Those of us who work in television docs sometimes feel like the poor relations of the writers and directors and producers of the cinema documentary industry. Theatrical-release productions tend to have more money and more glamour and more longevity.

But while TV shows may now always be as polished or as slick as cinema fare, the sheer quantity of output means that there is a wealth of shows that offer something quirky or distinctive – be it an off-beat story or a bizarre moment of actuality.

Going to documentary festivals, I’m sometimes struck by how favourably the workaday docs of the TV world compare with long-in-gestation independent features.

With this in mind, I have taken a moment to jot down an idiosyncratic and entirely off-the-top-of-my-head list of some TV documentaries of unusual power or strangeness – docs that I stumbled upon watching TV or had recommended to me over the years or that friends made, but which, for various reasons, have stayed with me since I first saw them.

My criterion for choosing the list below has been simple: Can I imagine pressing a copy of a DVD into someone’s hand and saying: You must watch this!

Looking over the selections, I’m surprised by the degree of thematic consistency. All the docs are about sex, crime, religious strangeness, and mental illness. These happen to be themes I often explore in my own series. Are these subjects intrinsically more interesting? Or must more interesting to me? I don’t know.

I have put no special emphasis on originality of form or approach. Some of the shows below show great finesse in the editing and the structure. In others there is nothing very special in the way the piece is put together. But these more prosaic offerings all have moments of raw make-your-mouth-gape reality which, for me, justifies their presence here.

I’d love to hear feedback from any of you, especially if you have your own thoughts on TV documentaries that you think are worthy of inclusion.

I suppose, as a practitioner of television myself, I speak with a certain bias, but I do feel TV-makers – like the medieval craftsmen who carved gargoyles on the facades of cathedrals – suffer occasionally from a lack of recognition, that their hard-fought efforts get forgotten and their names lost to history. This list is also a small attempt to rectify that.

And so, in no particular order:

Madness in the Fast Lane
An extraordinary story following a pair of young Swedish twins who, for no discernible reason in 2008, ran onto the M6 and into the path of oncoming traffic. A BBC crew happened to be nearby and filmed the incident. This doc uses that footage and recounts the aftermath, which was almost as bizarre. It was directed by Jim Nally. More info here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursula_and_Sabina_Eriksson

The Hunt for Britain’s Paedophiles
A BBC team spent a year or more embedded with Scotland Yard’s Paedophile Unit, riding along for their raids on some of Britain’s most notorious sex offenders. This was a three-parter, that unfolded at length, giving room to some astonishing actuality. A scene that stays with me showed an accused offender who decided to mount a quixotic counter-protest while he was being filmed. The whole thing is available here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vq8zqDPmQxE

Philip and his Seven Wives
Directed by Marc Isaacs, I think this is my favourite of his. Normally he excels at evoking the atmosphere of an overlooked place, but this is a character study of an eccentric religious leader, filmed with uncommon poetry and compassion. A little clip of it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jmdC7O_zZw8

The Man with a Seven Second Memory
Aged 46, Clive Wearing suffered a serious brain injury. From that moment forward he couldn’t acquire new memories and couldn’t remember more than seven seconds back. The original documentary on his case was an Equinox (“Prisoner of Consciousness”). I saw it in the eighties and found it fascinating. Jane Treays made this amazing follow-up.

Hundred Percent White
Directed by Leo Regan, this follows a group of English skinheads as they grow older, with exemplary sensitivity and compassion. Leo also directed the brilliant Battle Centre about life among the ranks of the two-fisted evangelicals of the Jesus Army.

The Ice Age
Bit of a wild card this: an embedded doc about life among Australia’s meth heads. Some of the actuality defies belief. The openness the director Matthew Carney coaxes out of his contributors is jaw-dropping and the sequences of the meth heads tweaking – having hallucinations, rooting through dumpsters – are unreal. It will put you off meth for life. Easy to find on the web (the doc, not Meth, though that may be too). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yxKst8BaPbc

Johnny Oddball
Franc Roddam, director of Quadrophenia and devisor of the Masterchef format, directed the original documentary: an affectionate look at a charming child arsonist. Then Philippa Walker made a follow-up. Both are quite hard to find but heart-breaking and powerful.

Hardcore
This look at the porn industry was especially interesting for me as I’d made a TV programme with similar themes around the same time. There is even some overlap in the characters – a performer I knew as “Dick Nasty” turns up here as a “porn agent”. Directed by Stephen Walker, it has one of the most shocking sequences of any documentary about adult films in which extreme pornographer Max Hardcore tries to coax a newbie performer into doing a scene, alternately flattering her and showering her with abuse.

King Con
Blast! is a London production company that specializes in documentaries about the underground – and also, oddly enough, the Underground (the one with trains). They’ve covered British porn and dodgy get-rich-quick mavens and questionable New Age gurus. King con was inside look at a direct mail fraudster (or should I say “alleged fraudster”?), directed by Alastair Cook and Rob Davis.

Between Life and Death
A shattering depiction of the twilight world of a brain injury clinic. Small moments of recovery and decline have massive resonance throughtthe beauty of the filmmaking and the sensitivity of the approach. Directed by Nick Holt.

Stalking Pete Doherty
I recommend this film at every opportunity. It follows Pete Doherty-obsessive Max Carlish as he follows Pete Doherty, but it becomes clear that Max – with his unpredictable bi-polar symptoms and cringe-making over-the-top enthusiasm for his subject – is at least as interesting as the Babyshambles front-man himself.

Secret Rulers of the World: David Icke
I had to have something from the wonderful Jon Ronson. It could have been the Jonathan King documentary (as good an expose of the wiles of organized paedophiles as I’ve ever seen). But this is also excellent, documenting the scourge of lizardmen – and former Coventry goalkeeper – as he tours Canada and weathers accusations of anti-Semitism.

Saving Africa’s Witch Children
This was a Dispatches on Channel 4 and looks at the baffling phenomenon of Nigerian children accused – very often by their own families – of witchcraft. In life we hear a lot about “a mother’s love”. This film is a salutary reminder of how cruel parents often are to their children. Watch it and have every comforting prejudice about family bonds exploded in the most gruesome way. Directed by Mags Gavan and Joost van der Valk

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I’m often asked to name my favourite documentaries. I’m much too indecisive and changeable to be able to nail down a definitive list. But here are twelve I like a lot. (I was going to do ten, but then I thought of two more…)

A Question of Consent
Superb disturbing doc made by the team that did Cocaine Cowboys, it recounts the alleged rape of a stripper at a fraternity party in Florida, much of which was filmed by the party-goers themselves. I watched it on a plane and had to keep minimizing the screen due to the adult content. I suppose I could have stopped watching but I was too engrossed.

A Letter to Zachary
A posthumous love letter from the filmmaker to his murdered friend, it has one of the most explosive and upsetting twists two thirds of the way through. I recently saw this was on the IMDB as one of the most popular documentaries of all time, it’s number two right after Night and Fog. So it’s not exactly obscure but it is totally riveting.

Thin Blue Line
I love this film. I can still hear the distinctive musical cadences of the principal character, Randall Dale Adams, and his palpable sense of bafflement at the course his life had taken: convicted of killing a cop in cold blood. If you haven’t seen it you’re in for a treat. And this one has a happy ending.

American Movie
Chris Smith followed a filmmaker called Mark Borchardt and his monosyllabic sidekick Mike Shank over the course of several years to create this beautiful portrait of a man attempting to make a low-budget masterpiece. Full of accidental comedy and poignant moments.

The Monastery: Mr. Vig and the Nun
This one’s also about a man with a dream: an eccentric Danish bachelor who wants to convert his house into a home for Russian nuns. I saw it at Sheffield Docs Festival and never heard much about it afterwards. There’s something very special about a film that’s driven simply by actuality as it unfolds, as this one is.

TV Junkie
My friend Freddie Claire turned me onto it. The central character is a news reporter who obsessively documents his own life, to the point of filming his own spiraling drug addiction, the loss of his career and the breakdown of his marriage. The footage he films of his argument with his wife in front of the kids is unbelievably harrowing.

The Queen of Versailles
This is on at the cinema at the moment! Go see it! A wonderful portrait of a family as their dream of building America’s biggest private house crumbles in the wake of the credit crunch. It’s a riches-to-less-riches tale, very humane, very funny.

Don’t Look Back
Dylan’s 1965 gets the cinema verite treatment at the hands of documentary pioneer D.A. Pennebaker. Dylan comes across as both tremendously beguiling and also callow and slightly cruel. It’s black and white and looks beautiful. So many great scenes. I like the fans disagreeing about whether Dylan going electric made him just another pop band.

Hoop Dreams
I remember coming out of a screening of this in New York maybe fifteen years ago and just thinking Wow. The level of intimacy and the filmmaker’s commitment to the lives of their subjects: it’s like a novel.

Catfish
Some people said they found this fake but I bought it. There’s maybe one scene that’s a bit too good to be true, but overall I loved the strangeness of the quest and the amazing reveal when they find what they find. It’s hard to say too much without giving it away but basically it’s about an Internet romance gone awry.

Exit Through The Gift Shop
I used to find Banksy a bit annoying but I had a new respect for him after seeing this. It has that wonderful thing of a contributor slightly taking over the film and going in a strange and unexpected direction.

Deep Water
I just like this story a lot. I read the book when I was a kid, The Strange Voyage of Donald Crowhurst, about the solo round-the-world yachtsman who lost his mind at sea. But I didn’t realize there was so much archive. Very sad, too.

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Louis’ new porn documentary that was previously set to be aired in March now has a confirmed air date which will be on June 10, 10pm on BBC2.

You can find out more info on this documentary on the show page HERE or by reading Louis’ original blog post for the show HERE.

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Registration of Masterclass Louis Theroux, May 4th 2012 at DOCVILLE Documentary Film Festival in Leuven, Belgium. Interview by Jan Leyers.

More information on Docville can be found HERE

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As one of the big retirement destinations for middle class Americans, Phoenix Arizona has also become a capital of dementia care. Louis visits the city in order to spend time in state-of-the-art care home Beatitudes and with home-based carers, whose love is tested by a condition that steadily erodes the personality and character of their partners.

At Beatitudes Louis meets Gary, a 69-year-old patient who thinks he is serving in the military and that it is his job to check the state of everyone’s teeth. Louis submits to a dental check-up, is introduced to two of Gary’s new resident girlfriends and spends time with Gary’s wife of 20 years, Carla – a woman whom Gary robustly denies ever having married.

In a suburban Phoenix bungalow Louis agrees to become carer-for-a-day to Nancy, a formerNew York model with a personality to match. He finds a woman who can no longer remember her way through a complete sentence, but also a husband who finds much to love in the glimpses of personality that still sparkle through the dementia.

Please find addition information on Extreme Love: Dementia on Louis’ Blog post: –HERE–

Previews -

David and his mother Gail

Once a dentist, always a dentist

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Due to a scheduling hiccup, my next show to air in the UK won’t be the porn industry documentary as I previously thought, but a two-parter entitled Extreme Love.

The porn show was deemed a little too lurid for a 9 o’clock slot and there was something about it not being a great follow-on from the gentle pleasures of Springwatch, which I can understand.

So that’s now been pushed back to sometime in June.

In the meantime, for your viewing pleasure, we have a warts-and-all watch-through-your-fingers look at the trials, tribulations and rewards of caring for someone with a serious mental condition.

Part 1 is about Autistic kids and their families.

We base ourselves in New Jersey, the number two state in America for its rates of Autism. According to the latest stats, one boy in 29 is diagnosed with the condition. (Rates for girls are much lower.)

Services for Autism in New Jersey are considered to be among the best in America and we spent much of our time in an extraordinary school, the Developmental Learning Centre in Warren.

The DLC Warren educates Autistic kids from three to 21 and tends to take kids who have more of the challenging behaviour associated with Autism: frequent tantrums, aggressive outbursts, serious verbal and social disabilities.

A lot of the coverage of Autism in the media tends to focus on the milder end of the spectrum: Asperger’s (as in the best-selling novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night) or cases where the deficits are compensated by extraordinary abilities (as in Rain Man).

We made a decision to look at more “typical” Autism.

Among our contributors was Joey, aged 13. Joey’s a charming kid, outgoing, he reads and writes and draws, though his speech is limited. But for the past year or so, Joey’s been having violent outbursts at least once a day, which often involve him hitting and kicking his mother, Carol. He’s punched holes in walls all through the house and left Carol bruised more than once.

Joey’s rages descended unpredictably and were shocking and upsetting to watch. He’s a big kid and Carol worried that the day might come when she couldn’t control him any more.

Other memorable characters included Nicky, whose progress at the DLC meant that he’d been selected to move to a more mainstream school. But he still suffered from frequent anxiety and as the day of his move approached he became more stressed. Nicky seemed to enjoy the idea that I was on TV and known in the UK and there’s a funny scene where he discovers my Wikipedia page and delights in reading bits out to me to my discomfort.

So that’s the Autism episode.

Extreme Love: Part 2 looks at people with dementia.

We filmed that one in Phoenix, Arizona – capital of America’s elderly – principally working out of a care home with a “memory support unit” for the chronically forgetful.

One of the main characters is a retired dentist, called Gary, who spent much of his time believing he was still working at a military base among fellow soldiers.

A few times a week he would pack up his things, imagining that he’d been given another posting, and wandered the corridors looking for the way out.

The care home we were based at has a philosophy of not confronting the delusions of the residents, but instead, gently playing along with them. So rather than correcting Gary, the staff would suggest that it might be better if Gary left the following day since it was getting late.

It seemed, at first glance, a tiny bit dishonest. But I soon saw how it helped to de-escalate the episodes.

Here too, the demands made on the loved ones were extraordinary. Gary had forgotten that he had a wife, notwithstanding that he’d been married nearly 30 years to a charming lady called Carla. He’d acquired two girlfriends at the care home. Carla had resigned herself to the idea that Gary was no longer faithful in the full sense and she was beginning to move on, albeit with a host of ambivalent feelings.

Both these shows are riveting and surprisingly funny in parts.

I’ve always been fascinated by life at its more raw and most real. These shows are very much in that territory. Anger, honesty, despair, humour. It’s all there.

Looking after someone whose mind works in a way that is utterly different to your own demands extraordinary resourcefulness and commitment. It takes you to the limit of what love is, in a way that sometimes borders on the saintly. It also creates, at times, a very understandable sense of hopelessness and angst.

It’s definitely a bit of a departure from shows I’ve done before. Unlike many of my past documentaries, there is no suggestion that there is anything untoward or even questionable in the practises at the heart of the film.

The Autistic kids and the adults with dementia are all being well taken care of, using the latest therapeutic interventions and techniques. That, I suppose, is part of what makes these shows feel positive. But there is no getting away from it: the conditions themselves and the demands they place on the carers can be bleak.

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First, apologies for not posting anything since last November.

With no shows going out in the last four months, as much as I wanted to write something for the website or “make an announcement”, it was tricky because there wasn’t anything to actually announce. Short of announcing that I was “working on” an unspecified “something” which is a bit lame; or actually saying what I’m working on, which I don’t like to do because I worry I might put a jinx on the project – maybe I’m superstitious?

Anyway, I’ve been hard at work filming and editing three new documentaries, one of which is close to seeing the light of day, being 95 percent finished – they tell me it should be airing in March. (Now scheduled for June 10th – 10pm BBC”)

The doc is a look at porn performers in Los Angeles, specifically the San Fernando Valley. It’s both a bit of a follow-up to a show I made in 1997 (an episode of my series Weird Weekends which looked at male performers) and also a wholly new documentary with new characters, examining the state of the industry in 2012.

The show actually started life as a replacement for an idea which fell through – a look at the extreme wing of the Tea Party in Ameirica’s North West. I’d read that there had been an influx of white nationalists and self-styled “constitutionalists” into Kalispell, Montana.

That story turned out to be a bit less exciting than you might have thought from reading the print coverage – not so much a flood of secessionist nation-builders, barely even a trickle.

Casting around for ideas, I called a friend who I’d featured in the first porn doc I made, JJ Michaels. He mentioned two things that intrigued me.

One was that one of the other performers we’d featured, an established male star named Jon Dough, had killed himself a few years previously, possibly due to the pressures of the business.

The other was that the porn industry overall was in crisis, its profits slashed due to competition from free pirated porn on the web.

The idea of an industry downturn struck me as an interesting backdrop for a story about performers in 2012. Porn had been enjoying a kind of gold rush for a while. But now the gold was all mined out, the miners all wandering around with shovels bought and paid for but nothing to dig (have I milked this metaphor enough?)

I also liked the idea of following up with the characters from the first film. I’ve always enjoyed “Where are they now?” stories – and with porn especially, I’ve wondered what happens to the legions of performers who do time in the business: What do they do with the rest of their lives? How do they feel about what they’ve done? Do they have kids and if so, how do they explain about their past?

We went out and shot the story in December. The director was Jason Massot, who’d also directed and shot a doc we made about Lagos. The assistant producer was Sam Farmar, who’s made some Unreported Worlds for Channel 4.

We had certain time constraints but it was one of those shoots where we got lucky. Jason and Sam did a great job of making contacts in the business, from a standing start, and then various industry people were helpful to us.

In the end it only took a little over a week to shoot.

One of the highlights was catching up with Rob Black, who’d been responsible for some of the most outre and shocking productions back during my first trip. In the interim he’s been to prison for obscenity, as has his wife, Janet Romano, aka Lizzie Borden. Now he’s back in the business, but – if not exactly “chastened”, still, a somewhat changed character, and making much more mainstream erotic fare, like superhero parodies.

I also spent a fascinating couple of days with the industry stalwart Tommy Gunn, a male performer with a vulnerable and sensitive side which he talks about with great eloquence. Tommy showed me around his customized “zombie van”, a paramilitary  vehicle that’s been adapted for dealing with an invasion on the undead. It started out as a prop for a hypothetical movie, but is now a kind of toy-for-men and art project.

Unlike last time, when I focused on the perspective of male performers, I decided to feature a female performer, a rising star called Kagney Linn Karter. The consummate professional, though still young, Kagney is willing to put herself through outlandish physical acts if she feels it will advance her career and please her fans. She reminded me of a Lars von Trier heroine in her selfless and considered devotion to the idea of her own profanation and her porn career.

In addition to the Rob Black catch-up, there is also a revisit with JJ Michaels. He’d been a young rising star when we made the first doc. I won’t spoil the surprise by telling you what he’s up to now.

And we also pick up the trail of Jon Dough to find out what happened to drive him to kill himself.

What emerged strongly to me was that yes, the industry is very much in crisis-mode. Consumers have no compunction about illegally downloading pirated porn – in a way they might hesitate to do with more “respectable” content like music or films. And so the porn business model doesn’t really work anymore. As one contributor put it to me, the job of paid porn performer will no longer exist in five years.

As I say, there’s still a couple more days’ work to be done – it’s being edited by Joe Carey, who edited the recent America’s Most Dangerous Pets – but it’s looking really good. Funny, but also touching and occasionally very sad. The time lapse of 15 years gives the documentary a feel that’s very different to anything else I’ve done.

I’ll post more about it as we get closer to the airdate (which is as yet unknown.)

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Some of you may have noticed I’ve started Tweeting.

The main reason is that I’d got tired of people telling me they followed me and having to tell them that I wasn’t actually on Twitter and they were following an impersonator.

For a long time, I thought maybe I could live with having people masquerading as me in the Twittersphere.

If I wasn’t going to Tweet as me, it seemed reasonable that someone else might fill the position.

But then I then I started wondering who they might they actually be talking to? A spotty teenager in Bridport? A psychopath with a smuggled smartphone in Rampton Hospital? A hyper-intelligent shark?

It wasn’t even necessarily that the non-me mes were doing a particularly bad job of being me.

@LouisThx (more than 16,000 followers) was providing basically accurate bare-bones information: I’ve got a show on tonight… I used to live in San Jose…and so on.

@theroux_docs (the big boy on the block imposter-wise, with about 100,000 followers) was also plugging the shows (thanks, feller) and his tweets were passably funny, eg. “Why do Pringles claim “once you pop you can’t stop yet they have resealable lids?”” and “Are you the same person who started reading this tweet?”

Though maybe his jokes, like his online persona, were nicked.

He also had a weird habit of tweeting open-ended questions, eg. “What are your goals in life?”

One impersonator, titled @louistherouxg69, had a habit of Capitalizing All His Words (not even just the nouns, which might be understandable if his first language was German).

Eg, from May this year: “Hi Milly!, Thank You Very Much For Your Support I am Very glad You Like Watching Them! Very More To Come! All The Best Louis ”

As of writing, @louistherouxg69 had a little over 6000 followers, so not a vast number, but still worrying if they really are following him in good faith, not as a joke, and believe I would write: “The Alan Titchmarsh Show Is The Best Hour Of Telly, Apart My Own Hour Long Documentaries!!!”

A few weeks ago, I logged into a Twitter account I’d opened a year or two ago but done nothing with. Since many of the plausible variations of my name were taken, for reasons I don’t fully remember I’d settled on the Twitter handle “@loubot2000”.

Initially I was in the weird position of having to prove I was me and not an impersonator myself, like the main character in a Philip K. Dick short story.

As a philosophical conundrum: If someone tweets to ask “How do I know it’s the real you”, what can you say?

Clearly it wasn’t helping that I had a ludicrous Twitter handle and a Fatbooth photograph for my profile pic.

I threw the question back out to the Twitter community and was advised to Tweet a photo of myself holding a card with my @loubot2000 handle written on it. This I duly did.

I also contacted the Twitter authorities who have now helped me reclaim the name @LouisTheroux and given me a blue tick to verify that it is in fact me.

I’ve been Tweeting regularly for about three weeks now.

I’m still figuring a lot of stuff out but I’ve started to get what’s good about Twitter.

I was able to post an online appreciation of Jimmy Savile when he died and Tweet a link to it.

I live-Tweeted when one of my shows went out, in a kind real-time version of text-only DVD commentary.

I had an enjoyable brain-storm of great documentaries while waiting for a plane in Phoenix, Arizona.

I’ve also enjoyed tossing bits of mental flotsam into the cyber-void and seeing what kind of splash it makes. Thoughts on Bob Dylan and his live show. The demonization of mime artists. Weird meals I happen to be eating. And so on.

Where this will all lead, I’ve no way of knowing.

Last Saturday night, half drunk, I began Tweeting and realized I was, in a metaphorical way, in danger of standing naked at the window in front of thousands of people.

I worry about Tweeting impulsively or making a joke that will be misconstrued and landing myself in hot water.

I also worry that I am creating a paper trail of opinions that will in some way end up backfiring on me, as I’m accused of bias and refused access in the future by potential contributors in the world of, say, Nascar, because they find a Tweet in which I make a tasteless joke about, say, Dale Earnhardt (not that I would, I promise).

As of this morning, I’m up to around 30,000 followers.

I’m not all about numbers but there is something oddly pleasing about watching the increase, like watching the donation thermometer to up on a Blue Peter Appeal, even though I’m still second fiddle to @theroux_docs who still has a whopping 98,000.

In fact there is part of me that enjoys the paradox of someone being better than me at being me. If he starts making TV shows too then I’ll be in trouble.

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I feel a strange mixture of emotions at the passing of Jimmy Savile. Mainly sadness but also a slight guilt that I hadn’t seen more of him in the last few years. And also a sense of unreality that a man who seemed indestructible – and who was such a fixture of my childhood and then a kind of personal landmark in my own career – has now succumbed to the inevitable.
I actually started making my Jimmy Savile film out of a fascination with the macabre rumours that used to swirl around the man, many of them started by Jimmy himself.
One was that he didn’t actually like children, despite hosting one of Britain’s most famous childrens’ TV shows.
Another, written in his autobiography, that the few days he spent alone with his deceased mother’s body during her laying out was the time of his life.
That he was in charge of “entertainment” at Broadmoor where he would have tea with Peter Sutcliffe.
That he spent his spare time volunteering as a hospital porter at Leeds General Infirmary where he was known for wheeling bodies into the morgue
I thought if we could experience even a fraction of the darkness and complexity suggested by these stories it would make for a fascinating film especially when set off against the upbeat colourful charity fundraiser and TV personality we were all familiar with.
I started making the film with a sense of trepidation.
After two days of filming I wasn’t sure if it was working and we were considering pulling the plug. He was parrying my questions with catchphrases and Jimmyisms. “I am not a grass.” “Women are brain damage.” And so on.
What I didn’t realize until later was that Jimmy’s evasions were fascinating in themselves. And that without me noticing, Jimmy was working incredibly hard, putting up with”my pestering questions for hours on end, in actual fact “producing” the film just as much as me or my director.
Jimmy’s gameness and his creativity about generating stunts and ideas and pulling “moodies” (his word for pranks) in the end was the most crucial part of what made the film a success.
In the course of about two weeks my director Will Yapp and I went on a strange, fascinating and occasionally infuriating journey with Jimmy.
We saw his dark side. Well, Will did – I happened to be in bed on the evening Jimmy chose to discuss his years of “zero tolerance” in the nightclubs he managed, tying people up and leaving them in the boiler room if they were being lairy.
We saw the eccentric memorialization of his mother, “The Duchess”, whose clothes he had kept in her old closet and which he had dry cleaned once a year.
But we also saw the indefatigable game-playing, the teasing, the playful evasions and his gift for turning the various incidents in his daily life into anecdotes, adventures and, quite often, actual news stories.
When he broke his foot running on “his” mountain, he offered to keep filming. Or, he said, we could take him to hospital.
We opted for the hospital option though I don’t doubt he would have hobbled on if we’d decided it was important for filming (he had a fascination with the stoical martial ethos of the Royal Marines).
Once at hospital, he invited a friend to take photos, the better to place a story in the papers. But in typical Jimmy style, when I called him on this detail, he stoutly denied having laid any such plan.
I think it appealed to his sense of humour that he could produce a national news event under our noses without us noticing.
Seeing Jimmy on the road moving between his various residences – penthouse in Leeds, seafront flat in Scarborough, picturesque cottage in Glencoe – I was struck by his network of friends and helpers he had in each place and their loyalty to him.
I left Jimmy feeling that I was in a small way a part of his “London team”, as he called it.
My director and I were somewhat anxious about showing Jimmy the film before transmission. It was very much a warts-and-all portrait. Will travelled up to Leeds for a special screening. Afterwards Jimmy said, “Yeah, that’s good, that is.”
Every time I remember that I’m reminded how tough he was, how unfazed by negative attention.
In an age of agents, PRs, and media handlers, he was completely the opposite, utterly free of showbiz airs. He was as far from being a diva as one could imagine.
I kept in touch with Jimmy for several years after the documentary was finished.
Will and I would travel up to Leeds for an overnight visit.
We’d go out to the Flying Pizza restaurant with a camera and videotape Jimmy as he presided over the birthdays of strangers with a kind of papal authority. But the camera didn’t have tape in it – as Jimmy himself knew. He just enjoyed the idea that everyone thought they were being filmed and the sense of occasion it created.
He was a complete one-off. Wrestler, charity fundraiser, deejay, fixer, prankster, and professional enigma.
He was also a plainspoken Yorkshire philosopher and psychologist.
There won’t be another one like him

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Edit: Louis has now been verified on twitter and his account name changed to @louistheroux.

I am officially jumping on the twitter bandwagon.

One slight problem is that there are various people out there pretending to be me, almost all of whom have masses more followers than me.

That’s right, they are better at being me than I am. Isn’t it ironic?

Anyway, my real twitter name is loubot2000.
I’ll be posting tomorrow night (Oct 30, 2011) as the new show goes out.

Expect witty remarks. Or remarks, anyway.

Edited for picture.

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