by Jackie Holmes

Created on: March 22, 2009

Louis Theroux is a British broadcaster famous for his television documentary series Louis Theroux's Weird Weekends and When Louis Met. Theroux was born in Singapore on 20th May 1970 to an American father and a British mother; his father is, in fact, the respected popular travel writer Paul Theroux - noted for the works The Great Railway Bazaar and The Mosquito Coast.

Theroux was educated at Westminster School and went on to study at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he gained a first class degree in modern history. His first journalism job was at Metro Silicon Valley, a free weekly newspaper in San Jose, California. In 1992, he was taken on as a writer for satirical monthly magazine 'Spy'.

Theroux's first break in television came as a correspondent on Michael Moore's satirical newsmagazine television series 'TV Nation'. After the series ended its run, Theroux was signed to the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) on a development deal, out of which came Louis Theroux's Weird Weekends. In addition to his TV work Louis also writes for bi-yearly British magazine, The Idler.

In Weird Weekends, Louis follows various subcultures, mainly American, including Survivalists, Black Nationalists, White Supremacists, and Porn Stars. During these escapades Theroux generally lived with or near to the subjects. Louis describes the series as:-

"Setting out to discover the genuinely odd in the most ordinary setting. To me, it's almost a privilege to be welcomed into these communities and to shine a light on them and, maybe, through my enthusiasm, to get people to reveal more of themselves than they may have intended. The show is laughing at me, adrift in their world, as much as at them. I don't have to play up that stuff. I'm not a matinee idol disguised as a nerd."

Weird weekends ran from 1998-2002, before Theroux embarked on an altogether different project called 'When Louis Met', in which he accompanied a different British celebrity in each programme as they went about their day to day business and interviewing them in the process. His episode about the British celebrity Sir Jimmy Saville has been voted one of the top fifty documentaries of all time in a survey by Channel 4. Other subjects included former Member of Parliament Neil Hamilton and his wife, as well as Max Clifford a well know British publicist and media mogul. During the latter, Clifford was caught lying in an attempt to set up Louis.

Between 2003-2006, Louis worked on a number of special programmes, returning to American

• 1
• 2
• Next Page >>