringing that it struck me as exciting and transgressive: snake handlers, infomercial celebrities, preachers taken over by the personalities of millennia-old cavemen, people who cut off their own body parts for sexual thrills.
In my days working on a paper in San Jose, I’d been turned on to Adam Parfrey’s Apocalypse Culture, a book-length anthology of outrageous behaviour and assorted diablerie on the American fringe, loosely themed around the idea of pre-millennial disquiet. I had reason to pick it up again recently and found much of it, frankly, repulsive and awful, but I’m a father of three now whereas back then I was a dyspeptic young pup who viewed revoltingness as a positive quality. Articles about Nazis and sexual predators felt like forbidden literature. The interview with Karen Greenlee, ‘The Unrepentant Necrophile’, in which she talked candidly about having sex with corpses while working at an undertaker, made a particular impression.
I was also reading widely in more mainstream magazines, and a few articles caught my attention as possible source material for documentaries: a long piece from the New Yorker by an author named Susan Faludi, which looked at the stresses and emotional strain attendant on making a livelihood out of the vagaries of one’s erections; and two stories about the militiamen and survivalists in Idaho and Montana – one by Philip Weiss, another by William T. Vollmann – that depicted them as rather romantic figures, confused idealists making a stand for their idea of freedom. All three of these articles were imbued with a combination of emotions, finding human qualities of pathos and warmth and, on occasion, an almost mythic level of commitment to causes that were on the face of it ludicrous and laughable.
It was quite a weird time. I was freelancing the odd article for British magazines. I was writing odd bits for low-budget cable TV pilots that never went to series. Meanwhile, in a tiny circle of programmers and producers in the UK, it seemed I was viewed as a coming man of TV presenting and being paid to write my own ticket on BBC2.
I bumped into a friend, a young editor I’d known at Spy called Larissa.
‘What are you working on?’ she asked.
‘I’ve got a development deal with the BBC. They say they want to do a series with me, so we’ll see.’ It sounded like something I was making up.
Sporadically I emailed ideas to David Mortimer for series with me in them, long incoherent rambles with statements of intent and philosophical underpinnings. Not much came back and I sensed his real attention was elsewhere. And truth be told, so was mine.
With time on my hands, and enough of a safety net with the BBC offer, I had decided I wanted to take the leap of following a dream I’d been thinking about for a couple of years: to write for an American sitcom.
With the doors of the BBC documentary department swung wide open to me, I can understand the idea of turning my back on them to pursue a career in sitcoms – a world where I didn’t even know where the doors were – may seem quixotic, and especially with the twenty-five years of work as a TV documentary presenter weighing against the counterfactual version. The best I can explain it is that I was conscious of wanting to move away from my ordinary life, my upbringing, London, my parents, and that even the BBC represented something too close to where I’d come from. I craved success on my terms, that wasn’t academic or literary or British. Possibly, too, I still felt the need to prove myself. Somehow me being on TV as myself felt like cheating. In my mind I was as much the subject as I was the creator of the segments I’d done at TV Nation and whatever gifts I had were in some way accidental and unintended. But if I could write my way into a job in Hollywood it would all seem more earned.
I began work on a spec script for a new sitcom called NewsRadio. I had chosen NewsRadio partly because I liked it, it was quite new, and because its showrunner, Paul Simms – oddly enough, a Spy magazine alumnus who I’d been told looked like me – had previously worked on Larry Sanders, HBO’s groundbreaking sitcom about a fictional chat-show host, that featured celebrities playing themselves. NewsRadio had potential, but it also wasn’t so good that the idea of writing on it seemed unrealistic.
I brought a monastic level of commitment and purpose to my spec script. It took one whole day to figure out how to do the formatting on my computer, with all the indentation and spacing. I’d been told that a half-hour script should take a couple of weeks to write, but I honed mine over the course of two months at the end of 1995, going through ten or more drafts. When I had finished, I showed it to my comedy-writer friends. ‘The good news is it looks like a sitcom script,’ was one of the more positive remarks. Conventional wisdom held that you were supposed to write two scripts and use them to get an agent. But by now I was so spent I didn’t have it in me to come up with a second one. You also weren’t supposed to send a script for a particular show to that show – the writers would be so attuned to lapses in voice, they’d see everything that was wrong with it. But having decided to break the agent rule, I thought I’d break the other rule too. I labelled the final draft ‘first draft’ then sent it off to Paul Simms.
I also submitted some ideas to David Mortimer at the BBC, just to keep that plate spinning. There was one for a millennial-themed magazine show, provisionally titled The End of the World News. It would have segments about women who had sex with corpses and super-fans who peed in people’s mouths. Another, Brief Lives, took its cue from John Aubrey, the seventeenth-century diarist. It would be ten-minute profiles of random weird people I found intriguing. There was an idea for a travelogue in which my brother would appear – he’d been working as a camera operator and reporter at a start-up local TV channel. The conceit was that he would be shooting our TV show, which would take us to trouble spots around the world, but he’d also be appearing in it. Thinking of the then-popular band Oasis and two famous TV-presenting brothers, I’d pitched it as, ‘The Gallaghers meets the Dimblebys!’ Hence, The Gamblebys. On his reworking of my pitch document, David had renamed it The Boys from the BBC.
The last idea was for an immersive documentary series, a longer-form version of my TV Nation segments. Borrowing from a programme I’d watched as a child called In At the Deep End, I’d added the device of following my attempts to participate in the worlds I was reporting on. In each episode I would get hands-on in a different weird subculture – take a role as a porn performer or make contact with a space alien. Riffing on the popular cookery programme Ready Steady Cook, I joked we might call it Ready Steady Kooks. David renamed this one Louis Theroux’s Weird Weekends.
In spring 1996, David Mortimer flew out to New York and took me to lunch in a posh restaurant called Canard something where the butter pats were shaped like ducks. David always enjoyed those professional duties that involved a sense of occasion – especially when he was in the role of bestower of largesse – and he drew out the reveal like a judge on a talent show, as he spread some duck-shaped butter on his crusty bread.
‘So they have decided . . . to commission . . . Louis Theroux’s Weird Weekends.’
‘Oh, OK, great,’ I said. ‘Yeah, I thought they might go with that one.’
‘So.’ Big smile. More buttering. ‘Are you pleased?’
‘Yes. Of course. That’s great.’
Truthfully, though, I was already having the usual bouts of anxiety and seeing a vastness of downside.
‘Do you think it has to have my name in it? Louis Theroux’s Weird Weekends. No one really knows who I am.’
‘Well, it builds brand recognition,’ he said. ‘We have another one we’re working on, Ray Mears’ Extreme Surviv
al. It’s how the commissioners like to develop talent in the popular documentary genre.’
‘So there are four of them?’
‘Yes.’
‘Fifty minutes each?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you suppose there’s a case for just doing one to begin with? And then sort of seeing how it goes?’
I don’t recall his response to this remark but his expression, if translated into English, would have said, ‘You are a tiny child who doesn’t have the first clue about how TV works.’
David flew back to London, presumably to make plans to start production imminently, while I disbelievingly commenced a one-man Bataan Death March towards making my own series – a series that, for some reason, had the name of a nonentity in its title. I felt disappointed in myself and intensely self-conscious about having been commissioned.
A few days afterwards, I returned to the studio apartment to find the message light on the machine flashing.
‘Hey, Louis. This is Paul Simms at NewsRadio. I read your script and I, ah, liked it. So give me a call.’
It’s a little strange to admit, but in my entire working career – BBC commissions, BAFTAs, academic plaudits – that call engendered the most profound feelings of relief and gratitude.
A month or two later, and Louis Theroux’s Weird Weekends was postponed, possibly indefinitely, and I was making my new life as a comedy writer in LA.
Chapter 9
Deadheads for Dole
I wasn’t, in fact, working at NewsRadio but for a topical HBO sketch show about the presidential elections called Not Necessarily the Elections. I’d sent the producer a packet of material months earlier, in the fallow period after TV Nation had ended, and been hired based on a single funny idea, about fans of the acid-folk group the Grateful Dead following Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole around on the campaign trail in the wake of Jerry Garcia’s death.
The gig was for two months, but for me a big part of the appeal was that my day job could be combined with the active pursuit of my destiny as a sitcom writer. Sarah, my girlfriend-now-wife-kind-of, had stayed in New York. If anything she was a little too relaxed and philosophical about our separation, saying, ‘It’ll be good to have some space.’ Later, in LA, I recounted the story of this parting to a friend’s girlfriend. She explained that in women’s language that meant we were splitting up. I took this on board. Splitting up. In a human-like way, I attempted to do soundings of my inner depths about how I might feel about ‘splitting up’. Or like a ham-radio operator trying to make out a signal through a fog of static. No clear emotional response came back.
I’d also had to send David Mortimer an email telling him to postpone production on Louis Theroux’s Weird Weekends. I was aware it was tricky emotional ground – that it could be construed as a strange move on my part and maybe a little ungrateful-seeming, as schedules and budgets were now presumably having to be reconfigured, and vast BBC cogs screeching and sparking as they went into reverse – and I got Sarah to read the message to make sure I’d struck the right tone. I’d signed off, ‘I hope you will continue to view me as your boy from the BBC’ or something equally cringe. Though I said I’d be back in September, I was secretly thinking I might bail on Louis Theroux’s Weird Weekends, get hired on NewsRadio, and never come back.
Los Angeles was a vast sun-drenched factory town. For a couple of weeks I was back staying with my uncle Peter in Long Beach, an hour’s drive from Hollywood. Later, I rented a sub-let that came with a very needy kitten that had been weaned too young and was always mewing for attention and treadling me with its paws. I entered into a dysfunctional relationship with the kitten similar to ones I’d had with other people close to me. It needed me and I seemed to need it to need me.
The city was the reverse. Aloof and indifferent, it ignored me and I fell hard for it as a result – in pick-up artist parlance they call this ‘negging’, seduction by insult. Pale and skinny and bespectacled, I had little or nothing to offer the city of beautiful bodies and success, which made it all the more tantalizing.
I loved the morning adventure of driving to work on a Hollywood lot – Sunset-Gower studios – down roads colonnaded with palm trees. In my borrowed car, I felt like a knight riding into battle. The lot itself had the air of a medieval town, circled by high walls with guarded gates, and in place of a portcullis an electric pole that went up.
I turned out to be oddly ill qualified for my new job. The show was a US cousin to the eighties comedy format Not the Nine O’Clock News. It had been commissioned for four episodes over the summer – Bob Dole was then running against the incumbent Bill Clinton – and was hosted by the comedian Dennis Miller, though he was never around until we taped. Several of the other writers had come over from a live chat show Miller hosted, which was dark over the summer. With their day-jobs on the live show in their back pockets, the Miller writers were faintly dismissive of the hoary old eighties holdover they now found themselves working on. Even when I was staying an hour away in Long Beach I was the first one in the office and the last to leave. I shared a room with a talented stand-up comedian and writer called David Feldman. Alas, having had the one idea involving Deadheads for Dole, I struggled to come up with anything else.
By coincidence, also on the Sunset-Gower lot were the NewsRadio offices. By now I’d had a first, cursory meeting with Paul Simms – he’d seemed friendly, though a little distracted – and I’d sent some follow-up plot ideas along. But the line had then gone quiet and I wasn’t quite sure what the next move was – I didn’t want to badger him too much – and during breaks or just going about my day I wandered the central courtyard, hoping I might bump into him.
Finally, through his assistant, another meet-up was arranged. It was early afternoon when I arrived. Tinfoil had been put up on the windows to keep out the light. There were classic video machines about the place. Probably it says more about my own state of mind and the weird level of emotional investment I had in the whole notion of being a sitcom writer – I was like an airport frisking wand on its highest setting – but I had the disquieting feeling of there being no adults around; it was like being back in a sixth-form common room or a frat house the afternoon following a big party.
Paul, in a large back office, was in conversation with a PA called Spider, who was lounging on a sofa. ‘Wooden Ships’ by Crosby, Stills and Nash played – ‘Wooden ships on the water! Very free!’ – and someone remarked on the ridiculousness of the lyric about eating ‘purple berries.’
I nodded and tried to think of something funny to say about Crosby, Stills and Nash or purple berries.
One of the story ideas I’d sent over involved a character on the show becoming obsessed with Dungeons & Dragons and having a psychotic break, going down into the sewers of New York, thinking he’s an elf or a wizard.
‘Yeah, thanks for your ideas,’ Paul now said. ‘We’re actually working on one about Dungeons and Dragons already . . . So you’re based here now? You should come to a taping.’
‘I’d love to,’ I said.
He mentioned that the Writers Guild required a minimum number of scripts to be farmed out to freelancers each year. Maybe I could write one.
‘Wow, that would be great,’ I said.
Then he went to work editing a scene and complaining about one of the extras, who was over-acting. ‘This fucking guy at the back is killing me,’ he said.
Afterwards I was a little deflated. I had been trying to think what the office had reminded me of and later I realized it was of a story in Twilight Zone: The Movie in which a child with superpowers has taken the rest of his family hostage and they exist in a fearful state of forced fun. I wondered if this was the life I had dreamed of. Was I giving up my own BBC TV series for the possibility of freelancing a single script? And handing it in to a man in a room with tinfoil on the windows? And what was wrong with the lyric about eating purple berries? I trudged back to the Not Necessarily the Elections offices, wondering what exactly h
ad I imagined life writing on a sitcom would be like.
We began taping segments, including the Deadheads for Dole skit, but not much else by me, since in the six or so weeks I’d been there I’d written virtually no other usable material. My office mate, David, had been kind enough to include me as co-writer on some of his sketches – one based on the idea that the language was running out of words and we needed to invent a new letter, the ‘triple-you’, and another about the Vice Presidential Republican nominee Jack Kemp and a fictional prehistory he had as a singer in a doowop group called The Kemptones. I’d had an idea about a robot running for president but that hadn’t made the cut and another about a makeover show for homeless people. That one was produced but bombed so badly in front of audiences in rehearsal that it was also tossed out.
One evening, eating a lonely meal at a fast-food restaurant called El Pollo Loco at Fountain and Vine in Hollywood, I stared into my ‘Pollo Bowl’ and realized I was being ridiculous. Of course I should do my TV series. With a new gust of anxiety generated by the idea that Louis Theroux’s Weird Weekends might become real, I went back to my apartment and sent a long venting email to David Mortimer, starting ‘Dear Dave,’ and confessing all my doubts and misgivings – about my competence, about his competence, about the folly of embarking on a set of four hour-long programmes when I wasn’t sure he understood my basic concept, and that I wasn’t interested in making piss-taking shows that pandered to British prejudices about Yanks.
David sent back a considered email taking my points one by one and ending by saying he didn’t like to be called Dave.
Chapter 10
Head for the Hills
In the dog days of the summer of 1996 I arrived back in New York, with a plan to move back into the Chelsea studio apartment and reoccupy my old relationship with Sarah. I found to my dismay that she was ambivalent about both ideas, viewing me with an attitude of semi-detachment – she was thinking of moving on. ‘You need to get serious or hit the road,’ she didn’t say, but that was the subtext. But we still loved each other – I more than I realized – and we were also alone, knowing barely another soul in the city in any intimate way. After a few days of importuning on my part, I prevailed on her to think about her own creative projects – a book she was working on, her lack of funds. In a purely pragmatic way it made sense for us to live together, and, you know, probably continue the relationship, too, ‘or whatever’. And so, in this spirit, not quite knowing how committed we were to one another, but carrying on regardless, we found a new apartment in a semi-desolate but supposedly up-and-coming area of Brooklyn just across the East River called Williamsburg, which was then being settled by a small vanguard of artists and urban pioneers.
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