Gotta Get Theroux This

by Louis Theroux

  We returned. It was still slow going but little by little the scenes accumulated and a picture emerged of a world, in the townships and squatter camps, where mob justice was endemic. Despairing of being helped by the police, townspeople would round up suspected rapists and robbers, corner them, truss them and burn or stone them to death. ‘People are killed like chickens,’ a community volunteer called Walter told me. Another man recounted being shot and the police doing nothing about it. With a rueful air, he added: ‘Even myself, if they say, “This one is a robber,” I can assist to kill.’ To my knowledge, the story of mob justice in the townships hadn’t been told before and I felt proud that we were bringing it to light, in all its strangeness and cruelty.

  The most surprising moment of filming – and eventual climax of our documentary – came late in the shoot when, one morning, a call came in from William, the Mapogo vigilante who dispensed ‘medicine.’ He was, he said, at that moment, in Diepsloot, cornered by an angry mob of local people grown sick of his practice of physically assaulting men in his custody. He thought they might be about to kill him and was hoping we might help.

  We drove to Diepsloot, arriving to find an unruly gathering of local residents on a dirt road with rough corrugated shacks on either side. Sidney advised us to hang back while he went to speak to the crowd. Within a few minutes he returned, looking concerned.

  ‘William is in trouble,’ he said. He described how William and a co-worker had apprehended a supposed suspect in the area, detaining him inside a van. ‘While they were trying to drive out, the community turned against William.’

  Sidney said he’d talked to the people in the crowd, reassuring them we were there to document but not to critique. He felt confident we were OK to film. But he added: ‘When we go in, you mustn’t mention William’s name as if we know him. They will turn against us.’

  We walked up the road to where the crowd was gathered – a hundred or so. There was shouting, and William came into view, standing next to a police van, looking terrified. A couple of officers, in blue caps and jackets, carrying rifles, were attempting to marshal the crowd to no discernible effect. People dressed in t-shirts and dusty trousers and woolly hats were blowing whistles, and in among them was a man holding a rope that seemed intended for trussing William.

  At the forefront of the mob was a young woman.

  I asked her: ‘You’re saying this guy, William, beat someone up that you know?’

  ‘Yes, he beat Donald Lekgwati. Because this guy, this William, says he’s going to burn him. Truly speaking. William told us that he’s going to burn Donald Lekgwati. So we can’t allow him to burn Donald Lekgwati.’

  William was bustled into the police vehicle, protesting his innocence in the affair at hand. ‘I can’t use my hands on him,’ he said.

  Turning back to the young woman and Sidney, I asked: ‘What do they want to do to William?’

  With a wry smile, Sidney said, ‘They want to kill William.’

  ‘Yes,’ the young woman agreed.

  ‘They want to burn him,’ Sidney said.

  ‘Yes, we want to burn him. Because he told us he is going to burn that Donald Lekgwati.’

  It was an extraordinary scene: the surreal juxtaposition of people who came across as personable and thoughtful, expressing in a matter-of-fact way a desire to burn a fellow human being to death. It was also a testament to Sidney’s soft diplomacy, his ability to reassure and placate and negotiate. In the high-risk theatre of the mob it was a thousand times more useful than a phalanx of bodyguards.

  The phase of work in which our main output of stories was of a slightly more dangerous stripe – ‘pushing the jeopardy button’, I used to call it – lasted a couple of years. A documentary about meth users in Fresno followed. It sticks in my mind as one of the only times I was forced to make four separate filming trips over the course of many months to get what we needed. Unlike the prison, where everyone is bored and already convicted, the streets were much harder to get into, and less safe. It was inordinately hard to film someone actually smoking or injecting meth, and over the whole endeavour hung the unwelcome spectre of the Brass Eye drugs special – when oh when were we going to find someone out of their gourd on Yellow Bentines or Clarky Cat?

  We shot a film about gangstas and hoodlums in Lagos – two trips of two weeks each, two weeks being the deal I’d made with Nancy for the longest allowable filming trip. The Lagos film was memorable because our climactic scene – the result of an election that we were fairly sure would lead to unrest – coincided with a family holiday in France: a villa had been rented somewhere near a town called Verdun-sur-Garonne, where, apparently, the ‘Theroux’ clan originally came from, before they migrated to Quebec. Nancy, the kids, my brother and his family were all coming; my dad had flown over, which was unprecedented. He rarely came to Europe, and never for holidays, but he was enticed by the idea of a road trip to the ancestral spawning grounds. But I bailed on the holiday to film in Nigeria, which went down in the family ledger – a metaphorical accounts book in Nancy’s brain largely dedicated to my domestic failures and unkept promises, times I left outings early, missed parties – as The Time Louis Didn’t Come On A Family Holiday.

  Then, during the unrest, which took the form of a ragtag procession of ‘area boys’ – local youth – jogging along in a loose-knit and motley street procession, at least one or two of them armed with broken bottles and dripping blood, at the point it was decided we had what we needed and should clear the area, the director Jason and I managed to forget our AP, Guy King, leaving him amid the melee as we bundled into a waiting vehicle.

  All these programmes had their merits. I began to think of myself as making good on the awards and visibility I’d won too easily in former years – I was earning out the advance of my early promise. More importantly, our working practices at last felt sustainable: we were back to making shows in a way that was enjoyable and offered something different in the TV landscape. Having let go of comedy as a dominant flavour, the stories flowed steadily. I began to see that there was nothing so dark that we couldn’t handle it, and with each outing we edged a little further into more difficult material. ‘Go dark but cast it light,’ I would say. You know you’ve attained some higher grade of knob-hood when you have your own little professional mantras that you repeat to your co-workers. It meant, choose stories whose themes are filled with the possibility of misery and angst, but make sure your contributors are sympathetic and open.

  Another thought experiment I sometimes found helpful was whether I could imagine a given subject being featured in a reality format. If yes, then it was a sign it didn’t have enough of a knotty or dubious dimension: drugs, crime, serious mental illness. You weren’t likely to see them in a programme devised by Endemol involving sexy guys with six packs and ladies in bikinis. I tried to dodge the ever-present threat of obsolescence by taking on topics that were just too weird and questionable to be treated in ‘normal’ TV.

  I kept venturing gingerly forward. Well, we did that. Can we do this?

  Chapter 24

  This Is What I Do

  A friend once told me she thought the problem with working in television is that it’s too much fun, with the result that it makes relationships unstable. The TV widows and widowers – the ones left behind to do childcare and cope with tantrums and keep on top of laundry – can’t help resenting their other halves off filming in far-flung locations, with buffet breakfasts and heated swimming pools. Early on, Nancy and I developed a few rules we tried to stick to in an attempt to ease the pain a little: I wouldn’t go away for more than two weeks at a time; I tried to call every day; almost without fail I would write a longish email home. But it wasn’t easy.

  Since Nancy and I had met at the BBC, it wasn’t as though my being a programme-maker came as a surprise. Still, as time went on, and our commitments – also known as ‘children’ – multiplied, she made it clear she had an issue with me going away as much as I did. More than once she
said, a little ruefully, ‘I always promised myself I wouldn’t get involved with someone in TV. I’ve seen it fail too many times. Husbands and wives spending too long apart. Directors having affairs with their APs . . . It never works.’

  Like many couples, we fell into familiar patterns in our arguing. They were like songs – duets – without the music. Many centred on the idea that, unlike her, I had made no real concessions to family life. I was still going away, still doing the same job, as if nothing had changed.

  ‘I’ve sacrificed my career and changed my life but you’ve given up nothing,’ she would say. ‘You’ve had everything your way. Name one thing you’ve given up!’

  ‘Not true. I leave work early. I’m never back after six. I’m usually the first one to leave the office.’

  ‘Your workmates don’t have kids, Louis. You do.’

  ‘I’ve made lots of compromises.’

  ‘Name one!’

  In the background to these arguments were certain phrases that I discovered, to my cost, I wasn’t supposed to say. But inevitably I would say them, because – to my mind – they were self-evidently true and important. One was: ‘But this is what I do, Nancy.’ There were other variations of this that were equally inflammatory. ‘I was doing this when we met.’ ‘You knew what you were getting into.’ And so on. They never failed to increase the tensions.

  ‘What was I doing when we met? I was making programmes, too. I wasn’t sweeping up bits of rice from under the table. “This is what I do.” Change what you do! Do something else. It’s not part of who you are. It’s bullshit.’

  Another phrase was: ‘Why don’t we get more help?’

  ‘Get help – so you can not be a dad? It’s not about “help”, Louis. It’s about you being a father to your children.’

  I suppose we all bring into our relationships certain assumptions based on how our parents were. I’d grown up with au pairs who’d lived with us in our house. Both my parents had worked. My dad had travelled for weeks at a time. The way I rationalized it, I wasn’t expecting Nancy to stay at home. I didn’t have an issue with her travelling for work – though as it happened, she didn’t travel for work as she had taken a break from full-time paid employment to be around for the kids. Still, I wasn’t expecting anything from her that I wasn’t also prepared to give. And so, to my mind, it was all equitable and fair.

  Given the limitations I was working within – the fact of having commissions and needing to make programmes and suffering from the human frailty of only being in one place at one time – I did my best to keep my end up on the home front. I didn’t ‘help’ at home, since that was another trigger word. ‘I help!’ Help implied you were supplemental. ‘You do it and I’ll help.’ ‘Wow, that’s amazing, you’re helping with your kids. Has it ever occurred to you that might be your job?’

  One part of me – a nasty little voice in my head – would say, So work is a luxury now. I’m selfish because I work. What happened to, ‘He’s a good provider’? I’m supposed to count myself lucky that I’m allowed to keep doing a job.

  Sometimes I would look enviously around at other couples and how much licence they gave each other, how much they could get away with – long hours, frequent trips, self-indulgent hobbies. Golf? Rock climbing? Whaaaat? For a while, my brother and I got into an unhealthy habit, whenever we were together with our families, of needling and picking at each other’s supposed masculine entitlement. ‘Ooh, doesn’t do the school run! Did you hear that, Nancy? And how long were you away on your boys’ walking weekend?’ It was a little like some kind of grotesque metro-sexual update of the Four Yorkshireman sketch. ‘You got up for four feeds in one night? Looxury!’

  In arguments with Nancy, I tried not to cite examples of the latitude other male partners seemed to enjoy, since that never ended well.

  ‘Jim and Joan have au pairs. Jim just got back from a two-month shoot in Tibet.’

  ‘Maybe if you talked to Joan you’d know their marriage is in serious trouble.’

  Before I went away I used to make batches of kedgeree and bolognese and spoon them into little Tupperware tubs for freezing. Sometimes, on location, I would do an online Sainsbury’s shop. When I flew back – more often than not on an overnight economy flight, landing exhausted and jetlagged – I’d be aware of the need to hit the ground running. I’d walk in with my bags, feeling like a zombie. Nancy would be tired and resentful. She’d have got into her own routines while I was away. I was an interloper and an encumbrance.

  ‘You seem grumpy,’ she’d say. ‘Aren’t you happy to be home?’

  ‘No, I am happy, I’m just tired.’ My little voice would be saying, can’t I have a lie-down? ‘I might have a little lie-down. I’m just so tired.’

  ‘I’ve been looking after a baby and a toddler on my own for two weeks! But you’re the one that’s tired, OK, sure!’

  ‘It’s jetlag. It’s different.’

  ‘You just have no idea, do you? I make everything so easy for you. You have it all your way. You get to carry on doing what you do. I haven’t had a night away from my kids in three years. You’ve never even done a weekend on your own with the kids!’

  ‘Book a break! Take a week off! I would love you to. You’ve got an open offer! Just do it!’

  In certain respects, we communicated better when I was away. Without the distractions of children, and with the imposed calm of distance and the interface of the written word, she would express her frustrations at the life she found herself backed into.

  ‘I’m really lonely, Louis.’ ‘I feel I’m basically being a single parent.’ ‘I’m in half a relationship.’

  For my part, I toggled between viewing myself as being unfairly victimized and put upon for making a living and – on the other hand – seeing Nancy’s side and wanting to do my best to support her and not wanting to be the stereotype of the guy whose wife is angry with him all the time. As was so often the case, my brain was a parliament of fractious voices. There was the one saying, Why can’t I retire to a man-cave and organize my collection of jam jars with screws and nails in them, and then emerge later to have wordless sex with my wife? Is that so unreasonable? And, across the aisle, there was the honourable representative for Progressive South who found Jam-Jar Man revolting and retrograde. What is your problem that you couldn’t imagine being a house-husband and even find the phrase ‘house-husband’ a bit weird? I found certain clichés of masculinity creeping into my thinking. It was like Bernard Manning turning up at the house wearing my dressing gown and slippers. What are you doing here? Go away! That couldn’t be me. I was cool feminist guy. I was the guy who was fine with his girlfriend not shaving her armpits at university. I wasn’t the guy who complained about his wife to his mates in the pub and wondered whether there might be ancient wisdom in sexist jokes.

  Making it all the more complicated was a weird kind of ambivalence about myself. In the spirit of Groucho Marx, I had never been completely OK with the idea of someone being in love with me. It seemed a character flaw in them. In turn this led me, ever so slightly, to undervalue Nancy for being with me.

  This was – in an unacknowledged way – lurking in the background of everything: the sense that if I was more committed, if I’d actually proposed all those years ago, somehow that would ameliorate everything. It was the double whammy of travels a lot and never even asked me to marry him.

  I liked to think my resistance to being married was part of a bohemian attitude to do with the fatuity of weddings, their role as platforms for materialism and showing off, as bourgeois status showdowns. Possibly too some buried anger at my own parents and their marriage vows, which were – as they say – more honoured in the breach than the observance. But if I’m honest with myself, I also see a deliberate withholding, a misjudged sense that it might keep Nancy on her toes and possibly also, in a spirit related to my attitude to contracts, that it gave you some leverage if you didn’t sign anything, that it wasn’t all quite official, and you could walk off the
job if it wasn’t working out.

  None of this was clear or consistent in my own mind. I loved Nancy. I loved my family. I wanted everything to work out. But other darker ideas and impulses hidden from me were moshing around alongside the healthier ones. And all the time the stress of children and work and daily life and feeling the impossible pull in different directions, of having to be around, of having to go away, bubbled up as the passive-aggressive anger of not quite being present.

  Alongside these arguments – which were going on intermittently in the background of our lives for several years – was a sense at work that we were in danger of running out of road. One night, after the kids were in bed, I sat down with Nancy in our front room to watch a DVD of a rough cut of our programme about meth use in Fresno. Twenty minutes in, she said, ‘That’s the first time you’ve smiled.’

  I didn’t think too much of it. At the end she gave a few notes – she is a perceptive critic and a hard marker – and then said, ‘I just think you should do what you are good at. There are plenty of reporters who can go to dangerous places. Your skill is building relationships.’

  It may be that it took a while for the weight of what she’d said to sink in. Or that I was lacking other options. But the comment stayed with me – a sense that, in pursuing harder-edged stories, I was also in danger of losing something, that something needed to change, without quite knowing what or how.