Louis Theroux

Yeah.

Anything like TV or film is kind of poor cousin in terms of the arts.

I got into TV slightly by displaced from like the pressure of feeling, oh, I can never write a book as good as my dad's.

So I thought I'll write for television and I'll write something like sitcoms were big.

This was the early 90s.

And then I struggled to get hired on a sitcom.

And then I got hired by Michael Moore for his series TV Nation and began presenting segments.

So, there was never a thing like, oh, I'm going to do The Great Railway Bazaar, but as a travelogue.

I don't even like travelogues on TV that much, like as a genre.

You can do without Portillo, can you?

I haven't watched much Portillo.

I mean, I like Michael Palin, but my go-to has always been classical documentary, especially immersive documentary.

Yeah.

where you have a kind of continuity of character through the film that maybe there's a reporter, like Alan Wicker was something of an influence for those who can remember.

That idea of someone who's immersed in an experience, who's sort of the straight man in the comic sense in a world gone mad, navigating through and especially where they get out of their depth in some way and they're exposed to the extremes of the human condition.

So I never, I struggle with that authorial, I know I'm talking way too much, but this is going to quite a deep place.

That authorial voice of the travel writer.

And then I went here and I went to see the Spanish Steps and a man vomited on my shoe and I went back to the hotel.

I always thought, I don't really, I'm not, you know, I think I'm more, I'd like to see, I'd like to sort of see someone immersed in their lives somehow.

Yeah.