From the KKK to the manosphere: A potted history of Louis Theroux
There’s a pretty strong case to be made for Louis Theroux being the most famous documentary maker of modern times. Ahead of his North Berwick appearance, Paul McLean looks back at the bespectacled one’s prodigious career
The manosphere, Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazis, porn stars: the list goes on. No, these are not a demented man-baby’s VIP guests for the grand opening of his big, beautiful ballroom: they’re a tiny snapshot of the subjects documentary big-hitter Louis Theroux has tackled across more than three decades. But the tables will be turned at Fringe By The Sea with Theroux facing the questions in front of a sure-to-be-packed Big Top.
From his earliest days in the business, Theroux’s polite, awkward, fish-out-of-water persona disarmed extremists of all stripes, while using his whip-smart mind to give them enough rope to hang themselves. Starting on Michael Moore’s TV Nation in the US, he soon graduated to his own show, Louis Theroux’s Weird Weekends. Embedding himself with subcultures and fringe groups, he gave us eye-opening insights into, among others, the adult entertainment industry, UFO hunters, survivalists and WWF (the wrestlers, not the wildlife charity). When Louis Met… followed, with its now skin-crawlingly legendary Jimmy Savile episode.
He’s created more than 50 documentaries for BBC Two since 2003, mixing social issues such as disability, mental health, eating disorders and addiction into his previous more ‘colourful’ repertoire, alongside feature-length investigations of scientology and this year’s Inside The Manosphere. That show probed the narcissistic world of male influencers and content-creating grifters pedalling misogyny under the guise of ‘traditional’ masculinity: just another bunch of man-babies.
Louis Theroux: In Conversation, Big Top, North Berwick, 2 August, 11.45am; Picture: Ryan McNamara.