Louis Theroux

The family thing.

Yeah, the family thing.

Basically, you leave university and then you write a travel book or not.

Like that was the aristocracy of letters was a thing in our household.

That was what was the highest calling.

I think I probably still believe that.

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.