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.

65 Comments »

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.

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

29 Comments »

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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What do you get when you cross a lion with a tiger?

It’s not the set up to a joke. It’s reality!! Tigers and lions are breeding in relatively large numbers at a zoo in Oklahoma owned by a unique individual named Joe Exotic. The answer, by the way, is a liger. Ligers are also breeding with tigers and producing a new even rarer creature called ti-liger.

It’s part of a plan to re-create a sabre-tooth tiger at Joe’s zoo. I’d go into more detail but a) I don’t want to bore you and b) I don’t want to preempt the show I have coming up on Sunday night (Oct 30).

Entitled “America’s Most Dangerous Pets”, it’s a romp through the strange world of exotic animals and the Americans who keep them.

I was promoting it on Day Break this morning. You can see that here (probably only for a limited time): http://www.itv.com/daybreak/entertainment/tv/louix-theroux/

I also wrote a short article about my experiences: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-15475636

Hope you enjoy the programme!

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Here are some clips for the upcoming show:

America’s Most Dangerous Pets

Clip 1

Clip 2

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Apologies for not blogging more regularly. I am still getting to grips with the technology and had trouble logging in. There are simply too many passwords in my life.  I keep locking myself out of various bits of software by putting in the wrong username and then have to invent new identities for myself and new passwords which I promptly forget.

It’s like The Net with Sandra Bullock crossed with Awakenings.

Anyway, here I finally am and the exciting news is that we have a new DVD compilation coming out soon. It’s called The Odd, The Bad, and The Godly.  It features our six most recent shows, those being: America’s Medicated Kids, Law and Disorder in Lagos, America’s Most Hated Family in Crisis, The Ultra-Zionists, and Miami Mega-Jail parts 1 and 2.

I’m really pleased with the product: the 2entertain art department have done a bang-up job on the sleeve art, complete with the appropriate Sergio Leone imagery, and also the menus. And it feels like a strong selection of shows.

I would try to attach a jpeg of the sleeve but that really would be stretching my limited technical faculties.

That’s about it from BBC Towers. I will try to blog again soon, but given my ongoing password/memory issues it may well be under an assumed name.

EDIT: Picture now included.

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Hi, I’m Louis’s series producer and I also directed the two Miami Mega-Jail films, Part 1 and 2.

I know many of you have been asking about two of the people who featured in the second episode.

I’m in contact with Robert Shaw (accused of triple murder and in solitary confinement.) He’s still awaiting trial, but he’s not facing the death penalty anymore. He’s still writing and tells me that an editor is currently considering his books for publication. Once I know more I will post.

Brenton Smith (the 14 year old who left Boot Camp) has just been returned to Boot Camp to try a second time to complete the course.

I’ll keep you all posted with any further developments once I hear them,

Thanks

Emma Cooper

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