Louis Theroux Soundboard Edit

A 23 year old Asian woman, Paris waters had seen an ad in the newspaper. That was how Jim got many of his walk-ins. His ads generally said figure models wanted you went up thinking.

A bell rang to announce that the ship would soon be departing. Jimmy saw us out of the cabin and we passed a smiling crew member carrying a jacket with gold epaulets and a peaked naval cap.

A bizarre piece of happenstance. A lightning strike of misfortune that zapped Neil and Christine Hamilton led to events that we were lucky enough to be around to document.

A Blizzard of requests went out trumpeting my non tabloid approach and 6 million viewers responses varied. Silence was a common one also polite demurral.

A businessman put his briefcase into the closing metal doors of a train trying to force it open, but instead the doors gripped the bag and the train took off for a moment, the man jogged alongside.

A director named Ed Robbins came on a thoughtful and urbane collaborator of a slightly older generation. E's strength was a contemplative approach, a feel for mood and nuance.

A family impression had me quailing after my mother. Ah ba.

A fantasist she had been visiting sex chat sites and became convinced that two of the people she conversed with Lord and Lady Hamilton were Neil and Christine smelling a financial opportunity she'd.

A few days later, I returned to the studio apartment to find the message light on the machine flashing.

A few days went by. We filmed a sequence of Christine getting her hair done at a salon in Mayfair called Michael, John and another of me and Neil working out together on a trim trail in Battersea P...

A few hours after they'd gone in the Hamiltons emerged, Michael Coleman gave a statement.

A few months after those first four episodes went out in May 1998, I moved back to the UK.

A few months afterwards, I was approached at a party in a friendly way by someone who described himself as a fan. He'd loved the first four weird weekends.

A few tables along a husband and wife team from Washington State, Liara and Dan Clausing were selling ingenic medallions. Little stone rings on cords to enhance your.

A few weeks in they let me have a small column. The police report where I wrote quirky articles about the city, an interview with a Jamaican psychic who was predicting an earthquake in the Bay Area...

A few weeks later I flew to Atlanta to see Sarge, the trainer at the power plant for a follow up interview and what had been planned as a lighthearted workout session with some of the wrestlers in ...

A few weeks later, I called up as myself.

A gentleman does not fucking ask a lady why she has not had children. He told me with some heat, albeit erroneously, given that I hadn't in fact asked that question.

A heavyset lady in an orange kimono that was opened to reveal a generous helping of cleavage.

A Hispanic woman who gave her name as Catalina was in a beige business suit.

A house on Helsinge Road felt mysterious and grant organised over 4 stories with weird nooks and drafty sash windows and creaky stairs and folding shutters.

A little later he led us into his bedroom where we found more racist pictures. One showed a cartoon of a petrified looking black boy, grand dragon. Michael said he was planning to put it on a T-shirt.

A little later I said my goodbyes and drove back to my hotel with the crew.

A little later I went to the loo. Will came in to have a covert conference and then possibly feeling a little emotional himself. He did an impression of Neil Hamilton masturbating onto someone at a...

A little later, having done my interview with Pastor Butler, I left the headquarters of Aryan Nations and returned to England. Time passed and I moved on to other stories, but occasionally I found ...

A little later, the camera operator, an older guy from the Bay Area, sought me out.

A masques for deeper and more insidious forms of power.

A minor note in the history of this business, Margold said.

A month or two on, and Louis Theroux's weird weekends was postponed, possibly indefinitely, and I was making my new life as a comedy writer in LA.

A news in turn. My duties involve fact checking articles, undertaking bits of research for other writers, transcribing tapes and pottering around, looking confused.

A pair of middle-aged women who said they'd been his girlfriends in the late 60s had got in touch by letter shortly after when Louis met. Jimmy originally aired. The letter was from both of them. L...

A pimp named Mellow tea? Who was pursuing a career as a gangsta rapper?

A rare instance of someone being sexually inappropriate to Jimmy Saville.

A reunion tour.

A search on that name revealed a number of books for sale on the Internet of which he was a co-author.

A series that for some reason had the name of a non entity in its title.

A sign said God has a plan for homosexuals. AIDS is the beginning.

A six month trip around the states catching up with ten of my most intriguing ex interviewees. An update on both them and their weird worlds.

A small handful made it into the pantheon of commissioned episodes of weird weekends.

A UFO believer named Thor Templar who claimed to have killed 10 aliens.

A visit to a pub where a local scallywag flashed Jimmy on camera.

A woman about whom they knew little had alleged that Neil and Christine had ****d her at a swingers party in Ilford in Essex.

A woman who was plainly mentally ill wandered into the building and began asking me questions about the space brothers, which I didn't feel well qualified to answer.

A woman, probably in her 30s, was smiling at me with a daffy air of free spirited bonhomie that seemed to invite further inquiry.

A word that got used a lot about me was boisterous.

A wrestler named Randy Macho Man Savage walked past Incognito in dark glasses and a tight black T-shirt.

A young porn performer who worked under the name J Michaels.

About the postmodern moment. But unlike those books, it was also very funny.

Adam, cuddly and ingratiating was an obsessive diarist, a Bowie fan, and maker of Compies compilation tapes of music for friends.

After a cup of tea at the Ottley Cafe, we drove back to Jimmy's penthouse. Now off camera, Jimmy struck me as more direct, less playful. He talked about TV longevity in for some reason, Ruby.

After a few days of importuning on my part, I prevailed on her to think about her own creative projects, a book she was working on. Her lack of funds in a purely pragmatic way. It made sense.

After a few days, the story ebbed away. The accuser who went by Nadine Milroy Sloane, but whose real name was Emily Checkfield, turned out to be a troubled young woman from Grimsby.

After a lifetime of cloisters and Victorian suburbs, I saw exoticism and romance in San Jose's anomie, an unplanned sprawl. It seemed utterly different to anything I'd.

After dinner, we took a taxi back to Jimmy'z. I had turned in early for an uneasy sleep on a 2 narrow bed in a spare room full of Knick knacks, a cuddly lion, a portable Sony TV, a try.

After his father's death, he'd taken to wearing his wedding ring on the third finger of his right hand. His mother had died a few years after, and Jimmy had once memorably described the five days h...

After I got back I fell ill possibly related to the stress of the preceding week. I called in to say I was unwell.

After protracted negotiation, the WCW PR Guy and Elton John lookalike, called Alan Sharpe, had permitted us to stand at the entrance to the dressing room interviewing the dribble of wrestlers as th...

After San Jose, New York had taken some adjustment. The slow paced, super sized farm town was no preparation for the noise and scale of Gotham. The asperity of the people.

After some pro forma compliments about the excitement of what had just seen, I said.

After that first visit, we stayed in touch by phone for a few years. Then one day his contact details no longer worked.

After that it had all gone a little quiet, though Chris had mentioned the Millennium segment, it had been offered to Merrill Marco, the author and comedian who had been a writer on late night with ...

After that it was second album syndrome.

After that, seeming to feel he'd made his point, Sarge disappeared.

After that, the plan had been to visit JJ on the set of a film called forced Entry, a **** themed film which was being shot by Rob Black, a young director who was carving out a niche.

After the Big Bucks show business of the WCW, the AI WF was a different proposition.

After the days of Jimmy's evasions, the idea of the Duchess's wardrobe felt solid. Something properly odd that Jimmy would have trouble dancing around.

After the ease of getting to Jimmy Saville and Paul and Debbie, the feeling was it should be straightforward to get some more episodes under way.

After the encounter back at the hotel, the sound recordist came up to me. He looked a little pale.

After the four episodes of weird weekends as a piester resistance, we watched when Louis met Jimmy.

After the press conference, surrounded by a scrum of journalists, we climbed back into Michael Coleman's car. Christine put the car window down and I leaned back so the photographers could get a co...

After the profile of Paul Daniels and Debbie McGee, he called to complain you are a Formula One car you never got out of bleeding first gear.

After the race war, when we were all on other planets, maybe we can keep in touch by phone.

After the shell suit went, he adopted a Velvet Underground look, black jeans, dark glasses, tight T-shirts over his skinny torso, usually A roll up in hand.

After the success of the Jimmy Saville programme, and then another profiling the magician Paul Daniels and his wife Debbie McGee Word had come down from executives at the BBC that I should focus on...

After Tower House, Westminster was a definite improvement. We joined the second-half of the 20th century and the only odd thing looking back is that our parents should have sent us off to board ins...

After two days fired finally appeared, taking us on a tour of a central staircase that he had expensively remodelled on an Egyptian theme.

Afterwards, I remember feeding the chute had been successful. Certainly we'd had our share of explosive arguments.

Afterwards, I was a little deflated.

Afterwards, off camera Chris said to me, though, you got what you wanted.

Again, I noticed this then rationalized it as a bit of Jimmy Saville provocation, disguising a deeper truth to do with his view of women as irrational.

Age 15 I knew 20 different sexual positions by name and the effect of most illegal drugs, but I had never touched a girl's breast or smoked a joint.

Ah, insincerity your speciality.

Ah, yes, said a voice. You glue it on your gas tank. It works using energy rays. It changes the structure of the gas, improves your gas mileage. 20 to 40% costs one.

Alas, having had the one idea involving dead heads for Doll, I struggled to come up with anything else.

Alas, it turns out insulting high profile industry leaders and celebrities on a monthly basis in a glossy magazine is not a long term business strategy. By the time I arrived, the.

All of the segments were supposed to serve the show's political agenda of advancing socialism.

All of these details I hope to reflect somehow in our program and they crowded in my mind looking for a chance to join the conversation, but I was underslept after the night in the guest bed and a ...

All of this might have made her unlikable, but some found her uncompromising and anti diluvian moral outlook appealing, possibly because of the unlikeliness of her physical appearance, tiny.

All of which also shouldn't cloud the inconvenient fact that Jimmy Savile's company when he dialed down the Savile isms and was on his home turf of his penthouse could be quite pleasant.

All out war.

All the attention and the sense of approval had a paradoxical effect, making me wonder about before. Did people not like the shows then?

All the excitement it created at the BBC. Among my executives, higher ups.

All the technology they possess, the space brothers is entirely in advance of anything we know, Charles said.

All these peculiarities, its soullessness the indistinguishable strip malls the gun stores and fast food places, franchise outlets, and the weird, scattered non belonging of people.

All three of these articles were imbued with a combination of emotions, finding human qualities of pathos and warmth, and on occasion an almost mythic level of commitment to causes that were.

All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does and that is his.

All you have to do is say shit or something like that. It's just more fun like this. I said it's tantalizing.

Almost heaven lay on a small plateau 200 acres divided into 30 or so lots. A motley scattering of unprepossessing homes.

Along with the vaguely hippieish ethos, went a certain relaxing of the rules on monogamy.

Alongside our production he was also working on a BBC funded film with Michael Moore, which would later come out as the big one.

Also surprising was his manner of speech, which was mumbled and unself conscious, still recognizably him but a more understated version.

Also with Zaca took a role in a production of ritual for dolls and allegorical play about repressed Victorian society written in 1970 featuring children's toys.

Always there was a hunger for ideas to the point where what else you got Michael's question to a writer or producer who was pitching him became an office catch phrase.

Among my friends and colleagues, the prevailing attitude seemed to be that I should feel lucky to land such a scoop. A few going so far as to suggest I'd been part of making up the allegations to h...

Among the other people he bruited as candidates for profiles were then manager of Leeds United Football Club, David O'Leary, the singer Lulu, the Romany impressionist, Joe Longthorne and the Kray b...

Among those I aroused was the future Deputy Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Nick Clegg.

An antagonistic approach which could end up being ugly and unkind.

An app called Leanne went up to Leeds to visit Jimmy at his penthouse for a wrecky to test his appetite for filming. It was surprising in a way that he agreed to do a wrecky, which is basically a k...

An economist and disciple of Milton Friedman, Lord Harris had a comical Tweedy air about him. He seemed a man born out of time. He should have been stepping out of a flying machine smoking a pipe.

An elusive self-help guru named Marshall Silver and as a wild card, the turbulent band leader Ike Turner.

An embassy aide reaching over, for some pepperoni said, I think I would like a slice of Monten**** because my mother is from there.

An hour before Showtime, he would take five or six aspirin to thin his blood tape. Little raises to his thumbnail, and then once in the ring lacerate his forehead out of sight of the crowd to make.

An intern again. My duties involve photocopying and stapling gossip packs culled from the five or six New York newspapers, and also doing research for the editors occasionally.

An old timer called Rowdy Roddy Piper, also in dark glasses and a leather jacket asked me my name, then mishearing it, said Louis Leroux.

And a drunken night with Mike Ayala, the underground hippie those days stay with me as a redemption from all the doubt that preceded them.

And also had to send David Mortimer an e-mail telling him to postpone production on Louis Theroux's weird weekends. I was aware it was tricky emotional ground that it could be construed.

And also performed a short monologue for an MTV pilot which wasn't used either. This was completely fine as I wasn't sure why they'd asked me to do the monologue, but they also hadn't invited me to...

And another about a makeover show for homeless people. That one was produced but bombed so badly in front of audiences in rehearsal that it was also tossed out.

And another when I pointed out an attractive woman who may have been in her 30s or 40s and his response was grandma.

And even those positive attributes are brought to the production were accidental much of the time a certain quality of ingenuousness, or maybe gormless that one people over a willingness to get inv...

And handing it in to a man in a room with tin foil on the windows.

And he began prepping me for what to say to Michael.

And his connection to Chequers, which he said was only four miles from Stoke Mandeville.

And his friends in high places. Margaret Thatcher the royal family.

And I did a couple of print interviews.

And I got Sarah to read the message to make sure I'd struck the right tone.

And I thought here I am aged 47. Still making a fool of myself for the purposes of a TV show, creating connections in unlikely places in a spirit in which the boundaries between.

And if you don't have a benevolent dictator, you have a tyrant.

And in a positive way, emerging from the fog of my own indoctrination, I felt what was probably a salutary urge to make something of myself to separate myself from my family to prove.

And in fact, my obsession with authenticity, while it occasionally went overboard, was probably my greatest asset when I looked back at what worked in that first episode about militias and survival...

And of course we will speak together eye to eye, face to face or whatever, probably before the next Millennium, but who knows?

And one part of me saw it this way, but another greater part was dubious. Suspecting that the transformation was not wholly earned and therefore not really mine.

And references to himself as a mob boss, the Godfather and El Capo de tutti Capi, which he pronounced in Yorkshire Neapolitan.

And so I found myself enduring the indignity of straining to understand a long stumbling rendition of an unfavourable review down a transatlantic phone line.

And so without quite realizing it, I entered into a strange, mutually parasitic quasi friendship, quasi deep cover investigation into his dark side.

And so, alongside the opportunistic outings up to Leeds for interviews to promote programs and DVDs was another motivation to keep U with Jimmy. The idea of generating copy from my diary.

And so, in this spirit, not quite knowing how committed we were to one another, but carrying on regardless, we found a new apartment in a semi desolate but supposedly up and coming area of Brooklyn.

And someone remarked on the ridiculousness of the lyric about eating purple berries.

And spy itself.

And the crew would follow behind.

And then at the hotel, we'll approach me with the air of someone with a secret.

And then it was all over.

And then it was my turn group two was called and what after all was I doing here? If I wasn't going to get involved?

And then on occasion the unexpected happens and your contributors are accused of a bizarre sexual assault at a swingers party in Ilford.

And then the name of Jimmy Saville came up.

And there had been one or two suggestions of non mainstream romantic practices including an Oxford student who'd gone public to say that during a speaking engagement at the university, Christine ha...

And they said all right, Jim, you didn't give him half enough and they never nicked me for it. And I never altered.

And to be fair, seriously, why was I being offered a network TV job? Weird looking gawky, socially awkward, unqualified, anxious 23 years old.

And truth be told, it was also just something I enjoyed the release from my normal existence and sometimes an occasion to imagine myself in a wholly other life.

And two stories about the militiamen and survivalists in Idaho and Montana, one by Philip Weiss, another by William T Vollmann that depicted them as rather romantic figures. Confused idea.

And was by turns comical and self deprecating. Friendly and unhinged.

And was hosted by the comedian Dennis Miller, though he was never around until we taped several of the other writers had come over from a live chat show Miller hosted which was dark over the summer.

And we'll filmed, while a contagion of irrationality, rampaged outside.

And what was wrong with the lyric about eating purple berries?

And what will it be?

And Whitcomb was a difficult subject for me, for very different reasons. The documentaries that had tended to work best so far were those that placed me as a straight man in a strange world in subc...

And will it be on Earth?

And without me wanting it to the embarrassing parts of my brain began entertaining all sorts of visions of grandiose success with Baftas, dancing around in a conga line.

And yet I was also very worried, prone finding causes for anxiety in the most unlikely scenarios that I would never be able to read and write that I'd be unable to pay my taxes when I was grown up ...

And yet, as much as I liked to flatter myself, that I had a technique and knew what I was doing, I was aware that much of it was adventitious and undeserved hinging on lucky breaks and collaborators.

And you also worked in Metro. I was surprised he'd heard of Santa Clara Valley's free alternative weekly.

And you got the nerve to ask me that bullshit down at Nitro what the hell you think we're on athletes hell, we're the best athletes in the damn world.

And you've seen Roger and me, right? He will definitely ask you about it. It's your favorite film.

Anne had brought her mother, Rita, who was as cheeky and playful as Anne was stolid and withholding, and also a female friend of Singaporean heritage, whose name I don't recall. No sapphic.

Anne's eccentricity was more low key, genteel, rather than outlandish. She was not a performer or a light entertainment turn. She was a politician. The world of Westminster and MP's.

Another brief lives took its cue from John Aubrey, the 17th century diarist. It would be 10 minute profiles of random weird people I found intriguing.

Another favorite phrase was you've let yourself down. He said this to me many times in particular, if he took against a line of probing, as in, you've let yourself down with that question also.

Another frequent interaction involved being complimented on shows I hadn't made. I don't just mean the title was wrong. Wacky weekends is a common misnomer, and I don't bother to correct it.

Another friend, Zach Sandler, introduced me to the world of comics. The fabulous furry freak brothers by Gilbert Sheldon, viz. And in history class, we'd compose strips doing all.

Another had written in offering to make a cup of tea for Jimmy as his fix it.

Another impression my dad used to do involve me saying, but why does the man have his mouth open? He was based on a dimly remembered incident on a bus or a train or somewhere in London.

Another involved Michael flying to Britain and buying a lordship.

Another on short billionaires calculating their adjusted height. If each 100 million was worth an extra inch.

Another strange bit of terminology was calling normal non uniform clothing shag good Lord Thiroux. Why are you in shag?

Another time he called up to chat and share a couple of jokes here. Why does Michael Barrymore not need ashtrays?

Another way of putting it would be professional celebrity, but Chris had an elevated approach to his new public position. He saw himself as a teacher and truth teller. I once read a descript.

Another, more promising Ave was the idea of a documentary portrait of an intriguing cultural figure. It had a file on Lemmy, the lead singer of Motörhead. I liked the pathos of an unregenerate Ru.

Any money Neal earned was siphoned off to pay his legal debts. Christine wasn't technically bankrupt, so she could keep her fees for media appearances.

Any other job I might have been fired at that point I realized there was an advantage to having my name in the title after all, and yet along with the feelings of doom and the embarrassment was.

Anybody who's white is welcome, Jerry said.

Anything whatever. I'm asked photocopying, phone bashing.

Are we being filmed or taped? Was the first question from Beth? And then why did it take you so long to get in touch?

Are you excited? I asked.

Are you sexually quite normal?

Are you the bloke that does that thing? Are you who I think you are? One? I didn't know how to respond to was I love the way you take the piss out of those cunts said to me by three young men from ...

Around that time, figures like Gary Glitter and Pete Townsend were being accused of downloading images of child abuse on their computers.

Around this time, Sarah and I separated. She initiated the breakup, possibly thinking a little bit of a reality check would focus my mind and shock me into a more serious commitment to my future wi...

Around.

Arriving at Oxford, I'd planned to take it easy kick back a little, start to enjoy life, go out bird dogging chicks and banging Beaver. Or if that couldn't be arranged, maybe take a long walk.

Arriving at the airport for some reason, I treated myself to a greasy breakfast. Possibly it slowed us down because when we reached the gym we were a little late.

Articles about Nazis and sexual predators felt like forbidden literature.

As an outfit, they were friendly and hospitable, flattered by the attention of a foreign film crew. Rick's boast was that they were the most extreme wrestling troupe in America. Bare barbed wire.

As an unsolicited Easter egg, it made a strange and telling counterpoint to the 0 tolerance footage Jimmy on and off. The Jimmy, who loved innocent good fellowship and the.

As before, Will was mixing 2 formats using a full crew for the bigger scenes and filming intimate scenes and after hours material on a small DV camera nicknamed the toy camera that he operate.

As for Thor, the Congress was a washout. Almost no one had heard of him or the alien resistance movement. His name drew blanks everywhere.

As funny as it was, seeing me on location in Idaho talking to a neo-Nazi, wouldn't it be twice as amusing to see a neo-Nazi interacting with a UFO contactee who was channel?

As he said this, Neil and Christine flanked him, both looking impassive.

As I grew older and my tastes became more decadent, one of my pleasures was TV that went wrong.

As I had with Jerry from time to time, I would phone or e-mail and ask how everything was going.

As I left putting on my woolly hat and stepping out into the cold dark Montana night, I said.

As I packed along with my clothes, I also had some Christmas gifts I'd bought for family members back in England.

As I said, I'm not going to go any further than I've just gone. I don't regard it as anybody else's business.

As it became clear that Karen was going to broadcast her feelings of frustration to the world.

As it became clearer that Spy was going under, I half heartedly thought about an exit plan. I wasn't sure what it would look like. I made desultory approaches to other New York magazines writing le...

As long as his most basic needs were met, unfussy, food, shelter, cigars, he considered himself well taken care of. As for the demons of loneliness, anxiety, melancholy.

As much as the shows were still viewed as Mickey taking by some, there was also enough humanity that they worked as the opposite exercises in rounding out people usually seen in two dimensions.

As my departure date for the trip drew near anxieties set in.

As our conversation went on, I began to sense that Beth and Alice had slightly different attitudes to their experience. Beth still seemed loyal to Jimmy slightly in awe of him, and keen to highligh...

As someone who took four goes to pass his driving test, I'm not sure that's true. Well, Mr threw congratulations on once again, getting feedback on your test.

As the culture of Tower House rubbed off on us, my dad noticed we were turning into little twerps

As the day wore on with our stomachs empty and no letup in the questioning, the mood became more captious and irritable. We were in danger of getting bogged down in a rhetorical slugfest, exchangin...

As the Minutes passed, there was a palpable escalation in the groaning and gyrating.

As the shoot went late, I could see the crew becoming impatient.

As the years passed and I made more episodes of my TV series, Jerry was joined in my mental scrapbook by a handful of other characters whose fates are continued to be curious about long.

As those who have been to my events before, the massage Artois, the Tantra events know I'm really into putting together events where you learn something about yourself, Cliff said.

As time went on, I saw friends making plans for their future, setting up appointments with careers advisors, going to jobs, fairs, meeting emissaries of big companies.

As to the idea of me doing a regular in my own style documentary about him voiced by me or whatever Uri was not so keen.

As unlikely as it sounded, the police were taking the accusation seriously. They'd had three months to check the information.

As was our custom in those days, we started with a tour of the place chatting as we went.

As we travelled, Leanne and Charles were wondering aloud, given the screw up, which of their various past lives they were now reliving. They couldn't seem to agree and were becoming irritable.

Assemblies up schools started with a recitation of the Lord's Prayer in Latin, pronounced in a special Westminster style, and it was said that the dining tables in College hall, a separate roof bea...

At another level, of course it made perfect sense at that level, I was neither kind, nor right, nor honest, depending on how you define those things.

At breakfast the next morning I met up with the segment producer. Hi Daniel, I said David. He said David. Of course. Yes, such an interesting subject. I said really keen to get star.

At Cliff's direction, we separated into three groups.

At dinner one evening, it may even have been after the Lord Harris visit. Neil and Christine made an elliptical reference to a new commitment, something in the diary that was causing them a lot of ...

At first I was enjoying the liveliness of the scene, the shouting and chanting. Then I got tired, and that's when things got slightly weird. It seemed it wasn't as simple as saying, right, lads, th...

At least as much as the politics. I enjoyed the weirdness and danger of the show and its writers. And in the spirit of Shakespeare's third life stage, I was seeking the bubble reputation in the car.

At marathon meetings, Michael and his wife Kathleen, who was also an exec on the show, would sit in session with the writers as producers came in for progress reports on the segments they were deve...

At one point it was mentioned that lawyers might get involved, since some of my weird weekend's ideas were similar to segments I'd pitched at TV Nation, but no suit ever materialized.

At that time they were fixtures of a low wattage celebrity circuit. Neil Hamilton, a former minister of Arch Thatcherite views, had been forced out of politics for allegedly taking bribes.

At that time, Westminster also had a system known as Fagging.

At the back of the shop there were live shows and the three of us, me, Sarah and Justin, crammed into a single booth and put quarters into a slot. A screen came down to reveal an ample smiling.

At the beginning of 1998, word came that the BBC had finally scheduled the first four episodes of weird weekends.

At the beginning of 2001 I signed a contract for a book. It was to be a kind of celebrity diary detailing my star-studded encounters the glamorous social carousel of a young TV presenter.

At the beginning of my last year at Westminster, I sat what was called fourth term, an entrance paper to study at Oxford weeks of memorization of history. Essays followed a month or two after I sat.

At the end of my first term, I struck up a romance with a fellow student. She seduced me, coming down to my bedroom half drunk one evening and saying, kiss me.

At the end of the summer, we'd fly back to London and our other lives saddled with a sense of doom.

At the end, when filming was completed, I felt we'd got away with it just about and had enough material to make an entertaining 50 minutes of television, but that we hadn't broken through the crust...

At the first lecture I went to 21 year old Jason Andrews from Kent claimed to go up in spaceships three or four times a week.

At the office I would gaze at the grandeur of the backissues fat and full of ingenious features. Eviscerations of the rich and powerful satirical takes on lazy pop cultural tropes.

At the police station we split up. Will and I waited outside while the Hamiltons went into the station to be interviewed for a while. All was quiet.

At the same time I was making enemies of the teachers. I was also, slightly paradoxically becoming increasingly fixated on work without really being conscious of it. I tried to control my.

At the same time, I enjoyed these concepts more as a spectator than as a believer in the spirit of George Orwell. When he wrote, there are some ideas so wrong that only a very intelligent person.

At the same time, I was aware that a kind of television renaissance was taking place, and particularly in the area of comedy shows like The Simpsons and Larry Sanders and Seinfeld were bringing a n...

At the same time, I'd been thinking about how much I'd enjoyed my time in the world. So the first four shows, and specifically what great characters we'd found.

At the same time, many people regarded the Hamilton's appetite for coverage as a further example of their supposed shamelessness and another count against them.

At the time I didn't have enough TV experience to know how far from being a typical show TV nation was.

At the time I took him to be saying either that he was celibate or that he had legions of lovers dotted around the country, but neither scenario seemed very plausible and I considered that the Ridd...

At the time it was great fun. Lot of laughs, but there were negatives as well, she said, looking back, I wonder if he gave a shit.

At the time we approached, they were attempting to make lemonade from the lemons of their disgrace plying their trade as professional objects of curiosity. Neil's term.

At the weekend when I had finished studying, I'd hunt for house parties among the student lodgings up and down Cowley Road, and Iffley Rd. Since his primed for any open doors and the Sound of Music...

At this bow began scrawling over great swathes of the country, ruling out areas in the tornado belt. The giant flood belt, the Blizzard zone, nuclear waste in Nevada.

At this distance, I can't recall what decided me one way or another. I just know that in December of 1992 I drove in my Honda Civic not West to Mongolia, which would have been tricky with.

Back at Michael Coleman's house, there were drinks. Christine had several fortifying glasses of wine. Then the four of us kneel and Christine will and me continued on to the Battersea Flat.

Back in the office, a meeting was convened to figure out whether it was worth continuing with the idea, me, Kevin will and my old exec David, who came down from the lofty citadel of his new job.

Back in the office, I told David about the conversation. He turned out to be a trove of Weird Jimmy Saville facts.

Based in Mount Airy, NC, quintessential small town America and supposedly the real life model for the fictional Mayberry of the Andy Griffith show, it was like a hillbilly am DRAM, true?

Based on my experience, if the ability to deliver subjects for a series of puckish first person TV profiles of intriguing public figures is any guide Jimmy Saville had as much clout as you'd expect.

Based on paper thin knowledge of the then fashionable theories of postmodernism, I said things like art is like a chicken running around with its head cut off. It's dead. It just doesn't know.

Be they trivial, like tying one's shoelaces, or packing clean underwear, or having a cooker, or more profound like the love of children, or a wife.

Bearing in mind Michael's advice, I waited for camping to finish what he had to say before asking follow up questions, but there weren't many breaks in the torrent of theology and so camping had fr...

Became a byword for a kind of extreme stress and emotional exhaustion.

Because he wasn't who he claimed to be.

Because I myself am a little self doubting, I assume other people are happy to examine their contradictions. But it wasn't so, and in many cases those whose faith was most important to them, like Bob.

Because we live in a very funny world, he said, and it's easier for me as a single man. To say I don't like children because that puts a lot of salacious tabloid people off the hunt.

Becoming excited at the idea that I was from the media, Michael offered to move a piece of paper with his mind.

Beep.

Before arriving, I'd learned that the LUNARIANS enjoyed dressing up in space themed costumes for big celebration days and also to make their visionary films.

Before I left London, I'd tried searching on the Internet, his name turned up on a couple of websites dedicated to devil worship.

Before we flew to the location, the segment producer Kent Alterman convened a bull session in the conference room. Someone suggested it might be funny if I wore a Klan robe and hood during filming.

Behave as if you're never going to get another job in television. He would say he told us we should consider it a good sign if we were ever arrested while making a segment.

Being ill, I'd missed his lecture that day on Starkids hybrid children with advanced abilities, but after we'd eaten, he began testing the auras of some of those at our table.

Being in the swim of hordes of media types of a similar age.

Being trans Iberian express.

Bernard Manning, the northern comedian given to racially charged humour, was another perennial, bunking up with him at his place in Manchester.

Beth led the conversation and was the more voluble of the pair she'd known Jimmy longer and had occupied a sort of leadership position in their little group as organiser and diary keeper.

Blossom about obsessive fans and paparazzi who stood in gaggles outside stars homes in New York.

Bo Gritz never shut up the Aaron Russo material was so poor. I don't think we ever spoke about it from that day on. It was like a national tragedy or a terminal illness, just to mention.

Bob closed his eyes, he rocked in his chair and snorted, and gurgled and twitched from side to side.

Bob huffed. Sure, you know I'll even ask my wife. I'll say, surely did this really happen? She'll say, Robert, you know it did because we have it documented.

Bob mentioned that Courton had told his wife Shirley, what kind to get down to the mileage and the colour.

Bob put on some slippers and rested his feet on a cushion. The only light came through the edges of the blinds, which had been pulled down.

Bob went and got a bag of gnarled silverware and flung it on the table.

Bob's vocal chords gave voice to several distinct personalities. Operators who were working a kind of interdimensional telephone exchange.

Booking celebrities turned out to be a bit like dating the people you want won't have you. And the people who'll have you you don't want.

Borrowing from a program had watched as a child called in at the deep end, I had added the device of following my attempts to participate in the worlds I was reporting on.

Both were first generation, university educated and placed a high value on literature and the written word. They encouraged us to view the artistic life and specifically fine writing as the highest...

Brian too was transformed, no longer shy and introspective. He had become ebullient.

Brian's bout had him pitted against some Kung Fu fighters from a local martial arts Academy, the School of Hard Knocks who were bald headed and dressed in only pajama bottoms.

British rap was then spotty at best. There was Derek B, who was a pale photocopy of an American embassy. MC Duke was more interesting. He styled himself like a country Squire.

Buddha was preaching the idea of pacifism long before Jesus was.

But at that moment I was confused in the footage. You can see me glance off camera for help.

But at the time, I didn't think that I was just happy to feel part of the team.

But by now I was so spent. I didn't have it in me to come up with a second one.

But David saw reasons to keep the faith, whether because he enjoyed the fractious quality of the encounter, or possibly just because he knew Jimmy was still enough of a name to pull in viewers, and...

But despite my best resolutions, working less proved more difficult than you might imagine.

But for a moment, the idea of a community in which the currency of sex and love was more free flowing made a tiny bit of sense.

But having decided to break the agent rule, I thought I'd break the other rule too. I labeled the final draft first draft, then sent it off to Paul Simms.

But he was also a talented mimic and natural performer. He'd grown up in Washington DC, raised by his mum, and later on he'd embraced hip hop culture. One year he arrived at the Cape in a shell suit.

But he was still enough. The Medford raised boy to also think we were pampered ninnies nincompoops. Who would be better off pinging tin cans with an air gun and learning how to tie sailor's knots a...

But his wife Maria didn't want to be on camera, which was a deal breaker for us.

But how it went after that, we will never know, because Anne kept interrupting, telling her mother to be quiet, seeming to feel that to have a family member declaiming nonsense verse on TV would be a.

But I also had pangs of conscience. Increasingly, I worried I was taking something real and abusing it, building trust and making it a basis for ridicule.

But I do think failure is often more interesting and revealing than success.

But I felt I had tried to do things correctly and later I wondered if the urge to conduct one's emotional affairs correctly was part of the issue.

But I felt I'd scored a small victory redeeming the preceding hours of fruitless filming by showing his habit of brazenly and untruthfully self mythologizing, albeit over a trivial exaggerate.

But I thought you handled it rather brilliantly.

But I was also struggling with a sense of self exposure. One of my impulses in making documentaries had always been an urge for invisibility and escape. This time my escape route had led out into a...

But if I could write my way into a job in Hollywood, it would all seem more earned.

But if the extent of Bo's good faith was hard to figure out, what was more worrying was a more basic issue. The growing sense as we filmed that both steamrolling style was simply a bit.

But in the course of cutting down the material, something surprising happened. The tension and the sense of me being out of my depth combined to give the encounter a power I hadn't expected.

But it quickly became clear these were a different calibre of racist. They weren't sequestered in the mountains of western Montana, Lonely and Maladapted. They were in mainstream America, their shape.

But it was all a salutary apprenticeship. I was learning without realizing it skills and techniques that I would rely on through the course of my TV career.

But it's also probably the case that he enjoyed my company and wills since we always saw him together and on our side. There was also a mixture of impulses using him for publicity later for.

But mainly I was confused by the turn of events and bothered by the strangeness of finding myself now a part of the story. As I increasingly was in almost all the coverage, there was a photo of me ...

But other than these tonal issues, the film came together with surprising ease and even in its earliest, long cuts was engaging throughout.

But she'd been worried that talking to religious loonies might disturb her mental equilibrium.

But speaking to him, under false pretences didn't feel right, and I wasn't sure how to get off the phone.

But that Christmas episode, what was that about? I sat watching it with a friend and I built it up to him and it just Oh dear.

But that's his left hand.

But the book was protein in its conception and in one of its more stable forms. It was a meditation on Jimmy Saville and an attempt to go further into unravelling his enigma.

But the idea of being a writer didn't seem especially realistic, and as my graduation date approached, I looked out at the inhospitable world, feeling like a prison inmate. After years of incarcerate.

But the line had then gone quiet and I wasn't quite sure what the next move was. I didn't want to badger him too much and during breaks, or just going about my day, I wandered the central courtyard...

But the trip was mainly memorable for an outing to Hollywood where amid the array of fleabitten attractions shops selling plastic Oscars fly by night guides with vans, advertising tours of.

But their flat, a gauntlet of press 6 or 7 camera people with top lights on swivelled in unison without saying a word.

But there was no noticeable lessening of the verbal assault.

But thereafter Marcel rejoiced in telling me about Jack, the stripper, a serial killer whose MO was to choke prostitutes to death using his penis.

But to what?

But was right in his comfort zone of delivering a kind of ad hoc radio show to an audience of 1.

But we still loved each other. I more than I realized, and we were also alone, knowing barely another soul in the city in any intimate way.

But you can't just keep feeding and feeding and it wasn't totally clear what the next move was. You squeeze the shoulders, massage the arms a little bit, but then what?

Butler picked me up in Hayden, ID in a creaky old Cadillac, accompanied by an aide de camp, whom he introduced as Reverend Jerry Groudle.

Butler wanted to open the mail, so Jerry offered to take me on a tour of the rest of the compound.

Butler's outfit Aryan Nations represented the far end of that spectrum. A strange racist group that styled itself a church. It was the most famous neo-Nazi org.

By coincidence, also on the Sunset Gower lot with the Newsradio offices.

By now I had bigger things to worry about and for once it wasn't the struggle to get programs going, but something far weirder. The fact that a program having got going had unexpected.

By now I had the impression I had cast a kind of benign spell over them, and that there was almost nothing I could say that would break it. I sang a space hymn that the Lunarians had taught me and ...

By now I'd had a first cursory meeting with Paul Simms. He'd seemed friendly, though a little distracted and I'd sent some follow up plot ideas along.

By now Sarah had taken a job teaching English in a remote area of China for a year.

By now we've been joined by a journalist from the Mail on Sunday called Paul Henderson, who declined to go on camera and lurked in the kitchen.

By now, I'd at least found some friends, a small gang of arty types who, like me, were a little bit pretentious over interested in music and comedy and scared of girls.

By now, with the crowd streaming out of the venue, it wasn't clear whom I could speak to. There was no sign of the publicity Guy Alan and I was running out of options.

By prior arrangement, we'd shot a greeting on a hillside where Mike and his friend Pat were building a house where in Carpenter's overalls, clambering amid a carcass of two by fours, surrounded by ...

By the end of filming, I'd arrived at an assessment of him as a rather remote figure, annoying, self involved, but that those negatives existed alongside more surprising qualities of intelligence a...

By the end of the shoot, I had no clear sense of whether we had what we needed to make the segment work. I was aware that I hadn't been in control of the encounters in the way I had on the Millenni...

By the time his piece appeared, I was back in America. I couldn't find it online. This was before newspapers were routinely on the web and they had to resort to calling up the Evening Standard offi...

By the time we were ready, Christmas was nearly upon us to squeeze in the chute and still make it back home to England on Christmas Eve, I realized I'd have to fly straight from Idaho.

By this time I was working on my celebrity diary book thing. So my main impulse may have been to generate some material for that, though there was also a personal sense of curiosity about what.

Camping said.

Camping took me on a tour of his radio studio, pointing out the collection of Christian Records, some of whose tracks had been marked with little stickers to indicate that they had too much beat.

Can you get wood? That's the most important thing right there. He said. Can you keep a heart on the entire time? Believe it or not, it's not easy. I don't care how beautiful she is some.

Caught on had me down as a pothead for some reason, I said.

Caught on the headliner speaks in a booming monotone.

Caught on then spoke for several minutes about oil cartels and the invasion of Kuwait.

Chaotic and spread out as it is. The UFO world is not an easy community to dip into, but once a year hundreds of its constituents gather at a low budget hotel casino called the Flames.

Chapter 2 the Fulani people of Nigeria.

Chapter 3 bird dogging chicks and banging Beaver.

Chapter 4 the way to San Jose.

Chapter 5.

Chapter 6 Millennium.

Chapter 7 don't burn me now.

Chapter 8 popular documentary.

Chapter 9 dead heads for doll.

Chapter 10

Chapter 11 weird Christmas.

Chapter 12 habits of work.

Chapter 13 if you're going to puke puke chunks.

Chapter 14 The Godfather.

Chapter 15 zero tolerance.

Chapter 16 celebrity roundelay

Chapter 17 professional objects of curiosity.

Chapter 18 Jimmy links.

Chapter one boisterous.

Charles and Leanne disappeared. He was strange and depressing. Comedy and hijinks had curdled into a feeling of being lost and forlorn.

Charles was in his 70s and had been married to one of the founders of Unarius, Ruth L Norman.

Chris encouraged me to send Michael some segment ideas. I sat in front of the computer and tried to come up with something. The only one I recall had to do with the fatwa against Salman Rushdie. I ...

Chris Eubank had the hallmarks of being more TV friendly a love hate figure of the sports world, reviled by many for his pose of arrogance. He was also one of the greatest British boxers of all tim...

Chris separated from Karen a few years afterwards. I still have a soft spot for the film, though it's been a while since I watched it. I have a soft spot for Chris too.

Chris was in a dress shirt, tireless now with the sleeves rolled up.

Chris's face took on the hooded look of an Easter Island statue, and, weirdly, I couldn't help feeling a degree of sympathy for him. Self styled role model to an abstract concept of the Navy.

Christ was coming back on the Tuesday or possibly the Thursday and every mountain and island would be moved out of their places.

Christine was up and down Sterned and fierce one minute, dissolving into tears the next, which to be fair, seems a reasonable reaction when accused of ****. I'm having a bit of a dip.

Christine, in one of her stock phrases of disapproval, said, well, thank you very much.

Christine, put her arm around Neil.

Churning through rejections was like a Groundhog Day of phone calls and letters to light entertainment has beens and deposed foreign despots.

Clearly they had less money at stake than the big name wrestlers. I also tend to think their self mutilation was so sanguinary and extreme that they didn't feel the need to lay claim to any other k...

Cliff was keeping up a patter of encouragement, find connection on a deeper level, he intoned as he paced up and down across from me. A long haired woman who I knew to be a doctor.

Colonel Gritz, how are you doing? We're from the BBC. Well, you're too early it's tomorrow, isn't it?

Communications are unlimited when things are put back right.

Conventional wisdom held that you were supposed to write 2 scripts and use them to get an agent.

Corporal punishment was common a whack on the hand with a ruler or plimsoul or a visit to the headmaster's office, for a taste of the sword.

Coughton said possibly, but that I'd have to change my lifestyle.

Could you do it now? I said gently. I'm not going to do a demonstration for you, Louis. OK, now I'm a bit tired. So just be careful.

Critics had their own opinions, mostly positive but not wildly so. I had the sense they hadn't really understood how much in them was new.

Crossing Moreland bridge. I nodded at many of the same faces as in Westminster's Little Dean's yard. The location had moved 56 miles down the M40, but the population was to a great extent.

David always enjoyed those professional duties that involved a sense of occasion, especially when he was in the role of bestower of largesse, and he drew out the reveal like a judge on a talent show.

David flew back to London, presumably to make plans to start production imminently. While I disbelievingly commenced A1 man Bataan Death March.

David made the decision to do survivalists first.

David Mortimer had explained that I should be thinking of ideas in the popular documentary genre.

David Mortimer was at the shoot offering suggestions, one of which was that I should take my boxes off. He said they'd use an effect, possibly blurring or maybe a little box to make sure nothing wo...

David renamed this one Louis Theroux's weird weekends.

David said he shared the same ambition for the programmes, though occasionally I sensed he was troubled by my enthusiasm for showing contributors with unsavoury political views in three dimensions.

David sent back a considered e-mail, taking my points one by one and ending by saying he didn't like to be called Dave.

David titled The documentary when Louis met Jimmy.

David was in ecstasies over the success of the show, nearly 5,000,000 viewers, stories and all the papers, but it worried me since there was almost nothing to be learned from making the documentary...

David would be a close collaborator for seven years and would guide me with varying degrees of involvement through three series of weird weekends that when Louis met documentaries and a period of c...

David, who was coming on as my series producer, had by now moved himself and his girlfriend from London for the nine month duration of the production. The BBC was paying for some sweet digs in Gree...

Day 2 followed in the same vein in his kitchen. After I asked him playfully about a stash of spirits, I discovered in his the famous Teetotallers cabinet. He gave me a mini tutorial about how to co...

Despite the Hamilton's evident stress and anxiety, Coleman was having trouble hiding his own relish for the impending battle with the police and media.

Did that not cramp your style a little bit, since you couldn't bring girls home because your mum wouldn't let you sleep with women, didn't want to sleep with them? Good heavens, Jimmy said with fei...

Did that not cramp your style? Jimmy? I repeated, I'll answer the question, Jimmy said, pointing outside. If you see over there on the horizon, a caravan camp, I had a caravan there. So that was th...

Did you argue much when you were living together? I asked never. Jimmy said. No point in arguing. And what if you had a girl with you? She would have actually killed the girl.

Did you see the TV nation pilot you know asked? Yes, I did. So funny and the segments you did on The Tonight Show.

Discos open and close, he said hospitals never close.

Do you ever wonder if it's real? I asked.

Do you hate being called a hate group? The white people of my family. I love them, but it doesn't mean I hate anybody else. Hating people is stupid.

Do you I ventured?

Do you know about the inverted pyramid? My shitty times editor Lorraine asked.

Do you know Africans think we're backward because we sit in baths and not running water, she would say.

Do you know at one stage they were going to lock us each in a cell? Christine said. Can you believe it just because Max Clifford and some tart have invented this allegation?

Do you mean you've never had a girlfriend? Friends that are girls, 8,000,000 friends that are girls? Yeah, but girlfriend in the sense of today. I you are together you don't bother with anybody els...

Do you see how stupid the questions were? You asked at Monday night, Nitro, he asked.

Do you suppose there's a case for just doing 1 to begin with and then sort of seeing how it goes?

Do you think I might be allowed to stay on planet Earth?

Do you think it has to have my name in it? Louis Theroux's weird weekends.

Doesn't he believe there are 12 foot lizard people running the planet? I asked?

Dominate me.

Don't know.

Don't want it just to be fringe? Need mix fringe, sex, celebrity violence, villainy fun.

Don't worry, Jerry Kupfer said. Take your time, no need to rush in.

Don't yell was stark. Naked in a desk chair. It's easier than putting my clothes down and taking them off again. She explained. Meaning for photographers and directors I assume.

Donnell had made a series of undercover reports using hidden cameras, with the result that is highly secret face was now nationally famous. He, too, was trying to figure out a way forward, like an ...

Drawing him into an undignified squabble?

Dream deceivers about a pair of teenagers in rural America who attempted suicide under the influence of a Judas Priest record.

Driving back to Las Vegas, I reflected that there was a lesson in my encounter with Bob.

Drones existing in a sinister confected reality in which nothing is really what it seems. The Kennedy assassination Iran Contra the cancellation of the TV series The X.

During a 1 to 1 midway through my second term, Moreland's head history tutor Angus McIntyre told me he thought I was on track to get a first in the end of year exams.

During my first visit for the documentary, I'd spent a matter of hours with Bob, most of which was taken up with the channelling session.

During one such dinner at a pub in Scotland, Jimmy had picked up the camera while will and I were off somewhere else and delivered a secret message. An odd sentimental little peep into our group.

During the holidays there was a show called Why Don't you that had the paradoxical brief of encouraging viewers to stop watching TV and do something else, develop a hobby like falconry or Trainspot...

During the wreckage, the director and AP visited locations and met and interviewed a variety of potential contributors with a view to deciding who would be in the eventual film.

Each focused on a defined area of the country. This helped give the show an organic quality, a unity of place and look, and with each I try to stick to the idea of giving the program a sense of pat...

Early in the evening he'd sometimes come and say hello, and we'd make conversation.

Early in the filming I flew down to Florida with my crew to visit a WCW Rd show called Monday Night Nitro. There was a bright sunny day and fans in ball caps and a few in.

Ed OG a positive rapper from Boston, who probably nobody but me, remembers, stopped halfway through his freestyle, unable to find a rhyme. Schoolly Dee and Evelyn.

Eden Simon went on a wrecky a pre filming trip to scout locations and characters a week or so later they returned sounding broadly positive about what they'd found. The only hiccup was that many.

Eight years on from my meeting with Thor and hoping to find him again, I arrived early in the evening. A paid up attendee of the 14th gathering of the Congress. The kickoff.

Embattled amid the surrounding blandness of San Jose, Metro felt like the citadel of a small counterculture. We were lonely holdouts flying the flag of strangeness in a vast India.

Even afterwards, I didn't think of myself as married. I imagined that if we ever did decide to marry for real, which I thought we might, we'd get married again. It was a little confusing.

Even allowing for exaggeration, it hinted at a much darker, more brutal figure than the one the world knew.

Even among those unapologetically devoted to ways of life, I viewed as harmful a pimp in Mississippi, a poor nationalist in South Africa, an unscrupulous spiritual figure like a spy.

Even when I was staying an hour away in Long Beach, I was the first one in the office and the last to leave.

Even when we had an idea there followed weeks of research led by the director at his or her AP in which magazines and newspapers were gone through phone calls made old films watched until they.

Eventually I made my way out, having promised to return the following day, which Needless to say I didn't do.

Eventually, after tireless efforts, a couple of names came on board.

Ever wondered how wrestlers get in shape or presented? Darren went to find out.

Every time they read out the address that's London W12 8QT. I couldn't find a pen in time to write it down.

Everybody back up, sodd shouted.

Evidently they had their limits because either he or my mum tore out one chapter.

Except instead of a shadowy group of super villains bent on world domination, they are Tweedy academics dribbling into their soup.

Eyes wide she trailed off.

Featuring photos of me and Jimmy.

Feeling burned, I wrote to hip hop connection complaining about their uncritical promotion of British artists.

Felt to me like a prison sentence.

Filming resumed, though there was always the lurking sense of her having mixed feelings about the project, enjoying the attention, but hating and resenting any question that hinted at salaciousness...

Filming went smoothly enough, taking place in the week leading up to Christmas smoothly in the sense that there were plenty of made for TV arguments between the contributors. Early on, it became cl...

Finally, after 45 minutes or so, I overcame my natural urge to be obliging and said, I'm so sorry, but I really have somewhere I need to be.

Finally, through his assistant, another meet up was arranged.

Finally, what felt like hours later, the crew called from a pay phone that found the landing site and would meet us there.

Fine, I did some more Hindu squats, some running on the spot and screaming, then feeling I really had had enough. I retreated to a small dressing area only for Sage to.

First, the excitable musical pioneer Ike Turner, who was mainly known for physically abusing his wife Tina.

Five or six years after my visit, a well respected wrestler, David Bautista, who went on to find success as an actor playing Drax in the Guardians of the Galaxy franchise, described a very similar ...

For 10 or 20 seconds, nothing happened.

For a final coup de grace in the story, we found news footage of Michael Lowe and Tom Robert rallies facing off with counter protesters being less guarded and more openly racist than they had with me.

For a long time, I imagine that some of the questions I had about Jimmy might be answered if I could just induce him to take an off camera excursion with me to Broadmoor.

For a man whose persona was so cartoonish, any subtlety of insight tended to come as a surprise.

For a moment I was filled with a weird giddy feeling of cosmic insignificance mixed in with a Tang of fear. And then I heard a voice saying DP YN, an acronym that stood for.

For a moment, he appeared on the verge of saying something, then thought better of it, and walked on.

For a small British magazine I got stoned and played Tetris on the computer. I stared at the red eyed figure in the bathroom mirror looking for answers to who I was and what I was supposed to be do...

For a while it turned farcical with Christine freaking out that the banner was lying crumpled out on the drive. In view of the cameras.

For a while, Michael developed a sitcom for Fox called Better Days, which Jim Belushi was supposedly attached to. It was to be a more political Roseanne. He sent me a copy of his script and I tried...

For a year and a half up the Amazon in a rickety motorboat in the revolutionary hills of Mexican Chiapas among religious crazies in Jerusalem and good old boys in the back roads of the Deep South.

For all his political bent, Michael seemed to view his writers in an almost talismanic way, recognizing that for the show to work it needed first and foremost to be funny.

For an idea to work there also needed to be some political or social relevance. A branch of the Ku Klux Klan whose leader was rebranding it a civil rights group for white people. Avon sales ladies ...

For each episode, I spent a concentrated period of time in a subculture alien to my own outlook and way of life in which the subjects had a commitment to something I viewed as wrongheaded. Weird, l...

For face saving purposes, we called it a trial separation.

For me it's not. He said it's the opposite. I finally found somewhere where I liked being where I'm appreciated.

For me, a fan of rap being mentioned by Fat Joe was a kind of baptism.

For most of that, O level year of 1985, I kept a diary which I can't now put my hand to, but can probably summarise without too much difficulty.

For nourishment Jimmy had laid on a packet of Frazzles and some chocolate biscuits.

For people threatened by attack from hostile space aliens.

For several days I made sorties to sites around LA, a pilgrimage to Compton, spawning ground for the rap group, N.W.A, a road trip down to the Mexican border city of Tijuana.

For several months I lived in Boston with my brother sleeping on his futon.

For some reason you have a hold over the public imagination I said and there is a sexual dimension to it.

For some topics, because of their weightiness and lack of obvious comedy, it was a case of needing to gain the confidence to know how to handle them. Or maybe earning the right to cover them.

For the Christianity photos, I held a large wooden crucifix and shouted at the camera, which wasn't at all the feel of the episode, but I have a regrettable habit of agreeing to do what I'm asked b...

For the first day of filming, we were in the San Francisco Bay area to speak to a radio evangelist named Harold Kemping, based in Oakland, who was predicting the end of the world for later in the y...

For the first four episodes, I had my subjects pretty well mapped out. It was a bit like making a debut album like a bag of songs. I've been thinking about those shows for a couple of years at leas...

For the first week or two had been sleeping on my brother's floor in a studio apartment in Chelsea, then having encouraged me to come, he'd landed a job in London and I took over his place.

For the party, Bob was wearing a shiny gold larmee top and a gold cummerbund. His white hair was pulled back in a ponytail and though it was dark, he had sunglasses on.

For the porn one I stripped off and made ANTIC faces while wearing only a pink feather boa and a pair of boxer shorts.

Forced together with them in the surreal circumstances of the media, siege and having lost my bearings as to what exactly my journalistic role was, I found myself enjoying the company of the Hamilt...

Four sounded ready to close the deal.

Franklin said.

From a mild sound bite of rob telling me he didn't go around saying he's a Jew, he's not a Jew. We cut to footage of Rob at a Klan event saying to a protester, you're a Jew. I'm not going to talk t...

From a state of directionless obscurity had been vaulted into a realm of possibility I hadn't ever dared imagine.

From another clip of Rob saying he didn't hate black people, we cut to a speech of Rob declaring in strident tones America belongs to the children of the Republic, not those from Mexico, not those ...

From colleagues, I kept hearing that the BBC was taking an interest in me. An exec had visited from London. He wrote down your name. A colleague told me.

From our first scene in a Montana survivalist store where I indulged in some good-natured teasing of the owner while he showed me his emporium of preparedness items. Imperishable meal.

Full of ambition but with no clear sense of direction. I had the strong sense it was time to start my life and no idea how to do it.

Furries fetishists who dress up in mascot like outfits and have sex at conventions were considered but dismissed based on their having a part time and largely virtual connection.

Garage to Jaguar at the back of the playground.

Gene mentioned he could hook me up there. The randomness of the connection, the fact that I knew almost nothing about the place, tickled me. I liked the idea of making big life decisions based on v...

Given all the pressure I'd felt to shake Jimmy up and rattle his cage, it's perhaps both surprising and unsurprising that when the time came to edit the material, one of the challenges was not to m...

Given how green I was looking back, I'm surprised at how much latitude Michael afforded me to do my work.

Given how intrinsic fakery is to wrestling, it would have been a sly but understandable storytelling device. In fact, it is real, though clearly there was a performative quality to the moment.

Given that he travelled throughout the world, the idea of finding somewhere he hadn't written about and left his mark on was in fact one of its main attractions.

Given that the idea was to teach and help out, not up stumps halfway through the job, you could say that my going and then leaving was worse than not going at all. And I wouldn't argue with.

Given the accusations made in the Panorama program, I was on the lookout for evidence of far right leanings, noting the many books by Enoch Powell.

Givers feed slowly, Cliff said, feed off part of your body, but do everything slowly. Slow is always better.

Going into the museum, I'd expected 1/2 hour ramble around an unintentionally humorous slice of roadside Americana instead. I was dismayed to find I was chaperoned by a very slow movie.

Good just to be underway, David said. As we rode up in the hotel lift. Yes, I said.

Gradually I fell out of contact with Jerry, but I never forgot him. The weird contrast of his warm human qualities combined with the hatefulness of his beliefs set a kind of gold standard.

Gradually my thoughts took shape in an idea.

Gradually our lifestyle changed the car. A singer Gazelle was replaced with a Canary coloured second hand Renault and then a sleek new Rover that was the least reliable of the three and often.

Group 1 began loading up plates with food and pouring drinks into plastic beakers with sippy cup lids.

Group One sat down with their plates and beakers next to them. Some took their tops off.

Growing up, if anyone had suggested, I might one day be on television, I would have looked at them quizzical and confused, wracking my brains to imagine what set of steps could possibly lead to it ...

Had been planning to head back to London at the end of the summer, but as September approached, figuring I had nothing pressing to do there, I decided to stay in America.

Had grown up watching his wish fulfillment show. Gimmel Fixit, which aired on Saturdays and which was in fact the creation of its longtime producer Roger Ordish.

Had they become a byword for a certain kind of unattractive man with glasses?

Has the business changed much? I asked.

Have you been fed food before? Asked a Gray haired older lady with dangly earrings.

Have you ever had your confidence shaken? Have you ever thought? Well, maybe I'm just a con man.

Have you seen Roger and me?

Haven't yet got around to doing.

Having already made one segment involving white supremacists, I imagined it might be the same drill with the Klan. Be nice and wide eyed, and gently satirize their ludicrous racial vision.

Having been promised access, we took occupancy of a small backroom at Harrods while we waited for him to appear.

Having failed to rendezvous with the crew, we drove back to the UNARIUS headquarters and there I sat in my space uniform wondering about my next move.

Having made an appointment by phone, I drove down from Las Vegas and met him in front of a local grocery store. He was dressed in black with a black cowboy hat and dark glasses.

Having put his sporting achievements behind him, Chris was now plying his trade as a kind of children's role, model, public intellectual and style guru.

Having sex for a living, staking one's professional fortunes on an unpredictable physical organ is strange. Kind of funny and potentially pretty sad all at once.

Having suffered through the ructions and self doubt of the first episode, I'd like to be able to say that the process of making the shows became easier. It didn't.

He agreed the majority of people who buy our product don't like women. They want to see them degraded.

He and his wife lived in separate buildings he took will on a tour of his quarters. Every day I checked the papers for what films are on if it gets at least three stars. Then I tape it.

He answered the door white haired well built in a tight black T-shirt and big buckled belt and growled in a way that wasn't entirely friendly. What's going on?

He arrived unannounced in the middle of a maths lesson, having taken a 2 hour taxi ride from Harare.

He asked about my previous jobs.

He asked me to fetch a pin at the bar. They had no pins, but they gave me a tiny plastic cocktail sword.

He batted this away. Likewise, the which human meat would you eat? Hypothetical dilemma and a sophomoric riff about whether if you were checking out an attractive woman from behind and then discover.

He believes the reptilian people have an agenda here that's correct, said Darryl. A success coach from Las Vegas. Have you read his books, said Jeannie, a grizzled looking teacher from Colorado.

He bore a resemblance to Jimmy Saville, but a much older version whose platinum locks were now thin and indistinguishable from the ordinary white hair of an OAP.

He carried a cigarette holder and wore a cravat. Telling stories almost certainly fictional about a fiance who died in a tragic accident.

He claimed to be the entertainments officer, but was hard pressed to describe what entertainments he'd actually organised. It was said he used to have tea with Peter Sutcliffe, but he was cagey on ...

He claimed to have killed 10 aliens himself. There is a thick gooey substance inside. He said these creatures make grown men cringe.

He comes to town and plays on an old mandelay and people put money on his tray.

He denounced Prince Philip for 15 minutes, then disappeared.

He did not teach gospel of so-called brotherly love with other races. He came only for his own race, the white race, the Aryan or Adamic race. Jones chipped in each race.

He didn't show any disquiet when I told him that we'd filmed him boasting about tying people up. He said he'd been speaking figuratively.

He doesn't tell you anything unless it's true, Bob said.

He drove us back to the homestead. It was dark when we arrived, but the lights on Mike's battered truck lit up a ramshackle construction of breeze blocks and logs.

He enjoyed Chris Eubank and tried to take credit for it. Yeah, that were a good idea of mine. The boxer kid.

He enjoyed dark humour generally when the police were looking for clues to the identity of the Yorkshire Ripper for several days, they had a large team searching round hay park for clues or possibl...

He enumerated the various sources of the people's paranoia, the government's natural phenomena, nuclear power plants. So I went to FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

He explained that I drank too much and smoked too much pot.

He explained that if any young men misbehaved at his clubs, he'd locked them in the boiler room until closing time.

He had a nonspecific English accent he would put on to amuse himself loosely based on a cleaning lady we had called Missus tarpey.

He had a total confidence in his own ability to handle any kind of questioning, and in fact he told me several times that he had a specific reason for agreeing to our project. I want you to find th...

He had an RAF style mustache short hair and stood at ease in the fashion of the army, maybe 40. He was attended by a woman with short blonde hair wearing a matching uniform.

He had made the decision to be unruffled by the crosswinds of fate and misfortune.

He had several poems that he knew by heart and would declaim them when the opportunity arose and carried little books with the sayings of Nietzsche and Oscar Wilde.

He had something he needed to show me. He said a piece of footage he'd shot 2 evenings earlier at Jimmy's penthouse after I'd gone to bed.

He had what seemed to be a watertight and self-contained outlook on life involving logic and a certain understanding of psychology, and perhaps more than anything, a quality of toughness and abilit...

He in turn told our executive producer David, and they followed a weird few days when they knew what the thing was and were in a position to tell me more. While I was keen not to know.

He led us out into his extensive yard, green and overgrown and backing onto fields centered around a vegetable patch.

He lived in LA in Beverly Hills. I liked the odd contradiction of his Hollywood connections and his militia leanings, and I lobbied to interview him on the same leg of filming.

He looks too much like Louis Theroux, she said.

He made it his project to school me on the dishonesty and inherent instability of the Federal Reserve.

He mentioned that the Writers Guild required a minimum number of scripts to be farmed out to freelancers each year. Maybe I could write one. Wow, that would be great, I said.

He might have called it a Roman right arm salute, but once again he was doing it with his left arm.

He moved towards the door, making his if to leave.

He must have had ambivalent feelings about our education. There was a side of him that liked the idea of US learning Latin and showing off to his American family aside that in a way similar to the ...

He offered to test me.

He paused appearing emotional. I give probably 80% more to my children than my father gave me, and still it doesn't come up to scratch. Well, what if scratch?

He persuaded Neil that he and Christine should carry it while marching out to the waiting reporters in a kind of procession.

He played a clip of me talking with a born again Christian Lady who anointed her car with holy water. You're taking the Michael aren't you? Ned said I should have been prepared for this, but I was ...

He pleaded guilty to having almost never kicked a ball with his children. Then he said my father, can I remember my father playing with me? No, my father never played with me.

He pops the DVD into the machine and for 50 minutes the two of them sit through a strange parade of images showing Jimmy is a lonely, occasionally sinister figure.

He puts his fags out in the pool. He also what do you call a shampoo for gypsies? Go and wash.

He referred to the Hamiltons as Amir's ball in a grudge match between himself and the authorities.

He regarded himself as something of a guru on the subject of applying logic to human predicaments more than once during filming, and after, he said to me, call me when you have your nervous breakdown.

He regularly suggested profiling the strip club manager Peter Stringfellow, who he said was a friend.

He reminisced to will about his days in the 60s as a nightclub manager in Leeds.

He said he lived outside Vegas, still with Liz. He didn't seem averse to meeting up.

He said he'd nicknamed the brick the Louie.

He said that from 1965 to 67 he'd worked as a weather observer at Nellis Air Force Base in Indian Springs, NV.

He said.

He scrolled around on his camera and I peered into the viewfinder in the clip, Jimmy, seemingly unaware that the camera was on slouched back on his sofa, cigar in hand, watching a Natural History d...

He seemed a figure of some authority and officer, or maybe the captain morning Governor Jimmy said, looking suddenly shifty.

He seemed to feel underappreciated in his home country. I sensed that he was a little put out, that there weren't statues of him on street corners.

He shared a quality of many of the best producers and ability to absorb anxiety to keep the faith in dark times and recognize when decisions needed to be made.

He simply disappeared.

He spoke of an encounter with Cherie Blair.

He stalked about jabbing his cigar at his luxurious features. It was, he said, one of only two penthouses on board. The best lodging to be had.

He swallowed whatever hurt he may have felt and declared the documentary another triumph.

He then talked for some length about the 0 tolerance footage.

He told me his story. A building contractor in Las Vegas. He'd struggled financially. The IRS had raided his bank accounts.

He took Leanne to Harry Ramsdens the fish and chips chain, where he paid for their meal with a collection of loose change, counting it out with theatrical frugality for the meal. They were joined b...

He took me down to the gym where we worked out together.

He took us on a tour of the house, which I can only assume was decorated to his wife's tastes with cute little bits of Christian kitsch figurines of angels, framed inspirational messages and painti...

He ushered me inside. My crew followed behind and I took my shoes off in a cloakroom, then ventured into a large kitchen.

He was 23 at that time, fresh out of the Air Force he'd been in the business 5 weeks and done 13 movies.

He was 72 or in his argot 36 twice.

He was a deep sleeper and needed a lot of pushing and humping.

He was also an early adopter of video technology on shoebox sized cameras. He and Joe would film improvised skits, in which I occasionally appeared.

He was also on the radio when I was growing up. A weekend oldies show, and he presented ads for Rd safety clunk. Click every trip and British Rail. This is the age of the train not to.

He was also troubled by a conversation I'd had with Debbie about her reproductive choices, in which I had mentioned that she'd never had children, and that perhaps that was one of the reasons she'd...

He was always switched on to whatever was happening in the culture. The latest music and fashion in a way that was completely unforced. Coolness came to him as though it was his first language.

He was far from being a conventional mentor. He wasn't huge on bonding, but just his keeping me on board felt like a huge endorsement.

He was in full Edwardian dandy persona, Jodphurs, Monocle, Windsor knot, and speaking with exaggerated precision, though just occasionally little glimpses of the London St Kid he'd.

He was keen to be seen as well connected, pointing out a place setting that appeared to come from Buckingham Palace and at the same time he enjoyed ostentatiously parrying and deflecting the questi...

He was keen to stress his considerable achievements, but without being seen to do so.

He was knowledgeable about minstrelsy and enjoyed talking about various dubious blackface vaudevillians of the Bella Ipoc.

He was packing for a two day cruise and he itemized the contents of his overnight bag, making sure I noticed a packet of condoms. Hope Springs eternal in the human breast, especially when you're si...

He was then finishing up post production on his first non documentary feature, Canadian Bacon.

He was there to give his new Alexander Wright character a soft launch not by wrestling, but by walking the aisles and the ringside creating a buzz around the new identity. Achtung achtung.

He was understanding. I'm sure we could have sorted it out Lou, he said, but he accepted my resignation and gave me a couple of tiny walk on roles.

He was with my friend Chris when I arrived.

He went on to pitch a one hour or two hour or three hour program that would be made from footage from his personal archive. It could be voiced by me, he said, or you could.

He went on to say he was himself a walk in an alien in a human body.

He wrote a short story. Children based on overhearing our conversations with friends full of mild bigotry and boasts about skiing holidays. It's in his collection. The London embassy.

He'd already set his sights on being a director and written four or five screenplays, making posters for them, which he put up in his bedroom.

He'd also been one of both shortwave radio listeners and both pitch of a mutually supporting Patriot community geared towards communality and self defence in the end. Times had appealed to him.

He'd always ask that we'll bring a camera so we could film him going into the restaurant celebrity style.

He'd become a poster boy for what was termed Tory sleaze and had lost his seat in a high profile election.

He'd brought a banner with the website name on it and was intent on using it to give the website a plug on national TV.

He'd come to the door wearing a quasi military uniform Gray shirt with shoulder patches and a maroon beret.

He'd had a distinguished career in special forces, as attested by his 40 or so medals framed on the wall.

He'd had extensive contact with a community of tall white aliens who, with the knowledge of the US military, operated a top secret landing area for their craft.

He'd look at you expectantly after you finished speaking, as though one more word or phrase was still needed for everything to make sense.

He'd mentioned a son and a daughter, neither keen to be interviewed. He said he used to work nine to five jobs as a waiter and bartender, and more recently, stacking shelves in a grocery.

He'd monologue at Big Brother speaking directly into the cameras to confess his vulnerabilities, seemingly finding the fictional concept of Big Brother more relatable than any of his.

He'd presented an odd figure in his track suit with his pageboy platinum hairdo affecting the style and air of someone younger than he was.

He'd proven himself in one of his first scenes, pulling off a tricky double penetration, or DP, which is, as it sounds, two men inside one woman, one by the back door and one.

He'd recline on his sofa and play host with the minimum of fuss.

He'd sat on a small throne in the corner of a little Chapel behind his house and wheezed and gurgled, and shook from side to side for quite a long time in the semi darkness.

He'd sued and the BBC had settled paying him £50,000 in damages.

He'd visit with his siblings and my uncle Jean, and afterwards my dad would point out footprints on the hallway walls where Justin had been climbing up them once when he was probably only six or se...

He's got a cell at Broadmoor, where he sleeps. He said he keeps his mother's clothes in a closet and gets them dry cleaned once a year.

He's joking in that one, she said, pointing at the first, but not in that one.

Head for the hills.

Held prisoner by the television, a kind of Stockholm syndrome set in and I fell in an ambivalent love with my captor.

Her name was Sarah. Her name wasn't Sarah. Fiercely intelligent, thoughtful and argumentative. She came from a ******* family in north London that was in its way as status conscious and idiosyncrati...

Her voice was quavering and she covered her face again as Neil stroked her forearm with the tips of his fingers in a stiff up and down gesture.

Here he comes the Zulu warrior. Here he comes, the Zulu chief chief chief.

Here I am telling stories using myself my feelings for real after so many years still doing it.

Here's the problem. He said in a broad Texas accent and handed me a half dollar coin. Now give it back now ask me for it.

Hey Lily, this is Paul Simpson newsradio. I read your script and I liked it so give me a call.

Hindsight has telescoped that second militia chute into a golden idol of productive days, and cascading good fortune.

His apartment was unusually tidy for a young bachelor with racks of heavy metal CDs. John Carpenter movies and Godzilla toys all neatly organised.

His dignity was so seductive it created an odd dissonance between the power and the emotion of what he was saying. The very real sense of connection I felt with him and the fact that it was fundame...

His earlier explanation that had been speaking figuratively went by the board. Now he said yes. He locked up some Larry characters in his boiler room, but they'd been asking for it and the British ...

His eye was fixed to his camera.

His level of energy and backchat was unflagging. It was like a big game, tantalize and retreat. He wanted both to be asked about the mysteries and contradictions of his life, and then pointedly not...

His mother had been the only woman for whom Jimmy had ever expressed anything like love.

His name was Ralph and he was a Lord.

His natural authority was the inverse of my total lack of authority. Along with it came a taste for the perks of office like fine dining and taxis. Only once saw him on pub.

His obsessive need for self protection was a weakness he needed to overcome. He didn't think much of this analysis. He told me I hadn't found the chink.

His private life was famously obscure for almost as long as I can recall. Certainly since my early teens I'd heard there was something sexually untoward about Jimmy Saville, but one didn't attach a...

His reply became the opening exchange of the finished documentary in words reeking of prophetic irony, he said, no, not at all. It's been a permanent source of regret that the one thing I've.

His self-image was as a steely kind of Yorkshire Ubermensch, who, through mental strength had transcended the normal human need for relationships for love for the ties of convention.

His two this is your life. Read books were on display. He announced that he was the only person to have been featured on the program more than once. A first taste of the unverifiable Jimmy Saville ...

His upbringing had been difficult raised in Peckham. Running Wild, then sent to New York to straighten out where he was saved by the boxing gym.

His war exploits had naturally made him a hero and role model to many on the far right, and combined with a commitment to a fringe brand of evangelical Christianity, he'd built up a devoted followi...

His wife, Christine, had featured prominently in the coverage, whereas Neal seemed mild and slightly robotic. She came across as fierce. She had helmet like hair that looked as though it had been.

History came easily. The memorization and grinding through reading lists the marshalling of arguments. On the one hand, this on the other hand, that which prejudices me against it.

Hmm, Chris said one evening after work. If only we knew a British person who was intelligent and had a sense of humor. I just can't think who that could be haha. I said I'll let you know if I think...

Holly Wellin from Manchester, England, 18 years old, was wearing white stiletto boots. A denim miniskirt, giggling.

Hoping to get a status report on the UFO field from a more sober perspective. I continued my Circuit of the banqueting room spotting Jim Marrs, author of Alien Agenda and a respected ex.

How about Star Wars? Pretty accurate, pretty accurate.

How involved could I get in something I was personally opposed to? How did the idea of me going native in a slightly tongue in cheek way jibe with our deeper ambition for the programs of?

How is your clan group different from other clan groups? Well, one we promotion. Alas we have Adams to sell to the public and that's an advantage. It's the nannies and you need to sell yourself to ...

How much does the government know? I said Allah, they don't want you to know that there's alternative energies out there that might upset their monopolies.

How much they'd be likely to let us see backstage was unclear. To cover ourselves. We also approached a much smaller local wrestling league of part timers in South Carolina called the AIW.

How odd I thought that even though I don't believe it still feels nice to be included.

How was it working at Spy? He said good. I enjoyed a lot Chris acting as my corner man added Louis did the piece about rappers freestyling raps about gun safety.

How we are going to incorporate you? I really don't know. Maybe you can overlook the whole project, but in a serious way I will have final approval or whatever.

Huddled in three small windowless rooms on a high. Story of a tall office building in midtown Manhattan, 3000 miles from the documentary unit in Bristol. We spent those first few weeks develop.

Human connection is one of the most precious things we can experience in our lives. Cliff was saying.

I also entered two different Blue Peter competitions, one to design A logo for the UN's International Year of the Child, and another to do an illustration for an anniversary card for the Natural Hi...

I also had the impression he made visits to Ashworth, the forensic mental hospital where Moore's murderer, Ian Brady, was detained and another time when it was in the news. I asked what he made of ...

I also heard that puking during workouts was a regular occurrence, in which case the only surprising part was that Sarge was holding me to his usual standards of what he expected from young wrestli...

I also submitted some ideas to David Mortimer at the BBC just to keep that plate spinning.

I always think everything relaxes when you've got something in the can.

I am not really active in that alien area anymore. He said it just didn't pan out so we've stepped away from that. The major problem of our time is super illnesses, AIDS, chronic.

I am the Myra Hindley story. He replied no comically and without elaborating.

I applied for an internship on a magazine, there called Spy, but I was also missing Sarah who was still in China. But coming to the end of her teaching assignment.

I arrived at San Francisco Airport to find a limo driver holding a card with my name. The first time I'd ever been privileged such a welcome.

I arrived one summer morning getting lost on the stairs leading to the top floor flat in a modern block in Battersea. This was their London pieda tear.

I asked about the sex very quick. One of them said.

I asked him about Christmas. Would you normally do, I said.

I asked him what he knew about JJ.

I asked how old he was. April 17. I turned 45, he said, and they still can't beat me. Alright so you should have caught my act when I was 29 I would have made love to you.

I asked Karen if she wished Chris would help a bit more.

I asked why he didn't take a photo when he was on the ships. If you need physical evidence, he said, then you're not ready to see.

I assured him he was alive and well.

I attempted to remedy this by writing descriptions of the off camera dimension of the production. The celebrities we were approaching and for the most part being rejected by the little bits of shoo...

I attended all fathering primary school which was full of kids in Bay City Rollers, T-shirts, playing rounders, bean bags that smelled of chocolate and road safety films that they showed on a porta...

I began chatting to the performers as they waited to be called into the offices of the producers.

I began feeling morose, sensing that I was completely out of sync with what everyone else seemed to think I should want. My appetite for the sort of programs I was doing already in decline dipped p...

I began spending more time in the vending area where the motivations of the salespeople were reassuringly mundane.

I began wondering why anyone might possibly fixate on the Hamiltons as the object of fantasies. I recalled that before any of the **** allegations a colleague at work had said there's something abo...

I began work on a spec script for a new sitcom called Newsradio.

I bought a couple of British rap albums out of a sense of Obligation 1 by the Demon Boys, another by ruthless rap assassins. Neither was very good.

I bought a medallion and put it on. You're in your cocoon now, said Dan.

I bought furnishings second hand at thrift stores and junk shops.

I brought a monastic level of commitment and purpose to my spec script. It took one whole day to figure out how to do the formatting on my computer with all the indentation and spacing.

I bumped into a director named Robert Herrera, a soft spoken Hispanic man. He said that according to the trade magazine Adult Video News, the porn business now produces 400 films a week.

I bumped into a friend, a young editor I'd known at Spy called Larissa.

I called Jerry back.

I came back to find the flat half empty and a note saying she hadn't been able to find her digital camera.

I circulated slightly aimlessly, trying to stay in the orbit of receivers who already had a giver next to them to take the pressure off me. But even with a 2 to one ratio, it still occasionally hap...

I compiled a rough list of the people I hoped to see, adding to those names. I already mentioned. A prostitute named Haley a UFO cult in San Diego. A neo-Nazi children's folk.

I continued in his gentler way, as I could, asking to look at other objects until Grand Dragon Michael lost patience, the mood shifted again now. Now, don't burn me, let's face.

I couldn't even get my stupid pictures on television. That's how not on TV I was.

I couldn't imagine having the goal. Then I began to fixate on how I would remember all the questions. Could I carry a little notebook or maybe a clipboard? I thought I'd seen people on television d...

I counselled against this. I was aware that as a journalist myself and supposed disinterested party, it wasn't really my place to advise. But I couldn't help myself.

I craved success on my terms that wasn't academic or literary or British, possibly two. I still felt the need to prove myself. Somehow. Me being on TV as myself.

I cycled home in the late autumn gloom down the concrete defiles of Manhattan. Thinking at least it was all out in the open. Now no longer was it my solitary concern.

I did any number of things except watch Roger and me with the result that when Chris phoned to say Michael was ready to meet right now, I realised I still hadn't seen it and it was too late now.

I did so putting on a voice of FOE disingenuousness he said were I don't know what you're talking about. I don't have a half dollar. I never did have a half dollar. How can you prove I ever had one?

I didn't believe this. Incidentally, he only needed to look at his teeth to see that hygiene wasn't his strong suit.

I didn't do as good as I'd like, he said. I was nervous because he's a big director. You get nervous. It's hard to work, but near the end it was fine.

I didn't doubt he had been questioned by the police and his steeliness and sung foil were telling he hadn't just imprisoned his customers. He'd sent the police packing when they questioned him.

I didn't laugh, but I also didn't judge too harshly seeing the jokes as the private expressions of an old school sensibility and part of Jimmy's natural inclination to shock.

I didn't mind. I assumed she was helping out a friend, a producer on the show, and I owed her at least that, and in fact, without the ballast of a steady home life with the long term partner I was ...

I didn't much like the bad faith that went with prank calls. All I can say in my favour is that I brought a kind of comedy jihadi zeal to work that was, at times embarrassing and more.

I didn't question the indoctrination. I was too young to, but it could be a little confusing, especially when it conflicted with signals from outside the home.

I didn't sing that bit, I just had to chant, Chief Chief chief chief.

I didn't take the teasing seriously, mainly because the idea of me as a TV correspondent seemed so unlikely. Still, I remembered my ambition to write for television on a sitcom or a talk show.

I didn't think too much about it in advance. The sequence we were shooting had unpromising, written all over it. I suspected most of those present would be second in 3rd division wrestlers, hoping ...

I didn't think too much about this exchange and the suggestion that he might resort to legal action if he didn't like the finished documentary. I simply enjoyed it as a bit of barbed repartee that ...

I diligently kept the diary all the same, sometimes with the feeling of writing something interesting just as often with the sense of attempting to subsist on my own effluent like a one man human c...

I don't even remember his last name.

I don't have a credit card at the moment. I said and rang off.

I don't have any friends when will my life start? Why don't I have any pubic hair?

I don't have any idea such said ending the interview, though not explosively, and I didn't give much further thought to whether I might have annoyed him with my gentle Sally at thee.

I don't know how many scenes I've done loads. I love it over here. The weather, the people. Everything is so different. It's like a different culture.

I don't know that I ever found a satisfactory answer to this, except yes, a little bit, but possibly not as much as you might think.

I don't know what became of the manuscript of the beggar man. It is a text only known from references to it like the second book of Aristotle's Poetics, but it represents an ideal for the kind.

I don't like to think about the amount of concussion that was sustained in the entire display more than the stunts and the danger. I most enjoyed the grace notes of the over the top storytelling, w...

I don't recall his response to this remark, but his expression, if translated into English, would have said you are a tiny child who doesn't have the first clue about how TV works.

I don't think Anne ever confirmed this, but the rumour was widely circulated based on her strict religious morals and her having never been married.

I don't think I said anything in response, but I remember thinking in my almost fanatical zeal for realness. You really don't get it.

I drew pictures and sent them into the art program. Take heart they didn't get on.

I drove to the address listed for Thors outfit. It turned out to be a postal centre where he rented a mailbox, so I called the number on the website, putting on an American accent and asked about the.

I dug up the tape from the BBC archives as a gift for his 30th birthday. You can freeze it and see my brother's face looking angelic.

I encouraged him to put it all in, including wobbly shots to give the sequence its flavour of authenticity.

I enjoyed the air of abandonment that hung over them the other lives. They testified to the sad way they were arranged. The weird mothball smell and the benign lack of interest of the salespeople.

I feel as though I could kick him in the balls and he just keep going, I said.

I felt a familiar sort of doubling immersed in a weird situation, but aware that it was probably helpful for the documentary.

I felt disappointed in myself and intensely self-conscious about having been commissioned.

I felt like the embodiment of the cliche of someone ditching his long-suffering supportive partner the minute he becomes successful.

I felt pleased with how it had all gone. I felt something real almost magical, had taken place and for the first time I felt that it was possible. My series might be a success.

I filmed him over several weeks, having first met him in the grounds of his two neighbouring houses in Hove that he shared with his wife Karen and their four children.

I followed him around the UK on absurd quests. I'd only seen two episodes on VHS, one about Megafans and another in which his mission was to increase the ratings of his own show.

I followed him back to his house at the end of a red dirt Rd. We sat in his front room. I complimented him on his car. A sturdy Chevy utility vehicle.

I found a job in a glassblowing studio next door to an Asian bookstore where Marcel had briefly worked as a sales assistant.

I found a wellspring of stories on hidden worlds of misfits, but also a middle American media so aggressively retrograde and antithetical to my own bourgeois liberal upbringing.

I found an e-mail from one of his collaborators, Pat Ress, in Omaha, NE.

I found excuses to stay in touch with him, sent him copies of my documentaries, including the one he appeared in.

I found myself feeling irritated with Cortana. Little things bothered me like his accent slipping and bouts of coughing.

I found part-time work as a fact checker in the legal department of a large publisher.

I found to my dismay that she was ambivalent about both ideas, viewing me with an attitude of semi detachment. She was thinking of moving on.

I give up, I said not for the first time.

I go back and forth, but in general I'm grateful for the space my mum and dad allowed us. They were ahead of their time in some ways, mindful of the need to promote tolerance and understanding abou...

I got a baby at home, she said, oh that's great. Congratulations, I said she squeezed a little more her save some for the baby I said and she took this as her cue to squeeze.

I had a bag with a few clothes and a list of names and not much else. My plan was to buy a second hand car in Las Vegas and work outwards from there and it was several hours later somewhere up abov...

I had a new girlfriend by this time and overnight she and I would stay in and watch repeats of the Larry Sanders show or sometimes go out for meals in restaurants close to her flat in West London.

I had a very loud voice. I was adenoidal my EMS sounded like bees.

I had a whispered conversation with Paul outside the kitchen. I was to use the technical word slizzard at this point and feeling magnanimous.

I had been trying to think what the office had reminded me of, and later I realized it was of a story in twilight zone. The movie in which a child with superpowers has taken the rest of his family ...

I had enough sense to rule Jerry out of contention for the show, but not enough to wonder if there might be a problem with the concept itself.

I had made the welcome discovery that the participatory element of the weird weekend's concept, while it had been intended as a storytelling device and occasion for comedy, had the surprising effect.

I had one last conversation with JJ when I asked him about his choices.

I had reason to pick it up again recently and found much of it. Frankly repulsive and awful, but I'm a father of three now, whereas back then I was a dyspeptic young pop who viewed revolting.

I had the familiar sensation of being assailed by multiple ironies of having been in control of an experience and at the same time out of my depth. I thought about my wife Nancy, aware that the scene.

I had the impression he was babysitting the Hamiltons with a view to landing their exclusive story.

I had the impression in both places that staff viewed Jimmy as an irritant, a presumptuous interloper, turning up and expecting the run of the place.

I had to admit I was enjoying it.

I have a recollection of Ed, God bless him, stepping in about 15 minutes into a Russo monologue, confessing that it was a prime time show for a general audience, and we would have to be re.

I have one teensy weensy eensy spicy bit of ******* blood, I said.

I have people on tape admitting that I worked for Mossad or he went on, which I can't talk about myself and talking of knocking out Egypt's radar system due to my intervention.

I have vivid memories of that shoot. Not good ones.

I helped them set-up the ring and quizzed them on how it worked. Unlike the wrestlers at WCW, they were fine with acknowledging that they planned fights and happy to let us in on their professional...

I hope I'm not being unkind to Christine when I say it was a little reminiscent of being hazed by the wrestlers at the power plant.

I hoped the changes in their subcultures might say something about changes in the world at large. The Post 911 universe. Clinton's America versus Bush's America.

I invented 0 tolerance me. He said in the nightclubs if there was any nonsense, I wouldn't tolerate it.

I just want to say how pleased and excited I am. I said you caught me off guard. Thank you for this wonderful opportunity.

I knew Bob fairly well, having featured him in my UFO documentary.

I knew he had an interest in criminal mental health, but it wasn't a subject he talked about much.

I knew I was doing well at TV Nation because I kept being brought back for more segments for a year. End special for a second season, by which time the show had moved from NBC to Fox.

I later learned that my mother had a policy of being OK about sex on location when my dad was away. And to be fair in the early days his trips could last as long as several months.

I like to maintain eye contact.

I like to read Tolkien is my favorite. I only wear corduroy trousers.

I liked the authenticity of the video stopping mid goodbye.

I listened again, copying it into my notebook, wondering whether it might add something to the book thing I was supposed to be working on, and not thinking too much about whether he was still a sub...

I loaded my plate with some chocolate, some strawberries, slices of apple.

I loitered in the background.

I looked at sheets of funny questions written for me by the TV nation writers of a Christian fundamentalist. I was supposed to ask. Let's say I worship the devil. Should I be worried?

I love women and I'll quit the industry before I shoot them the way they're being shot today.

I loved the morning adventure of driving to work on a Hollywood lot, Sunset Gower Studios, down roads, colonnaded with palm trees.

I made about 15 segments for TV nation. In the end, most of them are forgettable and in all of them I'm embarrassed now to see how weird my hair looks. The strange way it is sort of stacked on my h...

I made my TV segments for TV Nation a nasty part of my brain was saying I have nothing to prove if my show is a disaster. It's on David and my new collaborators.

I mean, praise directed at actual shows and documentaries made by other people over the years I've been praised as Ruby wax, Nick Broomfield, and Mark Dolan among others. If any of the afore name.

I mentioned her outspokenness, then slid into an observation about her having announced she would never marry. Landing gently on you've said you're a virgin.

I mentioned I'd been enjoying Rory Bremner's new series.

I mentioned that I'd heard rumours that he was a paedophile or even into necrophilia. This was all discussed in a spirit of unreality. Naturally one assumed that if he'd really been a paedophile or...

I mentioned the idea to David who liked it and encouraged me to put calls out to contributors to test their enthusiasm for taking part.

I mentioned the Runson mission to David and he was dismissive.

I muddled on to the end of the term, then handed in my notice and went travelling in Zambia, Malawi and Botswana.

I myself have very little affinity for the idea that there are alien incursions into our airspace which the government is covering up.

I never had many more dealings with Sarah. I wished her nothing but the best. A few months after we'd split up, David called me into his office at work where the TV was on and tuned into a call in ...

I never want to see that shot in this show, Michael said solemnly.

I nodded and tried to think of something funny to say about Crosby Stills and Nash.

I once knew a sucker who tried to play me and slay me and make me do a mother fucking rap about gun safety. Your check it Fat Joe on the freestyle tip, a beep you don't want to fuck with.

I probably should have felt bereft, but the truth was I had such low expectations for myself that by my own lights I was doing sort of OK. I hadn't burst into tears on camera or shut my PC.

I probably watched too much TV from the earliest days grazing on play school and the clangers, Pipkins and Chorlton, and the wheelies on through Blue Peter and Swap shop and then later Jim will fix.

I proposed that we reenact this exercise for illustrative purposes, and I pulled out a map and magic markers.

I pulled photographs from an overstuffed drawer.

I questioned him a little more, telling him he was being passive aggressive as he attempted to move the conversation away from the subject of the Duchess and her clothes. I'm just thinking of the t...

I read last night a quote and this surprised me. If anyone says I'm not a virgin, I'll sue them.

I read philosophers of science like TS Kuhn who maintained that scientific progress is much more erratic and less purely empirical than it appears, and Paul Feyerabend, who went further.

I recounted writing in aged 11 or 12 asking to shoot my teachers at Tower House with Bugsy Malone style splurge guns. This request, not surprisingly, had gone unfulfilled.

I rubbed my eyes at a world that felt a little friendlier, a little closer to home.

I said I doubted his ability to bend cutlery with his mind.

I said I wouldn't agree to the documentary if it was along those lines. Frankly, I regard it as an impertinence.

I said my on camera goodbyes to him and Karen a few days later at their house. I went in for a hug. You're too spindly to hug, Chris said and asked again whether I had found the chink in his arm.

I saw there was pathos in the prospect of a huge celebrity coming to his life's final chapter. An illustration in grand form of the indignity and decay that awaits us all.

I saw your Paul Daniels documentary and I really enjoyed it. He said you don't need to send me a tape because I love what you do.

I sense this is an emotional thing for you, and you don't want to share it, and I respect that I said.

I sensed a hint of irritation, so I retreated and made a fumbling concession to the enormous amount of athletic and acrobatic ability of the wrestlers and tremendous strength and.

I sensed that Bob could tell he'd been disappointed in the channeling.

I sent off the packet and then didn't think much more about it.

I shared an office with a talented stand up comedian and writer called David Feldman.

I showed a 60 minute cut to a colleague while on location in India. We were doing a story about religious gurus. He was from Lancashire and I had the impression that possibly because of some native...

I signed a new deal with the BBC for a vast number of programmes. As usual without looking at the contract with the attitude of a man at a Cliff edge who doesn't want to see how long the drop is.

I signed up to a two year deal for 12 more episodes. I think there may also have been a clause about doing some specials. I'm not sure what was in the contract because I don't think I read it. Cont...

I simply don't believe it, Christine said, tell me anybody who said that?

I spent 11 Christmases and 11 New Year's Eves. There he said this segued to chat about his hopes for the documentary. There were jokes about turning the camera off and what would happen?

I spent a term studying the scientific revolution of the 17th century Galileo Kepler, de carte Boyle, Newton.

I spent my days there staring at my laptop at least part of the time trying to think of ideas for my putative BBC TV show.

I spied Sarge, a bullet headed muscle bound man I knew to be the head wrestling trainer, breaking down the ring. I approached him, camera in tow.

I spill my seed on the sheets of my fever soaked bed.

I spotted myself reflected in a dark window lank. Haired unshaven eye looked creepy too.

I sputtered to a halt and bow peered quizzically into the camera as if to say who is this moron?

I still chuckle at the moment in a wide shot to signal it is overheard when I plead with Steve, the owner of the survivalist store to let me know where his survival shelter is so I can go.

I still have a list from 1996 of possible ideas. A brain dump of 50 or 60 subject areas from anarchists to toad licking.

I stood 20 or so feet away and he walked towards me with a pair of dowsing rods in his hands.

I subscribe to hip Hop Connection, a British rap magazine. It mainly covered American hip hop, but the editors tried to support the nascent UK scene.

I suppose I came to see myself as a bit of a hatchet man doing hit jobs on racists, members of the far right religious kooks at the same time. I didn't see myself as a satirist and my guilt.

I suppose the arrangement allowed them to focus more on their work and any way we came home at weekends. But it's also true that my brother and I had had a brief and embarrassing love affair one su...

I surrendered to the priorities of whoever I was with. I tried to pitch in. I felt it was my job to be fully present and available, and if there was a little bit of going native, a mild dose.

I take it Mr Hamilton. You deny this. Asked one reporter. We deny this absolutely categorically, Neal said.

I teach people how to access cognitions and open up neural pathways, he said looking around the room, I help people access right brain faculties, develop psychic powers.

I teased him for his weird inconsistencies and evasions and the commentary devolved into the same childish repartee as the original programme. You're tricky, he said, but I'm tricky too.

I think my parents felt that whatever we were old enough and interested enough to read, we were old enough to deal with.

I think our threats are much greater from our politicians than from extraterrestrials.

I think there is less creativity while God said there's more attempt to shock than to arouse.

I think there's a belief that there's a secret of the heart of your relationship that no one knows. I continued. I don't know what you're talking about, Neal said.

I think you're going to really enjoy the experience. You're pretty safe. We're a good group of people.

I thought abductions might be passe, but the conference held daily gatherings for so-called experiences to interact.

I thought back to my first visit. It was only the second episode of my series and because I was sensitive to the creep factor, I'd sought out a male performer who was as unpleasant as possible some.

I thought back to university and my interest in offbeat sects, millenarianism and killias tests. The fanatics that flourished during the English Civil War had once brought a copy of the pursuit of ...

I thought being cheeky made me lovable. The teachers of Tower House disagreed.

I thought it might be funny to interview them while dressed up in one of their outfits. I raised the idea with Leanne. She seemed a little surprised but took me to a storage room where they kept th...

I thought of all the people I knew who were funnier than me school friends like Adam and Joe, and Zach's family members, random people down the pub.

I thought San Jose might be on the sea, confusing it with San Diego. In fact, San Jose's landlocked a farm town that, as they say of cancer cells, forgot to stop growing.

I thought there were tiny musicians that lived inside the radio and my favorite toy was a tin robot that shot sparks from its chest.

I told Bill about my book that I was curious about JJ and what kind of dimple he'd left on the waters of adult entertainment.

I told him I was checking back into Ufology and wondered how it had changed in the last 10 years.

I told him it was important that in the mix of characters we find a bigot with a heart of gold. I was aware this was a ridiculous phrase. I'm not too sure how seriously I took it. I just knew we ne...

I took a break and had dinner at the casino diner, ordering halibut with a baked potato.

I took all of this on board and felt rather bad, particularly at the idea that I might have bullied her, though there is an irony somewhere in the idea of a strident disciplinarian feeling bullied ...

I took an apartment in Fort Greene, a historically black neighborhood of Brooklyn that was battling the tide of gentrification.

I took issue with this and the session ended in something close to an argument between me and the spaceman from coal dust.

I took my mask off to sea Cliff sembiring up and down in a transport of satisfaction at the tableau he had created.

I took my shirt off and I put my eye mask on, noticing a strange sense of liberation as my vision was obscured. I felt invisible and some of my self consciousness ebbed away.

I took the train up the night before, then spent the best part of a day waiting for my 15 minute slot, strolling around the maudlin grounds. Its gracious configuration of quads and cloisters and it's.

I took this on board splitting up.

I tried to broker a piece on camera.

I tried to gather my thoughts. He was talking about the Millennium piece, an idea I discussed with Michael and Chris Kelly, and when could I fly?

I tried to reassure myself that my sense of curiosity about the story itself would see me through. I had no idea whether I'd be any good at asking questions on TV, but I did know I was excited to m...

I tried to remember the lessons I'd learned from that first excursion in Idaho.

I tried to stay vigilant and look after the seriousness and the journalistic side of the story, but there was a countervailing pull towards comedy. The need for the shows to be funny and also that ...

I trudged back to the, not necessarily the elections offices. Wondering what exactly had I imagined life writing on a sitcom would be like.

I try to start small talk about rap. So what do you think of the new Big Daddy Kane album? For some reason, these conversational gambits did not lead to the fantasy of respect and Co.

I turned in an early story about a fire that had gutted a Chinese restaurant. It began with a description of clouds scudding across the sky as the smoke rose.

I turned out to be oddly ill qualified for my new job. The show was a US cousin to the 80s comedy format, not the 9:00 O'clock News. It had been commissioned for four episodes over the summer.

I used to say that each story rested on a kind of tripod of qualities, comedy, pathos, participation. But as much as I like to think there was a formula, we didn't always get it right.

I wanted to do Cliff Richard, he said with the air of someone whose confidence in an idea is ebbing.

I was a bit more of a purist in those days, and I liked the idea of being informed about the thing, whatever it was for real on camera by Neil and Christine themselves. Still, I couldn't help wonde...

I was actually told you would not and said her head turning now to invoke my director Kate.

I was also on the Radio 4 show loose ends where the host Ned Sherrin criticised my approach in the Christianity episode accusing me possibly accurately of making fun of my interview.

I was also reading widely in more mainstream magazines and a few articles caught my attention as possible source material for documentaries. A long piece from The New Yorker by an author named Susan.

I was also surprised at how many people thought the Hamiltons actually had taken part in the ****.

I was among those accelerated and a late developer. Anyway, hairless and high voiced until I was nearly 16, I became even more socially maladapted

I was aware and probably regretted taking part in the program, which didn't feel great, but I didn't dwell on it.

I was aware this moment might be my best hope of addressing jimmy'z sexuality, the mystery of whether he was gay or straight or celibate, or something else, and more generally how it was that for s...

I was driving South from Vegas through Hot Flat Desert in my new second hand car, a 1993 Dodge dynasty with 90,000 miles on the clock for some reason.

I was experiencing muscle failure. I protested that I couldn't do anymore press ups. The trainee wrestlers gathered around me in a throng all shouting in a way that was somewhere between Turbo pep ...

I was going to San Francisco. US Union rules meant network TV shows had to fly writers and correspondents business class.

I was happy to agree with him and was nodding and shaking my head as vigorously as I could as skewed my discomfort only somewhat. Relieved by the awareness that everything was being captured on tap...

I was hired.

I was immediately feeling a little out of my depth. Oh Christ, I thought.

I was less puzzled by the vagina concept than by the speculum.

I was making a documentary about right wing apocalyptic Christians who've retreated to the American Northwest Idaho, especially in preparation for the end times.

I was running out of ideas a bit more. Chocolate, a strawberry.

I was slightly in awe of his untrammelled Dionysian style.

I was staying with my Uncle Peter, an author and Arabic translator, at his apartment in Long Beach, a small city South of Los Angeles.

I was still living in America, so the production flew me to London for a few days of publicity.

I was the second of two sons and had the space and license to be the silly one. My brother Marcel was a prodigy. The doffer of the Kingdom of Literature, a precocious reader, a writer of poet.

I was trying to be as ebullient and enthusiastic as possible, boying the mood and compensating for the sense of weltschmerz that Michael was giving off my overall feeling was that it was going OK a...

I was trying to show the other as not wholly other.

I was worried you were becoming too English. It's how he put it later on.

I wasn't in fact working at Newsradio, but for a topical HBO sketch show about the presidential elections, called not necessarily the elections.

I wasn't looking through the viewfinder Ed said by way of explanation.

I wasn't sure I'd been smiling, but alongside his gift for being combative without ill will was a knack for being friendly without benevolence.

I watched a documentary made in the early 70s entitled The Amazing World of Jimmy Saville. Shots of Jimmy riding his bike, going to church, talking about his OBE, and his relationship with the man ...

I went in marvelling at the banks of buttons and knobs. I peered through the internal window and were surprised to see the choir singing again, doing another take without me.

I wondered if an outing to Broadmoor would at least be a chance to see Jimmy in a different context in which some of his contradictions might make more sense, but despite me asking him several time...

I wondered if that was why you wore those elastic waistbands. Said the other, you knew when he'd had enough of you and wanted you to go away. He'd just say good morning.

I wondered if this was the life I had dreamed of.

I wondered whether my ill considered remarks had forced him into hiding.

I wondered whether she would be upset and annoyed.

I wondered whether the story would be kept hush hush, then slowly, a few reporters appeared, followed by a few more until a full orchestra of camera crews and paparazzi were arrayed as though.

I would overnight with Mike Kane at almost heaven and bunk down with Mike Ailer in his underground home and I would help build a little straw Bale annex next to Don's house.

I wrote entries about the trips to his penthouse and made notes every time he called on the phone with advice or just wanting to pass the time of day.

I wrote.

I'd asked if he was referring to rumours of paedophilia. Oh hi, how do they know whether I am or not? How does anybody know whether I am? Nobody knows whether I am or not. I know I'm not, so I can ...

I'd be listening out for anything I thought might be revealing. References to girlfriends which did occasionally crop up this or that woman who would be coming to visit a female photographer to who...

I'd been ambivalent about the idea of writing a book for various reasons, not the least of them being that I wanted to focus my time and energy on TV. But I had a romantic attachment to the notion ...

I'd been excited about the change as befitted its name, its premises were a house with a small turret in a quiet suburban St in southwest London.

I'd been interviewing odd people for almost 10 years. I was ready for a break. It would be a chance to work in a different way, getting closer to the people I was covering without the sense of perf...

I'd been pinning a lot on the idea of the Scarborough flat. It was here that he lived with his mother, who he called the Duchess and where to this day he'd kept a wardrobe of her clothes dry cleani...

I'd chosen Newsradio partly because I liked it, it was quite new, and because it's showrunner Paul Simms. Oddly enough, a spy magazine alumnus who had been told, looked like me.

I'd gone from being a confused and insecure magazine underling to a TV correspondent flying around the country to talk to the wild and Weird denizens of the American Extremes I liked and admired.

I'd had an idea about a robot running for president, but that hadn't made the cut.

I'd heard a little about Scientology, my Uncle Peter, who like me had a certain fascination with the macabre and the taboo had described it to me as a mysterious and secretive spiritual organization.

I'd heard someone recommend a combination of savoury and sweet, so I added a couple of slabs of cheese.

I'd interviewed him on my first visit too.

I'd like to say it cost me some pangs of conscience to lie about. Having seen Roger and me, but it didn't. It slipped out very easily, though I did make a mental note to watch the film as soon as I...

I'd like to think I improved at my job as time went on. My strength had always been that I was an attentive listener and a hard worker. I flattered myself. I was good at building relationships on l...

I'd love to, I said.

I'd made a documentary seven years earlier about JJ Michaels, a young performer who was then new to the game. JJ was out now working a straight job in Missouri. But while I.

I'd met him before too.

I'd sent the producer a packet of material months earlier in the fallow period after TV Nation had ended and been hired based on a single funny idea about fans of the acid folk group The Grateful D...

I'd signed off. I hope you will continue to view me as your boy from the BBC or something equally cringe.

I'd sometimes reference a children's TV program that started the Blue Peter Danger Man Peter Duncan trying his hand at exotic pastimes like sumo wrestling. We're not making Duncan dares.

I'd taken my medallion off by this time, but I left it under a bottle of wine. I'd opened the day before that had tasted a little fizzy.

I'm *******, he said.

I'm looking forward to some good wedge verbals. He'd say on route to a meeting with some ******* friends.

I'm not sure this qualifies as sensitivity, but it seems to me marginally on the right side he had by his own profession, at least a natural affinity with the Leeds ******* community. He called Jewi...

I'm one of the good guys, he added with gold rings on his fingers, snaggled teeth, gelled hair in a surly manner. Jason made an unlikely messenger of intergalactic goodwill.

I'm so excited, she replied, are you nervous too? Nah, why would someone be nervous? It's just a night of fun and freedom. It's all.

I'm so sorry, I don't think I can do it. I'm just no good.

I'm sorry one day we've all fought worth before, but one day it'll happen.

I'm still not sure whether this was the right answer.

I'm surprised you don't remember more about JJ. He made hundreds of films.

I'm very happy to put my arm around my husband. She said the whole thing is an absolutely monstrous fabrication and a lie. You can all get your photos.

I've been hoping for free range access backstage at the event. That was how we'd filmed the doc about the porn industry being allowed to wander around more or less Willy nilly if you'll pardon the ...

I've been struggling from the get go with no natural authority or instinct for the job. I'd tried to bond with students by being silly and making them laugh, which turned out to be a short term str...

I've been told that 1/2 hour script should take a couple of weeks to write, but I honed mine over the course of two months. At the end of 1995 going through 10 or more drafts.

I've been told that she didn't like addressing questions to do with her sex life, or rather her lack of one out of peek at this restriction. When filming commenced 1 morning at her house, in Elepha...

I've got a development deal with the BBC. They say they want to do a series with me, so we'll see.

I've got a new computer.

I've got a statement Neil shouted into the darkness I love will yap.

I've really enjoyed being around you and it just makes me worried because the more convinced you are that this is going to happen, it seems in a way the more likely it is that it will happen.

I've sometimes thought the quintessential New York moment was a scene I once witnessed on a subway platform at 7th Ave and 42nd St.

I've written four books on time travel and researched it extensively. She wrote it happens.

If ever in my life there was a lapsarian moment of loss of innocence. It was in 1978 when I was eight and my parents moved us to a fee paying prep school called Tower House.

If I ever did send them in, they didn't win, nor were they shown in a wide shot of entries that didn't win.

If I had to distill a single lesson in the selection of story ideas, which I still try to stick to, it would be to make sure there is something at stake for the contributors life, limb, freedom, se...

If Shakespeare were alive to day, he'd be writing on Caroline in the city. I did not say, but may be thought.

If the mission had been to build rapport with the contributors, put them at their ease and gently satirize them. I was fairly sure I'd failed.

If there was a trick to this whole thing, it was nothing more complicated than finding quasi friendships in unlikely places among people widely viewed as suspect or questionable or flat.

If there were any ideas that stuck with me from my entire three years at Oxford, they were to do with the contingency of beliefs, the ways in which we are all prisoners of our own place and time.

If you are ever thinking of marrying someone, I don't recommend marrying them before you marry them.

If you like what's happening, say yes. If you really like it, say yes please. Cliff said, if you're feeling overwhelmed and you need a pause, say ground.

If you tell me what intrigues you, I'll tell you what's coming up.

Ill and off school. I had an idea for a poem called the Beggar Man. He was about a man who begs.

In 1983, after four years of Tower House, I took my common entrance and got a place at Westminster School.

In 1984 a BBC Panorama documentary entitled Maggie's Militant Tendency had alleged that Neil was part of a cabal of right wing extremists that had infiltrated the conservative.

In 1999, while coming to the end of the second series of weird weekends, running dry of ideas, I began circling around the subject of muscle men in strange uniforms capes.

In 2004 I made arrangements to move to America.

In a bid to add some seriousness to my approach, I tried looking for common themes among my subjects. I drew a diagram showing the four main sources of weirdness as interlocking circles which are.

In a dark office, bill Margold was sitting with two female performers, 1 veteran named Anita Cannibal, who was on his sofa. The other an aspirant named Donielle Daire.

In a human like way, I attempted to do soundings in my inner depths about how I might feel about splitting up or like a ham radio operator trying to make out a signal through a fog.

In a marathon session of interviewing that lasted several hours without a break, I poked around his penthouse asking questions as I went while Jimmy kept up a perpetual stream of jabber about his p...

In a playful mood, I asked Jerry to say Mr Humphrey's catch phrase, but I am not free, Jerry said because this country's in bondage to the ****.

In a shared at the bottom of the garden, he showed me a sign they used for roadside sails. The wood of the sign was old and battered. Rated to use Grand Dragon Michael's word still it wasn't so.

In a sublimated attempt to derail Sacha Baron Cohen's then flourishing career, I encourage Neil to write a piece about him and whether he could be said to occupy a place in the minstrel tradition f...

In a way he was with his 19 successful world title defences and his tabloid profile a better booking than we had any reasonable right to expect.

In a way, it was all an after effect of his being on board with the film. From that moment, all sorts of other decisions flowed to do with the feeling of having him in our corner. A deployable agin...

In a way, it's a fitting continuation of the frontier tradition like the Old West. The UFO community is semi anarchic. A wild frontier settled by adventurers, dreamers and con.

In a way, the feeding was the easy part. You pop a chocolate into someone's mouth, they go MMM.

In a way, the key to the whole enterprise was walking a line between winning over contributors and at the same time trying to keep my journalistic focus always. Whatever the story was, I had no ide...

In a way, the Millennium piece with its mixture of crazy religion and racism set the template for much of my subsequent work.

In a way, this was akin to doubling down if work wasn't going well. I felt even more distraught in family law. One legendary night, aged 10 or 11 and.

In an apartment across the hall was a gay man with an alcohol problem. Who was dying of AIDS. Next door was a couple who had arguments that sounded borderline abusive, after which they'd have noisy...

In another, a black TV nation correspondent Rusty Cundiff attempted to hail a cab and was repeatedly passed by in favour of criminals and men in clown suits.

In ball sessions that stretched into the evening, we plotted a rough outline for the story and the beats of my immersion.

In booths, dirty old men were watching screens on one of them, the women seemed to be smeared in Marmite, though I think it may have been something less edible. An image that has never left me.

In certain ways it was a little like being around my dad himself, an American gun owner, have decided opinions. It was comfortable like listening to an oldies station on the radio. I found I could ...

In characteristic fashion, I toggled from the insecurity of the preceding days to an overweening feeling of self satisfaction, and began to think what a shame it was that such rich material would h...

In concert with the Yuletide theme, I wondered about bringing one person from each of the first four programs to New York to spend Christmas with me at my apartment.

In dramatic terms, it is the satisfaction of seeing the protagonist find himself at the sharp end of the story in a way he hadn't expected.

In each episode I would get hands-on in a different weird subculture, take a role as a porn performer, or make contact with a space alien riffing on the popular cookery program, ready steady cook.

In Edinburgh for the TV festival, the Channel controller of BBC One, Lorraine Hegazy fell into step beside me in the lobby of the Caledonian Hotel.

In general, I was drawn to the sort of stories of strangeness and deviance that were the opposite of how I was living my own life, which was domesticated and quiet.

In general, when I arrived to meet someone on screen, we made sure it was my first meeting, but usually the team would have met the person already on the wrecky. This raises what is probably the bi...

In hindsight, I don't know quite what I'd been expecting, I just know it wasn't this a tubby Hollywood producer delivering a learning Annex style lecture about the US Treasury in it.

In hindsight, I wonder whether 24 hours of our continuous attention had spun him into a hypomania of grandiosity?

In hindsight, the 90s may have been a kind of golden age for strange beliefs between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the attacks on the World Trade Centre. All kinds of bizarre heterodoxies took root.

In his bedroom, Jimmy gestured at the double bed and said there it is the altar.

In his statement, Michael Coleman had said that during their interviews, the police had brought up the name Max Clifford, the celebrity publicist famous for brokering kiss and tell stories with the...

In many respects their matchup was of the classic Mars and Venus variety. Him stoical and underplayed her, buffeted by emotional turbulence.

In my borrowed car, I felt like a knight riding into battle.

In my days working on a paper in San Jose, I'd been turned on to Adam Parfrey's Apocalypse culture, a book length anthology of outrageous behaviour and assorted diablerie.

In my fantasy of how the wrestling shoot might go down, which is always a dangerous place to dwell and extremely alarming to directors because it is often so out of whack with a sense of reality, I...

In my third year with finals on the horizon, my world became smaller still, as I redoubled my academic efforts when the time came to choose a specialization, I focused on philosophy and sociology.

In New York he was trying to make it as an artist, producing works influenced by graffiti and street art or a stage actor. Ideally, both. One night he and I and Sarah headed up to 40.

In order to give myself more of a lion, I decided to shave the night before. In hindsight, this strikes me as a bizarre thing to do.

In other words, my track record with respect to TV was somewhere between poor and whatever is below poor.

In our office ball sessions, I'd sometimes say the real participation is the emotional connection.

In presuming to assert that we were still on good terms, he was in fact leading the mood like a hypnotist acting as if everything was happy and friendly. In order to make it so.

In pride of place in a gold frame was a painting of an androgynous man with long blonde hair, blue eyes and a large square pendant.

In questions in Parliament.

In September, I called several times to see if Thor wanted to get together for coffee. The calls all went to a machine.

In short order, she arranged a visit with her online correspondent. A pensioner in Essex called Barry Leheny.

In short, everything that I was not and secretly aspired to be.

In some ways, Westminster spoiled Oxford for me. By the time I went up in the autumn of 1988, I had already done medieval cloisters and archaic slang like subfusc, which meant.

In Spring 1996, David Mortimer flew out to New York and took me to lunch in a posh restaurant called Canard, something where the butter Pats were shaped like ducks.

In the afternoon we took a drive to the far side of Bose constitutional covenant community to almost Heaven 2. That's TOOO both felt impelled.

In the back seat I was having flashbacks to long car journeys, growing up, feeling hot and bothered. My parents arguing not to mention the nylon spacesuit, which in the heat was becoming itchy.

In the complement of his showbiz interests and charity work, his involvement with the killers and psychopaths at the hospital was the closest thing to something solid.

In the dog days of the summer of 1996, I arrived back in New York with a plan to move back into the Chelsea studio apartment and reoccupy my old relationship with Sarah.

In the Duchess's bedroom appropriately granish with its dark pink bedspread on the double bed and genteel furnishings, he opened the doors to a small freestanding wardrobe against one wall.

In the early 90s, he'd published several grimoires of the dark arts and a 14 volume collection of black magic spells.

In the edit, most of my sillier questions were cut out. I worried we didn't have much of a story that had been bumbling and hadn't built the necessary trust.

In the end, it fell to her to say the words that we were splitting up.

In the end, it wasn't Tom Robb who lost patience, but my camera operator who stopped filming in the middle of a testy exchange about the Holocaust, exhausted from holding his camera for so many hou...

In the end, Jji didn't appear in the movie because his paperwork from the clinic vouching that he was free of HIV or venereal disease, which performers in porn have to keep updated on a monthly bas...

In the end, the idea of getting close seemed complicated and entangling, fraught with all sorts of potential for embarrassment, more trouble than it was worth. I would play the encounter out in my ...

In the end, they made their statement with no banner. Their live coverage will and I were just visible lurking in the background like a couple of shabby stagehands who have strayed into shot.

In the end, we knocked it on the head. If that isn't a tasteless way of putting it.

In the first term of sixth form, Adam and Joe with another friend, Ben Walden put on a production of an American play called Private Wars, in which the three public school adolescents took roles as...

In the media, almost heaven had been characterized as a semi apocalyptic gathering of fire breathing zealots who had moved up there, seduced by Bugright's. Canny exploitation.

In the mid 80s before he made Roger and me, Michael had collaborated with the director Kevin Rafferty on a feature documentary about the racist right called Blood in the face. He knew how the clans...

In the middle of the year, in the wake of the Rodney King verdict unrest, San Jose experienced this in the tiny rippling form of a small downtown protest. I phoned an anarchist thinker and writer.

In the minivan, I felt slightly sheepish at how far I'd gone with my commitment to experiencing the workshop.

In the months between having the idea of filming with Jimmy and our arrival, I'd acquired a new executive producer. David Mortimer had been kicked upstairs, or possibly to one side and replaced wit...

In the pictures they were laughing and clowning. There was one in which Jimmy was making an antique display of imposing himself on Alice and another of Alice in the kitchen against the Wall and Jim...

In the play and possibly in life.

In the second series, I became aware that we had overemphasized the participation leg of the tripod and ended up doing stories that lacked moral complexity or gravity.

In the sixth form, when we were joined by an intake of female students, I must have made a strange apparition. Piccolo voiced Androgyne that I was rubbing shoulders with classmates, some of whom we...

In the two years that followed, I settled into habits of work that were to serve me well with some changes and adaptations and a few hiccups for the next 20 years.

In their front room we watched a pilot of a TV show they'd appeared in entitled Posh, Nosh, a strange cookery come travel format. It showed the Hamiltons descending upon a big, unruly family in.

In this day and age.

In those days in New York, those so inclined could investigate the world of niche filmmaking at a legendary video store in the East Village called Kims Kims is gone, now rendered obsolete.

In typical style, Jimmy showed a Yeoman like commitment to the task at hand.

In Uptown salons, it was whispered that there were no go areas of the city and that to travel by subway after dark was to take your life in your hands.

Inside it was like passing through a portal into the 70s. There was white shag carpeting on the floor and swayed wallpaper. A zebra print sofa and pink cornicing

Inside was a basic country dwelling with a freestanding stove in the middle.

Instead of negative things which keep cropping up, try and workout two or three things that I can give you a piece of wisdom lot of people on their way up. For instance what it's like for somebody ...

Intending to make it my final question, I asked whether I might have the right stuff to be a space channel myself.

Interviews that went sideways the corporate handler putting his hand over the camera, random people shouting abuse.

Is a soap opera for men? Rick said a lot of people they think. Oh well, these guys know who's going to win, who's going to do this? So it's fake. That may be one side of it, but this is not fake. H...

Is it animal, vegetable or mineral? I asked look what harm can it do for you to know. David said well, I'll have to act.

Is it big? I asked.

Is it OK to call them aliens? No, they're not aliens. They're homo sapiens like you and I they have the same anatomy. They're homo.

Is it something we can follow? Yes, well, that's good because fuck knows we need something. Yeah, quite well said.

Is that because you discriminate? No, we do not discriminate. No Sir, it's not a pun there course, not grand Dragon. Michael said not quite able to keep a straight face.

Is that the Spice Girls a voice said through the intercom?

It also has to be said that getting disproportionate credit has its downside when the shit hit the fan with the Jimmy Saville business, I was surprised to find that while I got called before, vario...

It being August news was in short supply.

It can't all be positive though, can it? That's just not reality, right? Said Jimmy. His man are becoming brusque, make it as negative as you like. That's all right. See you in court, take a few qu...

It doesn't look as though it would be the ideal landing place for a spacecraft just because it's so uneven, I said.

It felt potentially like a segment for breakfast TV.

It has happened. Grand Dragon, Michael conceded and attempted a thoughtful answer before returning to his media script that their branch of the Klan didn't hate anyone but just preferred their own.

It helped win trust with those I was among when I wrapped did dynamic meditation, walked on hot coals for the porn show as a comic bit. I had stripped naked in the offices of the main.

It is a city in which the natural relation between centre and periphery is reversed. The life of its community takes place in vast malls, secondary towns, suburbs, freeways, and office park.

It is also true though, that what I experienced was business as usual at the power plant.

It isn't cheggers bedroom put it that way, David said. Will it have implications for the documentary? Yes.

It just seems so unlikely. I said. I mean, I really don't think they did it. It would take such brazenness on their part if they'd done it to then go and invite our camera in. I mean, who's came?

It just sounds like one to me.

It lies 100 miles South of San Francisco and numbered in those days around a million souls. It has no claim to fame other than featuring in a Burt Bacharach song about someone unable to find.

It may be that I missed out, but I also tend to think that deprivation and narrowness bring their own compensations. The hours of watching Open University or Eastern European expressionist cartoons.

It must be bittersweet, having fewer and fewer opportunities to spread this kind of happiness. I said me and the Pope can never retire, he replied. When he wakes up, he's the Pope. I wake up and.

It ran big essays making fun of fashionable people and pastimes. A survey of multi millionaire female power brokers called too rich and too thin.

It said that Mr and missus Hamilton were in a flat when a young woman was ****d. He said it's also said that Mr Hamilton was masturbating on to her whilst another man as yet unidentified.

It seemed I was being offered the job of presenting this segment and I did my best to reply appropriately and sound on point and alert.

It seemed mainly a bid for recognition in the film, Jimmy had claimed he'd never had any girlfriends. I assumed this rankled them and that they wanted someone to know that Jimmy had had relationshi...

It seemed paradoxical. The success of the shows would hinge on my ability to open up on location, lose perspective, go native, and though elements of it were an act, there was a large part of it th...

It should have felt like a kind of redemption. My own show.

It sounded like something I was making up.

It sounds like a toilet cleaner, Joe said.

It stands for Nice, natural, naughty nookie.

It started with David Mortimers mentioning that the channel was looking for Christmas programming for the following year.

It took him a while to find it and he also couldn't read very well, but it soon became clear that the write up was not positive. My encounters with the UFO believers reminded Victor of someone's ar...

It was a good trick.

It was a little like a game in which the objective was to become inebriated in a stranger's kitchen.

It was a little like a starters pistol had gone off, but instead of running in a straight direction, the masked athletes had begun swaying and groaning with their mouths open. Like little baby chicks.

It was a natural subject for us. Unlike Olympic style grappling, pro wrestling is a semi fictional activity in which the bouts are choreographed and the outcomes predetermined.

It was a paradoxical mood. As the conversation progressed, the Nazi Christians settled into an attitude of Teacherly indulgence. They seemed grateful for some attentive company and my que.

It was a sad winter and never learned the knack for being single. I have that manned thing of needing someone around not so much to talk to, which might lead to intimacy or negotiation. But just to...

It was a summer replacement series commissioned for six episodes on a trial basis. My beat was more or less offbeat cultural phenomena, or for want of a better term.

It was about 20 years before Michael and I spoke again.

It was all fairly low key, less obviously fractious than the encounter with Michael Lowe, and I wasn't too sure how much useful material we were getting as ever. There was a balance of normal quest...

It was almost a secondary side effect that whatever friendliness arose turned out also to be useful for the creation of a candid and revealing TV segment.

It was almost eerie how easily we slipped back into our respective roles, petulant Jimmy said in a singsong voice of my attitude in an early encounter.

It was also around this time that I composed what may turn out to be my most enduring contribution to posterity and the arts.

It was also clear Beau couldn't be our main contributor. Instead, we committed two days to filming a less elevated character and almost heaven resident and true believer called Mike Caine.

It was an internship. I'd be working for next to nothing for three months in California at a weekly newspaper.

It was an odd contrast to the gruff macho figure bowcut. He had supposedly been the real life model for Rambo, though I had the impression it was mainly him who put that rumour about.

It was as though I had time travelled back into some earlier, more narrow minded era. All boys surnames, only the children even use them for each other. The teachers were almost all men yet to stay.

It was clear from the off that our two strongest ideas were the malicious survivalist story and porn.

It was definitely him. The same self serious intonation. The tendency to over explain.

It was difficult for me, since I'd always regarded a person's sexuality as a key to their personality and an exploration of intimate romantic relationships as the most reliable way of understanding...

It was early afternoon when I arrived. Tin foil had been put up on the windows to keep out the light. There were classic video machines about the place. Probably it says more about my own state of ...

It was faintly worrying. I had no idea what I might do in the future by now I'd contributed the occasional article and film review to Oxford publications and drawn some comics, and written a.

It was fairly clear to me early on that the case against them didn't add up whether or not they went to swingers parties. They didn't go to them in small flats in Ilford, and in fact within a few d...

It was in some ways perfect for me, inasmuch as it was founded on the two lodestars of my life. Withering repartee and academic work.

It was late in the afternoon when I arrived, having pedaled up from Chelsea a cold winter's day just beginning to get dark.

It was like an Argos for budding Harry Potters.

It was like being back in a sixth form, common room, or a frat house the afternoon following a big party.

It was my job to remove the stems from the store bought goblets, grind the ends down and fixed the cherubs in the middle using a glue that was activated by UV light. I had to wear spec.

It was never officially said that TV nation was over in a way. It was classic Michael. He would never admit defeat and even after it was clear she'd gone to a watery grave, I stayed around to find ...

It was on an evidence gathering trip to see Barry Leheny that she said the sex party and the **** took place.

It was one of a handful of times in my filming career when I've laughed involuntarily.

It was only after the show possibly prompted by its outrageous storytelling that I realized I hadn't asked any of the wrestlers about the choreographing of the bounce.

It was only later that I came to see it as an example of a certain kind of documentary, making those moments when the contributor takes over control and produces the encounter.

It was picked up by shadowy unlicensed makers of merchandise and began appearing on T-shirts and tea towels and other bits of product. For reasons that are obscure, but which I'm fairly sure have n...

It was quite a weird time I was freelancing. The odd article for British magazines. I was writing odd bits for low budget cable TV pilots that never went to series. Meanwhile, in a tiny circle.

It was said that only one boy had ever been expelled from Tower House and that was for selling copies of the Socialist Workers Party newspaper in his school uniform.

It was supposed to be traumatic, but caused a school colleague recognisable even in the dark, as Reed Smith to snort involuntarily with laughter.

It was tempting to conclude I was a victim of my own success. I had done too good a job of stripping the secrets from the celebrities I'd already profiled. Or possibly I'd expose them in a cruel wa...

It was the brainchild of the filmmaker Michael Moore and a pilot episode had been shot the previous year. A mixture of satirical stunts and humour reportage with a left wing point of view. It was s...

It was the saddest and most mysterious poem ever written so far. As I was aware. But the bottom I drew a picture of the beggar man holding his mandelay and showed it to my brother.

It was to be a satirical investigation cross referencing the predictions of various apocalyptic groups for when the end of the world was going to come and how it would take place. I would be leavin...

It was usually a bad sign if my moment of becoming involved was the climax of the film selling paper shredders on the Home Shopping Network, or auditioning for a Norwegian Cruise Line.

It wasn't quite clear what the story was leading up to.

It wasn't that people on TV seemed remote. If anything, the reverse they were familiar. They turned up in your home. Their faces beamed onto a piece of furniture, sometimes on a daily basis.

It went without saying that I would not be maintaining kayfabe in reporting my documentary. In fact, I saw the wrestlers refusal to break character or acknowledge the fictional aspect of their craf...

It would be hard to imagine someone in whom book learning and emotional maturity were more out of balance. I was like something created in a laboratory, a freakish manchild in culots offering opinion.

It would be my first visit since making the shows, which now that I thought of it, some critics had regarded as being faintly mocking in tone.

It would have been easy to Fast forward and drop in some comments at salient points, but he was set on watching all the shows all the way through. He also said he'd watched them all the day before ...

It's a little hard to see him through the miasma of everything that has been uncovered since, but the first thing to recall about Jimmy Saville was that to many of us he was weird and creepy even t...

It's a little strange to admit, but in my entire working career, BBC commissions Baftas academic plaudits that call engendered the most profound.

It's a lot easier to make negative TV shows than it is positive ones, he said. And if we are doing nice things and good things and happy things, imagine how many millions of people you'll cheer up,...

It's a picture of Michael Jackson with what looks like a bread roll. How about boulangeries or just Michael Jackson role model?

It's a real pleasure for you for me to.

It's also always been true that as a production, we've had trouble focusing on more than one idea at a time. A little like air traffic control, you land the planes one by one, and sometimes they cr...

It's building several of them, designed by Sir Christopher Wren, clustered around a cobblestone yard and connected to Westminster Abbey via a network of cloisters.

It's flattering that people imagine I do more than I do. I used to try to explain it by comparing the Louie through on screen to Homer, the poet, in that he is more like a committee of people opera...

It's for this reason that I try to remember never to call myself a filmmaker but a journalist.

It's hurting my back. I said I was here yesterday doing this. I'm here today doing it and I'll be here tomorrow. Get up now.

It's killing my back. I don't care.

It's like when you say I could kill him. You don't mean you really want to kill him.

It's more than we ever got when filming. Alice said you might get a cup of tea and a transport cafe and a voucher for your train home. If you are lucky.

It's possible I might have managed to keep the sick down if I'd tried, or at least in my mouth, but I was secretly hoping my vomiting might have a shaming effect on Sarge.

It's Sarah, he said, and it was her voice talking about an unnamed celebrity ex partner who was. I can't remember the details, possibly a narcissist or monster of ambition.

It's striking, looking back that the most revealing and unself conscious piece of video that, to my knowledge, exists of Jimmy Saville, a mumbled confession of criminal acts committed in the 60s sh...

It's the kind of town where they have jello at the salad bar.

It's worth putting oneself in Will's place, arriving back at the penthouse, joking to disguise his unease as he thinks ahead to the reaction that will greet the film.

Its chastening effect on Sarge, however, was nil.

J from the pawn show a Christian preacher called Randy James from the episode we made in Dallas about evangelism.

J Michaels.

Jim Junior guarding the entrance to world modelling with a clipboard was in his early 20s, the son of the boss and founder of World Modelling Jim Senior.

Jim South had put me onto JJ.

Jim was short and Tubby and wearing a Panama hat.

Jim was small and a little neurotic, hailing from Ohio Simon's tall and skinny and fastidious about his appearance came from Oxford.

Jimmy barely missed a beat servants quarters ildu for me.

Jimmy naturally enjoyed the interest in him stemming from the documentary, and when it led to me doing further celebrity profiles, he began taking on a kind of protective interest in my work.

Jimmy suggestions were neither helpful nor unhelpful, but revealing in what they said about his interests and the image he had of himself as a kind of behind the scenes fixer.

Jimmy was also given to the usual sorts of racist speech typical of many of the older generation. Possibly he delighted in offending my delicate sensibilities with his occasional references to schw...

Jimmy was approached in this way almost anytime he went out in public.

Jimmy was clearly keen to be involved. He came across as to the point and businesslike, but also obliging on Leanne's recky tape up for answering questions and showing off his Rolls Royce, which ha...

Jimmy was in the back seat. He was exasperated. The constant questioning was wearing on his nerves.

Jimmy was on celebrity duty, presiding over birthdays, ferrying cakes to tables, conducting the singing like André Previn in a tracksuit.

Jimmy was quite taken with him on camera for the links. He expressed a weird concern that girls who saw the programme might be induced to take up careers in prostitution off camera. He commented ab...

Jimmy would stand around trying to attract attention, meet and greet anyone who was interested. Seeing happy birthdays, and then when he'd exhausted the celebrity duties, he'd settle down and eat a...

Jimmy's attitude to the opposite sex always had a strange side, and in fact, he generally seemed to enjoy affecting a slightly chilling detachment bordering on callousness from the normal emotional...

JJ was a little downcast after it was over.

JJ was aiming to make a nice career out of porn as he put it. He was full of optimism for his new life.

Joe and Adam had announced they were now Co proprietors of their own media corporation called Joads, and they approached the production with a seriousness and ambition that verged on the comical bu...

Joe and I would joke that we worried Causey seemed lonely or that business had dried up since we never saw much evidence of other customers.

Joe's age 15 was tall and angular with a dry sense of humour and an occasionally haughty attitude that didn't win him. Friends among the clique of sporty, brooding boys who were Nick.

Just because I wanted to know someone better didn't mean that they wanted to be known better.

Kate and I had finagled tickets at the last minute. I suspect one of the aged passengers had passed away and we flew to Tromso to join the ship. Halfway through the cruise spending a night.

Keep it broad, but still focused. Also, is there a place for sadness for people searching for meaning?

Kemp's outfit Family Radio had listeners in the thousands. He'd written a book 1994 with a question mark outlining the biblical basis for his prophecy. The question?

Kevin was from Blackpool marinated and seasoned in the rough and tumble world of news coverage and he'd put me on my metal to be more than usually feisty. We were all aware that Jimmy, the experien...

Kevin, my exec was no longer with us. He hadn't died, but taken a big job commissioning current affairs documentaries at Channel 4, David had returned combining his exec role with a lofty enterta.

Kind of weird spending a couple of hours with people you know would like to see you annihilated.

King, Louie. Don't name pity about you being such a fucker.

Late 1999 was one of those periods. The second series of weird weekends seemed to decline from the first rating, softer reaction, more muted, and I was still under contract to make six more episodes.

Later drugs became part of the conversation and I overheard my mum saying to my brother, when the time comes and you're a little older and you want to get high, you can do it with us.

Later feeling jealous, I announced I was founding my own corporation with Zach called Lozach.

Later he'd worn suits and dressed more conservatively, but the hair was still dyed and he still passed himself off as a curiosity, an unfancy man of the people, and self-described con artist or pie.

Later I asked my mum why they never had me baptized. She said she thought it would be better if we chose our religion when we were old enough to make up our own minds.

Later I found out that the two of them had a long history in far right politics. They had been involved with Arian nations as chief of staff and Chief of Security, but in that moment they came acro...

Later I heard a British colleague refer to the segment as a piece of satire, and I was a little surprised. Not that I didn't think it was weird that such powerful firearms should be freely availabl...

Later I rented an apartment that came with a very needy kitten that had been weaned too young and was always mewing for attention and treadling me with its paws. I entered into a dysfunctional rela...

Later I thought how ironic it was that Richard should use the example of a used car dealer there amidst the mountebanks and latter day snake oil salesman of the UFO world.

Later in LA I recounted the story of this parting to a friend's girlfriend. She explained that in women's language, that meant we were splitting up.

Later on, after I left, Tony told me he'd found a brick that did the same job of holding his punty in place just as well as I'd done it.

Later on, his relationships with other women became more consuming and the strained too much for the marriage to bear. But like most parents of that era, they were figuring it out as they went along.

Later they moved to Singapore, where my dad had taken a job teaching at the university and it was there that I was born in May 1970 at Glen Eagles Hospital and issued a US passport.

Later when I tried to think what it was about Thor, I found so fascinating. I realized it was quite simple, despite the alien beliefs, the claims to have killed graze his Phantom Army of.

Later when we were sent to a fee paying prep school, the children all advertised their Tory leanings. I knew my mum supported labour. I kept it quiet. We were not patriotic nor were we royalist.

Later, after a couple more drinks, Neil decided he should go up the driveway and deliver a statement to the waiting cameras.

Later, as a consolation for missing out the school arranged for the choir to make a recording at a professional studio.

Later, as Shadow Home secretary with her devout Catholicism in forming her political positions, she had opposed gay marriage, opposed the equalization of the age of consent for men, opposed abort.

Later, back in the office, Michael commended me using me as a kind of object lesson for other staff and drawing attention to the irony that a person born to privilege should end up his fiercest sol...

Later, I loved programs like the Kenny Everett Video show and the Young Ones that broke the rules by drawing attention to their own artifice. Kenny Everett would wander off the set showing the wire...

Later, I realized that I'd been in a holding pattern kept away from the office while they decided whether I'd done a good enough job to be offered more work on day three, Jerry called and asked if ...

Later, I was grateful that we'd captured this bit of unintended comedy on film. It was a perfect illustration of Michael's documentary precept about always filming the hello for Real in case someth...

Later, the professor gave way to an older man named Corsey, whose services were used for five or more years.

Later, the Vietnam option receded as my position at TV Nation became more secure, I figured I should keep going as long as they would have me.

Later, when it was said as it was by many that everyone knew, I took it to mean that everyone knew there were rumours. But the phrase everyone knew was misleading and suggested a wider circle of co...

Leanne's voice from behind the camera, its brightness and cheeriness is striking throughout the tape and at this moment she asks why do you call it the altar? Because that's where the sacrifices ha...

Lehane's account of the visit differed markedly from Milroy. Sloanes, in his version, he'd picked her up in his Ford Granada and taken her on a tour of London sights. They'd bought some food and wi...

Let's face it, UK hip hop sucks. I said signing off King Louis Oxford.

Lie down, move your arms, move your legs, say Sir, I'm a dying cockroach.

Like a village Chapel but with swastikas on the altar and on the wall.

Like the Roman, I seemed to see the river Tiber foaming with much blood.

Little short kid, Margold said.

Looking back with my own children as my future judges, I see these characterizations as unfair, but it was how I felt.

Looking back, I'm conscious of being able to pick out a number of different narratives that cover some of the facts. All equally true and at the same time contradictory.

Looking back, I'm struck that David must have thought it strange to be saddled on a network TV show with a presenter with literally 0 hours of television experience, but he showed no disquiet, enti...

Looking good for 65, I thought I'd interviewed him years before. 12 directors in all, all men all creepy to various degrees.

Los Angeles was a vast sun drenched factory town for a couple of weeks. I was back staying with my Uncle Peter in Long Beach, an hours drive from Hollywood.

Lou, I couldn't reach you on the phone. I hugged him. He began taking photographs and the students erupted. I still have the photos. I'm smiling, surrounded by overexcited.

Louie, I appreciate what you say I really do. I can promise you this if it happens. It won't be because we started it. We prayed daily. It doesn't take place.

Louis meets Master P. He encourages him to rap. Louis and Randy organize evangelical car rally. Louis returns to mellow tea to confront him about his choices.

Louis Theroux's weird weekends.

Mainly, he talked about whichever cruise he'd just been on. Which TV, commercial or celebrity profile he'd just done.

Making a documentary is like surfing. I imagine I don't surf, but there is a similar combination of applying skill and technique to elements that are outside your control.

Making this only slightly awkward was that my getting my own series and the BBC's and my failure to keep Michael informed had apparently annoyed him. I once heard the process of hiring me from.

Many long conversations were had trying to figure out the degree of my participation. I wanted to show willing in the worlds I was investigating, but I also didn't want to hijack the narrative and ...

Many of my anxieties focused on events at school when I was still at primary school. My mum went in to explain to the teacher that I was perhaps more fragile than they realised and needed special a...

Many of the guys were in plain collared shirts and the women in knee length dresses. They might have been at a church mixer, but there was also a sprinkling of more flamboyant partygoers. A bearded...

Many of the show's most memorable segments involved satirical stunts and pranks. In one, Michael hired a TV nation lobbyist to see how much democracy $5000.

Many saw them as exactly what I hoped they weren't Mickey taking an anti American.

Margold was curly haired, walrus, mustached, late 50s, an ex performer and now the head of a support group for people who work in the industry. He described himself as the most knowledge.

May I ask a sensitive question?

Maybe before the year 2000, he said.

Maybe it was what I needed to recognize the whole misadventure of teaching in Africa as play acting something I was too young and too immature to know how to handle.

Meanwhile, I had an unfamiliar sensation of being in demand.

Meanwhile, I'd also been continuing my education in independent documentaries, immersing myself in films that push the boundaries of subject and approach.

Meanwhile, the man in the leatherette waistcoat was moaning and spasming in ecstasy. I looked over at my director Aaron to try to gauge his reaction. Was this what he'd been expecting?

Meanwhile, the media frenzy continued hitting ever higher levels of absurdity on the 1st morning in Cheshire. A man turned up a one time TV reporter who was now a truck driver and the crew.

Mello was a troubling figure. Charismatic but macabre and given to pronouncements like somehow when a woman has a gun pointed to her head, seems to make her think better.

Meteorites presumably, or frozen turds jettisoned from planes.

Metro was a free newspaper given away in metal bins around the city. The editorial team was a ragtag band of aging punks and ex hippies. What might later be called hipsters. The deal on off.

Michael advised against it.

Michael brushed off my compliments. It should be spinning way more than that. He said. The resistance of that stupid plastic thing is crazy.

Michael came into a screening of a rough cut and said, simply, you got it.

Michael felt the segment wouldn't require any big gestures on my part for it to work.

Michael had a gift for taking situations into extreme terrain by nudging and twitting his interviewees in a friendly way. Threatening to run into the back of a factory across the Mexican border.

Michael had a year zero attitude to the work in long story meetings in his office he would slouch back in his chair and ramble about his pet subjects, mumbling out of the side of his mouth. His the...

Michael looked tired and harassed, slumped in the corner at his desk. His body language barely registering that I'd entered.

Michael screened a rough cut of a segment he was working on, in which he visited the Serbian embassy and they explained the Balkan conflict using slices of pizza.

Michael stuck one end in a piece of cheese, balanced a small strip of paper on the other end, then put a glass over them. He twitched a few times, then made strange rotating gestures in the air wit...

Michael was also a paranormalist. He had a spherical crystal round his neck. He was 40 or so a little overweight.

Michael was then working out of the Brill Building in Times Square, hallowed headquarters of many composers and songwriters of the Early rock and roll days, Goffin and King Lieber and Stoller.

Midway through the year, Sarah joined me in New York. She found work making origami boxes for a living, which she sold to shisha shops. Cash under the table, she had to work illegally because of he...

Mike was cradling his rifle all through the conversation. His delivery was utterly poised and he gave the impression of having waited years for this moment to make a public declaration of his willi...

Mike's wife Chacha had prepared an evening meal of Mexican food, and while we ate, Mike outlined his unlikely vision.

Mikes Hillside declaration of war gave us our ending. We filmed a good buy at his house where I hugged him and chucha and thanked them for their hospitality. As we were leaving the camera operate.

Militias and the associated community of Ultra Constitutionalists and Patriots had been thrust blinking into the spotlight of national media attention in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing.

Minute for minute. The best piece of television I appeared in at that time was probably a very short segment about a visit to an exotic weapons shooting range in Arkansas called the farm and advert...

Moments later, we were in the car with me driving and will filming heading towards the cafe.

More than once I had the disconcerting impression that people expected me to be other than I am on screen and that they felt a little insulted to find that that is more or less who I am.

More than once, he recited an apothem of Wilds.

Most important facts at the top was anyone heard how much damage the cloud scudding can come further down?

Most of my spy friends had already found work elsewhere by this time and other magazines and news agencies and a couple on a new TV show named TV Nation.

Most of these revolved around my persisting fascination with macabre and taboo themes jumping off from the work I had done at TV Nation, I wanted to go further into the realm of deviance and.

Most reviewers were complimentary, many responding to the sense of pathos. Jimmy projected a man addicted to fame increasingly left behind, as we all eventually must be by fashion.

Much as he had reinvigorated the documentary form with Roger and me, Michael was attempting a new way of making TV. He would often say he wanted to see meaningful political change in his life.

Much later, David tried to claim that we had invented the Big Brother format two years before the fact, which, given that we had no House, no rig, no public voting, no evictions.

Much of it had to do with disgruntlement over an occasionally eccentric work environment coming from Flint, Michael and Kathleen sometimes gave the impression of viewing the TV nation staff as spoi...

Much of that day is lost to me, but I can reconstruct it from viewing the finished segment.

My brother had started two years earlier. I assumed my parents had picked out Westminster because it had a reputation for academic excellence and also for catering to the children of the London Med...

My brother had swarmed through the school beloved by all. I thought I would do the same, but it didn't work out that way.

My chief recollection from the visit was of Lord Harris, leaning in and confiding. His sense of confusion that his academic protege and his wife had been reduced to going on a Channel 4 program.

My classes became unruly fewer and fewer homeworks were handed in. I was putting children in detention on maths trying to claw back some control to little avail.

My cousin Justin was also living in the city. He was someone I'd grown up seeing every summer on the Cape when he'd been an excitable little ball of nervous energy.

My dad came from an immigrant family of slender means, half Italian, half French Canadian. He'd grown up in Medford, a shabby suburb of Boston, one of seven siblings, all shouting and cry.

My dad had also been an Eagle Scout. Impressive as it was, I reflected that it didn't necessarily qualify him to start his own religion.

My dad seemed to find British people in general ridiculous, though he also admired a small selection of British and Irish writers of an older generation like VS Pritchett and William Trevor.

My dad was American, a lecturer in literature at Makerere University and already a published novelist. My mum's English was studying to be a teacher so she could take a position at a girl's.

My dad worked from home tapping away on a manual typewriter, wreathed in pipe smoke.

My donation was turned down. They said it didn't freeze, though. That's hard to believe. Presumably it froze, but the sperm were all dead when they thought it out. Either that or I'm missing my tru...

My English grandma, who had a gift for simplifying people's characteristics, pegged me early on as someone who was good with his hands. It took me years to realize it might not be a compliment.

My father published short stories in Playboy, so there was also conveniently a stash of pornography in the house. I borrowed these and I find it hard to believe he never noticed them becoming more ...

My feelings at this point were complicated. I suppose I should have felt grateful that the Hamiltons had allowed us to continue filming, though I was also conscious that it was potentially helpful ...

My geekiness already in evidence was about to be turbocharged. In those days Westminster run a programme of accelerating the top two classes of each fresh intake, moving them up a year, so they took.

My guilt so heavy that I didn't even have it in me to call time on the relationship except in the most passive aggressive way by waging a devastating attritional war of non commitment.

My hesitations and the resulting delay meant that by the time I arrived at Jimmy's penthouse in Leeds, he was a coiled spring of excitement like a rodeo bull waiting for the gate to go up.

My main appear sue regarding that world was that its true believers, while undoubtedly dogmatic and paranoid were slightly less hateful and less racist than was commonly understood.

My memories of this period are dim and of the surreal. Do I really remember this variety?

My mum did her best to assuage my concerns, but I was way beyond reach in the emotional equivalent of deep space, weeping, raging, hyperventilating.

My mum would sometimes recall a performance at my preschool. We were singing Peter hammers with one hammer with accompanying gestures and she noticed that instead of hammering my own knee, I was ha...

My office mate, David had been kind enough to include me as Co writer on some of his sketches, one based on the idea that the language was running out of words and we needed to invent a new.

My other job was to hold Tony's punty rod until the blob of glass on the end heated up.

My own series.

My parents met in East Africa in Kampala.

My parents were very different, ill matched in some ways, him more emotionally expressive and freewheeling, her more steady and contained, but I suppose that was also the yin and Yang of what kept ...

My participation worked best as a device, a tongue in cheek motivation, an opportunity for incongruous comedy. But the real story needed to be bigger. My connection with the contributor who'd pledged.

My performance as Loony Bergonzi would be the last time I ever attempted to act, unless you count a role in a porn film for weird weekends many years later.

My school trousers were giving me a rash. Sir, I have a chit from matron.

My second shoot was the one about the clan rebranding.

My stay in Zimbabwe was definitely educational, though sadly not for my students. As I quit halfway through the posting, unable to keep control in the classroom.

My subject was modern history, which in classic Oxford style meant everything after the end of Roman Britain.

My wife walked into Larry Green Chevrolet. This was the only one on the lot.

My years of accumulating cuttings and scenes on the offbeat and bizarre finally paid dividends as I brought in a pile of Manila folders stuffed with research and shared them with the team.

My, but why questions were my sallies at a world full of mystery and strangeness? And often they drew attention to taboo subjects. Things you weren't supposed to say the homeless people.

NBC had financed the pilot, he said, but the network had balked at paying the full amount for the series. The BBC had stepped in providing 1/3 of the budget, according to Chris the BBC Commissioners.

Neil kept making off colour jokes. They'd been at Lord Longford 's funeral earlier in the day.

Neil returned from the kitchen and noticing us did a comical double take.

Neil was driving. Christine was feeling the effects of the alcohol. I think we need to have something to eat, Neal said. I hesitate to say you need to get something inside you.

Neil would do impersonations of the famous rivers of blood speech in Black Country tones.

Neil's robot like exterior belidor. Droll sense of humour. I would slip into my own robot like mode and we would compare notes about subjects we were both interested in.

Never having aspired to make cherub goblets, I was feeling directionless and unfulfilled.

New York still had the reputation of being dangerous in those days. The era of the mythic superpredators and feral youth raised on crack as one of their five a day was part of the recent past.

Newsradio had potential, but it also wasn't so good that the idea of writing on it seemed unrealistic.

Next came a young German wrestler in dark glasses with Mohawk hair and a trench coat. He was debuting a new character, he said in accented English. I used to be Alex Wright in WC.

Nice Guy Jim said. Married a girl from Russia I think.

Nietzsche wrote a joke is an epitaph on the death of feeling, and with Jimmy'z dislike of emotionality. His jokes were a statement he was making about his detachment from normal human affect.

No I haven't. Anne replied. People ask impertinent questions then make deductions. But I always tell people to mind their own business.

No one likes to dwell on failure in certain self actualization philosophies. There is an expression. There is no such thing as failure, only feedback.

No one really knows who I am.

No, Bob said no, no no. If you're gonna do that, you might as well forget it, because what you're doing is putting yourself down, assailing yourself with negative, doubtful situations.

No, I don't, sogge said.

No, it's supposed to be today, I said.

No, see the earth was the inheritance of his children only.

No, that's not the penthouses. The man said the main penthouses are on the next deck.

Norma Desmond in tracksuit and trainers as one journalist, later put it, tramping the twilight Scarborough Sea Front and trotting out the same one line as it catchphrases to an ever thinning audience.

Normal peoples areas reach about a foot away from their bodies, he said. Starseed are about 12 feet.

Not criminals, patients, he would say.

Not having much to go on other than the allegations of Neil's corruption and Christine snog, I was nibbling away at the idea that they might be sexual boundary pushers in some vague way.

Not into my heritage. He smiled and said, those are my English peas.

Not long after finishing, this shows word came that the BBC Two controller Mark Thompson had seen them and wanted to Commission more.

Not quite knowing what I meant by it, I asked Neil if he and Christine were saucy.

Not something you necessarily need to know as an 8 year old.

Not that I expected any of them to break kayfabe, but it was less about getting an answer than being seen to have asked the question.

Not to mention that in the film, in addition to the host of exaggerations, impostures and outright lies, he has caught retelling and the ridiculousness of his general deportment, the clothes, the Jew.

Nothing else that happened on the chute quite rose to the strange surprise of the discovery of will secret footage. Though the days had their rewards, and in filming terms we basically got what we ...

Notwithstanding my dedication to my studies and the fact that I generally did well in tests and homework, I had absorbed from my dad a certain iconoclasm and swaggering attitude.

Now able to work lawfully. She found a job as a writer on a trivia quiz website called Riddler. The web was just then taking off as a force and everyone seemed suddenly to be finding work at.

Now all this was gear she wore, he said. So instead of slinging it away I thought I'd hang on to it because these make better souvenirs than photographs.

Now it's not emotional. It's a friendly thing, Jimmy said going on to explain the difference between emotion, which he seemed to regard as suspect, gloomy and incapacitating, and friendliness, whic...

Occasionally I would wonder what it would be like to write for television, but that did not seem very realistic early in the year, I'd submitted some multiple choice questions to an MTV quiz show.

Occasionally people shouted at me in the street. Sometimes nice things like we love you, Louie or more mystifying remarks.

Oddly caught on seemed to think he was dead.

Oddly, the clientele was not markedly different than on the casino floor, mainly over 50. There were few of the men sported white pony tails and UFO themed jewellery. At one table.

Of all the things I'd expected to uncover about Jimmy Saville, the idea that he might confess to more or less kidnapping customers of his dancehalls was not high on the list.

Of John Aubrey, something in their combination of remoteness and familiarity, was oddly reassuring.

Of the hours we spent at Broadmoor and Stoke Mandeville, almost nothing was used with the single exception of a section from a car journey in which Jimmy addressed the rumours of pedophilia.

Of the TV reviewers, the only one I much cared about was Victor Lewis Smith, who wrote for the Evening Standard.

Off to the Scottish trip. We shot two more outings with Jimmy visits to Broadmoor and Stoke Mandeville. He had lodgings at both hospitals with the same sort of memorabilia as was in his penthouse f...

Offers of at home with photo features in magazines, GQ invited me to be their TV personality of the year, which I politely declined.

Often there were pages of unflattering photos of people at high society parties.

Often we'd go to Zack's place in his dad's flat off Finchley Road in north London. Zach's dad was a Napoleon obsessive, his sitting room, a vast library of leatherbound books about the armies of th...

Oh OK, great I said yeah, I thought they might go with that one.

Oh, it's good to hear that, I said.

OK, I said got it.

OK, Jerry said that's good to hear. Yeah, good to know you're excited. I didn't know if I caught you in an off moment haha. No, I said I am very much on and excited. Thank you.

OK, so you founded a patriot covenant community here in rural Idaho. Would that be correct? You'd be exactly correct. Both said I went to every state and everywhere I went.

OK, that's probably enough. I broke in thanks.

OK, well sorry about that. Take your shoes off.

On a narrow balcony, Jimmy puffed his cigar, wearing an aquamarine tracksuit and a chunky gold watch and wrap around Oakley glasses and talked about life with the Duchess.

On a whim, I took the train to Los Angeles, riding over in an Amtrak sleeper car, spending much of the time in conversation with the train attendants, who were all black and confusingly, fans of Ph...

On another table, a personal evolution trainer Michael Telstar was chatting to an elderly space channel named Bob Short.

On Christmas Day, Reverend Robert Shaw arrived and channeled his alien friend Courton in the front room of my apartment issuing horoscope. Like messages for each of us for the coming year.

On day three we flew to Montana, then drove several hours through a wild landscape of snow, patched fields and lonely farmhouses, and in the distance the Bitterroot Mountains to the far West of the.

On Earth and by extension that I would one day not be here again.

On his reworking of my pitch document, David had renamed it the boys from the BBC.

On his show he was a granter of wishes. Fix it to those who wrote in with a special request to drum with a favorite pop group or to indulge a whim, like as a Boy Scout troop famously did ask.

On instinct I mentioned Jimmy'z boast of having one of only two penthouses. The naval man looked confused as Jimmy nodded at him in pantomime fashion and said that's right, yes.

On one occasion, during filming in Scarborough, before going out for dinner with a gay friend of jimmies, he said ear Eric's a shirt lifter, right? So no jokes about poofters

On our last afternoon he took me target shooting.

On our second day we took a train up to London, where Chris was appearing on the lighthearted sports quiz. They think it's all over. He did the show in full guru and role model mode, coming off as ...

On our second or third day, I asked Jimmy about the 0 tolerance tape during a walk in the Highlands.

On religion my mum said she was agnostic. I wasn't sure what this meant. Is that the same as being atheist? No, it means I don't know, she said. But she had a soft spot.

On the 13th of July, Nadine Milroy. Sloan was convicted of perverting the course of justice, and given three years the judge commented, it's becoming all too easy for people to sell fake allegations.

On the last night of the UFO Congress at Laughlin still suffering with food poisoning, I made my way down to the closing banquet.

On the top floor of his house he had an office. Family members were stuffing envelopes with his clan newsletter to give an impression of activity.

On the walls were framed certificates and paintings of angelic looking aliens.

On those rare occasions when we received an actual yes, based with the suddenly real prospect of two weeks of filming often, we'd realise we weren't as keen as we thought. An awkward phone call wou...

Once every couple of terms I would break up with her, imagining a wealth of romantic opportunity waiting to be taken. Then reality would sink in. I'd be alone and she'd call or on at least.

Once in a while I got to arrange more left field. I wrote a satirical account of my past life regression experience at the Berkeley Psychic Institute, and another about making a donation to a sperm...

Once or twice we spoke on the phone and I suggested ideas, but by now I was distracted because David Mortimer had made good on his word and offered me a BC development deal to come up with ideas.

Once or twice, I overheard people I was working with say he really is just like he is on camera, which I found odd. The question I heard more often than any other was, is it an?

Once the kids were in bed, Chris and Karen and I ate our take away in the kitchen.

One afternoon in December 2000, I went out and watched a movie chopper at Whitey's Odeon in Bayswater to give her time to move out.

One anecdote he told involved a young female reporter who joined Jimmy on a cruise in the hopes of ensnaring him into a relationship for a putative kiss and tell story in Jimmy'z recounting the rep...

One cold December Day, nine years ago, I met up with an elderly racist leader named Pastor Richard Butler.

One dark winter afternoon. I'd visited the August Reading room of the Boston Public Library and found a book called the Directory of Internships and Applied for Work Placement Schemes at a far-flun...

One day in 1999, I'd been at a lunch for a women's magazine. I was freelancing for most of those present were in their late 20s and early 30s, and it came out that every one of us had written into ...

One evening eating a lonely meal at a fast food restaurant called El Pollo Loco at Sunset and Gower in Hollywood, I stared into my Pollio Bowl and realized I was being ridiculous.

One had asked for Jim to fix up his bedroom with new furniture and gadgets because he'd seen the same fix it done the previous week.

One morning I read a story in the papers about Jimmy attempting to comfort a depressed tiger at a zoo. There was a photo of the tiger with its paws over its ears.

One morning in April, a taxi whisked me to the airport.

One name on it was Uri Geller, the Israeli psychic. I phoned and we played tag for several weeks, then one day having called and gone through two different Israeli male voices I reached.

One night at home stoned. I was watching a dating show, the young woman said she didn't want to go on another date with the Specky bloke.

One of Bob's promotional Spiels was that he'd settled on Camei after taking a map of America and crossing off every area associated with any kind of risk.

One of my earliest memories is of watching an episode of the daytime legal drama Crown Court with my own pair. She told me the surprising fact that although we could see the people on the televisio...

One of my periodic episodes of Unsought celibacy soon followed.

One of my proudest moments came during the second season of TV Nation. While making a segment about Ted Nugent, the right wing rocker, when I was manhandled and shoved by a gatekeeper at the Washin...

One of the few times I saw Michael annoyed was when a producer showed a rough cut that had a reverse shot from inside a door. As it opened, signalling to any thoughtful viewer that the sequence had...

One of the first calls went to Jerry Groudle. The are you being served loving neo-Nazi from Idaho. Once on the phone with him, I had a feeling I've had many times when talking to contributors after...

One of the most revealing pieces of information about Jimmy and the truth about his private life came in May 2001 in the middle of the period when I was in sporadic friendly contact with him.

One of the pleasures was the discovery that Will had left the camera running during various meals we'd had capturing moments of candid reality, natural exchanges between the three of us.

One of the story ideas I'd sent over involved a character on the show becoming obsessed with Dungeons and Dragons and having a psychotic break going down into the sewers of New York. Thinking he's ...

One of the weird weekend's episodes about gangster rap in the Deep South featured a Mississippi based rapper called Mellow Tea, who styled himself a pimp.

One of their wrestlers, Jody Rushbrook, worked nine to five, changing the oil in cars at a Jiffy Lube the afternoon. I arrived in town. We spent a couple of hours at his workplace hitting each othe...

One of them had lived, but with the bottom of his jaw missing, so he drooled and had to be subtitled during his interviews.

One of them was blading for the first time, but as he went to gauge himself, he got jogged and cut too deep his face as he came off stage after the fight was a horror mask of pale white skin.

One of these friends, Chris Kelly of the rappers on gun safety idea suggested I might want to send over a packet. A collection of ideas for jokes and sketches.

One or two dissenting voices came from people who found the film overly critical of its subject and insufficiently appreciative of his charitable endeavours. Oddly, given how much debate there was.

One says I was about that, then it's the Jimmy and Louie show. The other The Odd Couple how Jimmy and Louie got fixed up.

One small thing I would just say you could maybe interrupt if someone is really going on. Oh, OK, we'll do.

One thing I don't totally understand is to what extent they know what's going to happen in the ring when they come out. Do you know what I mean?

One thing that we want to make perfectly clear is that these are not angels. These are not superhuman beings. Thor said his manner was officious.

One time Joe returned from a solo journey to Armory Way to announce that course he had asked where's glasses?

One written by my colleague Stephen Cheryl was if you were in a plane crash and you had to eat human flesh to survive, would it make more sense for you to eat the white people or the people of othe...

Only later did I realize how dubious it all was not so much ethically, since the contributors all knew more or less what they were signing on for, but dramatically the entire undergirding of my show.

Only years later did I realize, in an innocuous version of recovered memory syndrome, it must have all been a ruse to Get Me Out of the studio, though to this day the question of what was wrong.

Or Arnold Schwarzenegger. I just think you'd really be funny with him.

Or being conducted secretly in rooms away from me?

Ordinarily, a contributor might feel he was off the meter when driving to a location, so Will's grabbing a small handheld camera and continuing to shoot while the crew followed in a separate vehicl...

Oscilla and I were objects of some curiosity to our American relatives with our English accents. We were aware we came across as exotic and quaint. We played up to it, conjugating verbs in late.

Other people may have different barometers, but for me you are too famous when your image and likeness are thrust into the consciousness of people who don't like you.

Other than that, however, it didn't seem to promise much in the way of revelation and with other work to do almost a year passed before I called Beth on the phone and set-up a rendezvous.

Other than that, I worked and so my celebrity diary was thin on material.

Other TV Nation writers had written up some sheets of goofy questions, which I tried to slip in alongside the more normal ones.

Other wrestlers would be like why do you get out there and half kill yourself, but I don't. I don't half kill myself, I'm fine. I'm going to go tear the ring down and go to the Waffle House.

Otherworldliness of the Nevada and Southern California desert terrain and the self seriousness of the true believers, one of whom, Reverend Robert Short, was a space channel able to give voice to a...

Our cohabitation in that tiny apartment added to a kind of claustral isolation. We lived in a bubble of pot, smoking and backgammon, playing working our way through rented videos.

Our English teacher, Mr Townsend, was an effeminate Irishman who lived with his mum and modelled his personality on Noël Coward.

Our first contributor, Michael Lowe, lived in a quiet, unassuming single story home outside Waco, TX, which he shared with his mother.

Our first forays were faintly worrying. However, the light, entertainment, personalities, and intriguing public figures were not leaping at us with open arms.

Our other main contributor Michael Lowe's clan colleague and Superior Tom Robb, lived in a rusticated old house up a long driveway on the outskirts of Harrison, AR.

Our summers on Cape Cod became a chance to toughen us up and connect us to the homeland.

Our version of an American TV show we'd seen called Danger Freaks. We filmed a friend called Daniel Jeffries as he squirted lighter fluid on his sleeves and set them on fire. This is called the dan...

Out in the corridor, the ranks of the performers were thinning.

Over God's sake, Christine said, well, if you broadcast that, I shall come round personally and stab you.

Over that night and the following morning when we went out on a dawn patrol of the local area, presumably looking for the advanced guard of the UN invasion I grew to like Mike enjoying his.

Over the following weeks, we retooled our efforts, focusing more on the need to make the program a coherent whole.

Over the months I worked my way up the masthead, becoming an editorial assistant, and then a staff writer. I did a couple of pranks when a little known TV writer called Conan O'Brien, landed a high...

Over the years I've been tagged with the epithet phone naive, sometimes unfairly, I feel, but that encounter with the two millenarian. Neo Nazis was one time when I definitely earned the discriptio...

Pale and skinny and bespectacled. I had little or nothing to offer the city of beautiful bodies and success which made it all the more tantalizing.

Parodies of adverts. A spoof. French art film called Lum Evic Latette.

Parts of the magazine read like an issue of Tatler, but a Tatler where the staff had stayed up too late and gone. Feral gremlins ised and turned on the socialites. They were supposed to be celebrat...

Pat is an expert in time travel.

Paul in a large back office was in conversation with a PA called Spider who was lounging on a sofa.

Pausing on one long anecdotal ramble, he said to cut a Long story short, it's a bit late for that. I interjected thinking he might appreciate a well crafted zingg

People describe pro wrestling as fake, but that isn't really accurate. The athleticism is real and so are the injuries wrestlers have to perform night after night. Taking body slams and.

People in porn generally find the idea of speaking to aliens bizarre. What in fact was weirdness.

People say it's becoming more extreme.

People want to know what goes on behind the scenes, the editors said. But the whole notion of my documentaries had been insofar as possible to broaden the frame enough so that all the interesting s...

People who cut off their own body parts for sexual thrills.

Perhaps they'll be accusing us of necrophilia next, Neil said. Neil, will you stop, Christine said.

Petrol prices had recently gone up and one of the websites was selling a disc that you could stick onto your car to improve its mileage.

Philly, I said.

Photos of him from that time show he too was a prisoner of the era. Long sideburns, big collared shirt, a tight little tank top that his mother-in-law had knitted for him and jeans that were as.

Pictures of Jimmy with prime ministers and stars and anonymous young women.

Police found a strip of Rohypnol at Lahey's flat, though Leheny claimed it was planted. In any case, having made-up the tale of the group **** Milroy, Sloan's allegation of being drugged was therea...

Political attitude.

Porno seems like a dark, brooding place to us in the outside world, I said.

Possibly he was a little embarrassed that he hadn't done more to stop it in its tracks, even though he'd been right not to intervene. The entire episode was an exercise in humiliation, but not phys...

Preparing for filming had made a decision to try to be more aggressive than usual in my questioning.

Probably because I've never been linked to anybody.

Probably in his 40s slightly built mullet haired in jeans and a short sleeved collared shirt. He came to the door seeming both a little friendly and a little wary.

Probably the only thing I wrote from that time that sort of holds up was a series of interviews with rappers in which I asked them about the importance of gun safety and then invited them to freest...

Programs on husband and wife swapping sex party enthusiasts and devotees of Indian gurus. South African born nationalists and gangster rappers in The Dirty South.

Prologue, sensual eating.

Pulls on side. Christine said, Paul's helped us a lot.

Quickly it became clear it would be unlike any other filming had ever done.

Quite frankly, I've come to sympathize with the aliens if they need the human crud we have on this planet to propagate. They're welcome to it. I just wish they'd start by abducting Adolf Bush and h...

Racks of underground films organized by director. Esoteric documentaries on bizarre subjects. Chickenhawk, an access based documentary about NAMBLA, a group that.

Raised like a caged veal as the American writer, Shalom Auslander once wrote of his upbringing. She'd been shielded from pop music, or maybe had just taken no interest in it until her adolescence.

Randy's feeling was that new age prognostication of this sort was demonic. He opted out of this session, too, and when he came back, he accused Reverend short of being a Satanist. Whether or not he...

Rather than drag them around with me on the shoot, I thought it might make more sense to send them via FedEx. I took them down to a local office and then later I realized that in my heightened state.

Reaction from one or two friends and colleagues to a couple of early cuts was that I was being too mean to Jimmy. Sarah told me she felt I was insensitive in grilling him, so cold bloodedly about h...

Really, the altar is that because you sacrifice people on the altar? No, no, no, no. No, that's negative. I am positive.

Reese

Referring to a mentally ill young man who'd written him a fan letter, he breezily said he's never getting better. Seems a bit bleak. I countered, excuse me, I'll say it again. He's never getting be...

Resigning himself to staying in the room. Jimmy sat back in a reclining armchair affecting a pose of board tolerance.

Rita had written a poem about Kate and wanted to read it to us on camera. It began Kate ate a cake. Kate ate a Jelly.

Rob was smoother than Michael Lowe. He wore glasses. He didn't have a mullet. If anything with his rumpled bearing and air of educated indigence, he came off like a professor at a Community College.

Robert's enthusiasm for his weaponry was infectious and by the time we'd blasted off a thundering round from a fully functioning military grade mortar, I had more or less forgotten about the angle ...

Ruth had been a glamorous, larger than life figure, reminiscent of Glinda, the Good Witch in.

Sadly, there was only a limited outlet for many of these ideas in a newspaper dedicated to the prosaic concerns of a very average American city in which it was widely acknowledged. The only feature...

Safely inside my cocoon I attended a lecture by Charles Hall, a heavyset man, in a suit, about 60 years old.

Sapiens.

Sarah and I separated not long afterwards.

Sarah and I were still in the same studio walk up in Chelsea and also by this time married.

Sarah thought we should move to another country, possibly Vietnam.

Sarah, my girlfriend, now wife, kind of had stayed in New York. If anything. She was a little too relaxed and philosophical about our separation, saying it'll be good to have.

Sarge had no intention of letting me stop.

Sarge was bending over me, sweat dripping off his nose and onto me.

Scientology is on there too. My Scientology movie came out in 2016.

Seated across from me was Richard Boylan, a new Age educator from Sacramento.

Second rate works. Pieces that don't quite come off are more likely to reveal how they're done. It's like watching a magician perform a trick badly.

Seeming stung, he admitted to a style of parenting that was out of keeping with the modern way prescribed as he saw it by Richard and Judy, and political correctness.

Several hours later, I was heaving my guts into the toilet bowl. Most of the next day I lay in bed feeling as though I might be dying. It didn't speak well for the medallion.

Several of the writers were graduates of the nearby University of California, Santa Cruz, a cradle of radical activity and progressive politics, and I don't think it's too grandiose to say that fai...

Several times over the years, it seemed to me that I was coasting onto the off ramp from the TV highway heading towards the gritty surface streets of obsolescence.

Shaking both hand emphatically, I began well, let me just say, general grits, Colonel grits excuse me.

She became weepy, then noticing Neil was on the phone. She said if that's the Guardian, just put it down. Darling, don't even talk to them.

She called my dad who was away travelling, maybe even in Nigeria and through the phone. He tried his best to talk me down but not knowing much about that herding, people who count their well.

She doesn't even know if I'm circumcised or not. Neil said over Christ's sake, Christine said and put her hand over her face.

She laid out a vision involving the arrival of 33 spaceships, which would stack one on top of another, like a cosmic game of Jenga. In its strangeness it was oddly appealing, not.

She must have been aware Will was filming and I wondered if she was doing it for the camera. You do like to flirt don't you? I said who doesn't like to flirt? I mean if you can't have a little fun.

She placed her hand on my chest.

She said she'd been in the business for years. She'd done more than 100 films.

She said that during one conversation as she drove, the distraction of attempting to answer had caused her to break a traffic regulation. Possibly she veered into a bus lane for her ass.

She spent an afternoon with him filming on a little camera as he showed her how he would make 2 cups of tea with a single bag. He prided himself on his thriftiness

She started crying again. We've had enough to put up with in our lives without all these lies.

She was conscious of trying to counteract the lazy assumptions that were then part of the cultural climate in which her parents had occasionally been guilty of trafficking in.

She was famous at that time for having been prisons minister and defending the shackling of pregnant inmates in hospitals.

She was, as they say, a conviction politician, utterly sincere and a little unworldly.

She went on to mention a mysterious Secret Guild of techno shamans that Thor belonged to.

She went on to mention her consternation at as I saw it, a harmless bit of small talk when I'd spent the day with her in her Kent constituency and visited her home in a tiny town with a name like.

She'd also have been at Westminster. She was by coincidence, the doll I had spilled my seed over the sheets of my fever soaked bed about.

Shooting using the small cameras on car journeys in hard to reach locations had also allowed us to expand the frame and include moments of unselfconscious actuality.

Showed a couple more bits in one with some other wrestlers I practiced delivering hyped up speeches to camera, talking up fictitious future bouts under the new ring name they'd given me was.

Situated in the heart of London, Westminster was founded by Elizabeth the 1st in 15 something or maybe refounded. You can Google it if you're interested. The playwright Ben Johnson went.

So big smile, more buttering. Are you pleased?

So it doesn't leave that much, does it? I said.

So only the white people get earth. I clarified so the planet that black people get. Will it be better than the white people's planet about the same or not quite as good?

So tell me about the Hamiltons. She said. I think we might want that for one.

So there are four of them, yes.

So they could make it as nice as they want exactly. So what about if there are white people on earth and Earth not doing so well and they see that black people have done a good job on their planet?

So they have decided.

So tonight you're debuting a new persona. I asked, yes, he replied, and is there a new name? Yes, well, like I said before I was Alex. Right now I am Alexander.

So when aged 15 or so, I told my dad that I'd been smoking spliff with friends the night before. I slightly expected him to say hey, cool man, did you dig it instead?

So you're based here. Now you should come to a taping.

Some are so wrongheaded. I'm a little baffled as to what I was thinking. I had a preoccupation with US cultures, colonization of the world. Hence, exporting Baywatch was one idea and gay.

Some episodes are still proud of some. I'm a little embarrassed of all have their moments and if Twitter is anything to go by, there are many people who would prefer if I went back to that lighthea...

Some left moved on, others remained in his circle for years. There was never any jealousies, they wrote.

Some of the negative feedback was a result of how the shows were scheduled. The Christianity episode went out first, followed by the UFOs. 1 critics concluded we were taking a predictable anti reli...

Some part of him was probably keen that we should keep it to celebrities of similar calibre to him.

Some we covered, but not until many years later. The list includes eating disorders which are made a program about 20 years later in 2017.

Some wrote as though I must have been shocked to meet sensitive and appealing characters in far out worlds, as though I hadn't planned for them to be included in the shows.

Something in me kept driving me to study.

Sometimes contributors put themselves forward, which was always a bit weird. Bill Wyman's agent threw Bill's hat in the ring. The football club owner and porn magnate David Sullivan volunteered him...

Sometimes I take the coach down to London to visit Adam and Joe and Zach, who is starting a career as a comic book artist. These were my most dedicated years of pot smoking and with Joe.

Sometimes I'd be seized with worry, realizing we were in our early 20s in the greatest city on Earth and all that teeming craziness and life was passing us by.

Sometimes I'd enter TV competitions hoping to experience the vicarious fame of having my work featured.

Sometimes we'd watch 15 minutes of whatever film Joe had brought on video before conking out on Ben's mum's double bed.

Sorry I can't talk any more now. Neil said into the phone.

Sporadically I emailed ideas to David Mortimer for series with me and them long incoherent rambles with statements of intent and philosophical underpinnings. Not much came back.

Spy Mongol messenger, Mongol messenger, spy.

Star Trek does actually represent some of the battles that were fought when Lucifer actually came to the Earth and declared himself a God.

Still, he seemed a marginal figure and I continued to hesitate. What was he actually doing? What would we be filming? I was used to doing stories about weird people, but weird people with a sense o...

Still, I tried my best.

Still, it had its share of ridiculous traditions, such as the annual tossing of the Grees, a huge inedible pancake that was thrown each Shrove Tuesday, up school, amidst.

Still, the early names in these situations are usually unrealistic channel executives suggesting you spend a week bunking up with George Bush or the Duke of Edinburgh. That's a great idea, yeah, well.

Still, there was no question of not continuing and so two days after the arrest, after a day off from filming, Neil Christine, will and I drove up to the Hamiltons Cheshire pile.

Story generation was always an issue.

Strawberries and cream were tickling around my mouth. I was aware of a low throaty sound and a soft face pressing against my cheeks.

Stringfellow never showed much interest in our overtures, and as proved the case more than once, Jimmy's vaunted connections led to no material advantage whatsoever for the production.

Suddenly they splayed out as though butting up against an invisible force field. Ambre, what's that? 15 feet, Richard said.

Tall Lantern jawed and perma stubbled. He looked undeniably like a TV executive and it was easy to forget that he was only in his 20s.

Tebbetts letter was memorable because he expressed some reservations that he might be too boring.

Technically we did everything correctly. There was no one else involved. It was a mutual decision, and at some level it was confusing to me that you can be honest with someone. Try to be kind, try ...

That ain't nothing you ain't done nothing he shouted if you're going to puke puke chunks.

That both been raised in churchgoing households but were lapsed.

That didn't do very well, he said.

That even something untrue can produce an effect.

That first weird weekend with the militiamen and survivalists and the sense of belonging I've felt on location among people utterly unlike me taught me something about my own survival in the world ...

That image still makes me sigh inwardly whenever I see it in random places on the Internet, where it looks like a ninja awaiting the right moment to assassinate my ego.

That it felt a little light falling through a trap door.

That Monty Python guy on PBS's Michael Palin. He's great, but we're not doing gentle comedy. Americans don't want that. You've got to kick ass and take names, get in there. And she.

That night after supper I was reclining on a sofa when Christine came and sat next to me, Neil was out of the room. She began stroking my cheek. You haven't shaved, she said.

That night at our hotel in Missoula, Mt. Chris and I got drunk as a celebratory valediction to the shoot I overslept the next day and very nearly missed the flight back to New York.

That night I called my exec Kevin. I told him I wasn't sure how well it was going. Jimmy was subjecting me to a barrage of banter at the same time I had the feeling there was almost nothing he woul...

That night I felt relieved to have just got through the day, but without anyone saying it, I could tell I wasn't doing very well.

That night I slept in the Duchess's bed.

That night I tried the wine. It was fractionally better.

That night, I worried that Bob and I weren't getting to know one another after all, our agendas appeared to be at loggerheads. His was to expound the many times he'd been privileged with supernatur...

That sadness, which contrasted with the slightly irritating qualities of show business and banter, might make for an intriguing portrait.

That seemed like a job that wouldn't be too demanding. Professional boffin insulated from the world.

That sometimes a con is also an act of kindness.

That time, he'd gone into a trance and tuned in the prognostications of a spaceman named Courton.

That too may not have helped his mood.

That was about as far as we got in the warmth stakes.

That was all in the future when I started, I was simply intent on lasting from week to week, working from segment to segment. I remember thinking if I could get enough together for a real.

That was cool. I heard myself exclaim.

That was mildly encouraging.

That was one of the rhymes. Then one day the beggar man leaves town and no one knows where he's gone.

That's good, that is, he said, when it had finished.

That's Kortan, Bob said.

That's my policy and it's work to dream.

That's rather a lot. I said you can send money orders. You can also send cash registered.

The accusation that Neil had taken bribes came from the owner of Harrods. Mohammed Al Fayed Fayed said he'd given Neil money in brown envelopes. Neil disputed this and brought a libel suit against ...

The allegations against the Hamiltons were a sensation. The story was across all the news channels and in the tabloids, quickly mutating into a meta story about the ludicrousness of the media circus.

The American anarcho capitalist philosopher Robert Nozick. The historian Thomas Carlyle and Nietzsche, of whom Neil was a great fan and had done a line drawing which hung framed on the wall.

The answer was first random interview requests. I agreed to these with alacrity. I did one with a Welsh Railway magazine and another with two fans from a student paper who asked questions.

The apartment was on the second story of an elegant brownstone overlooking Fort Green Park on a street lined with towering plane trees.

The approaching year 2000 heralded the second coming or the arrival of a fleet of intergalactic spaceships, or at the very least, some glitches on your desktop PC.

The atmosphere in the room was reminiscent of a team sent to survey the wreckage from an accident.

The atmosphere was charged a little giddy like market day.

The bachelor pad offering chocolates and coffees or glasses of red wine. Always with some anecdote of recent vintage to do with an advertising campaign he'd just done or an interview in a high prof...

The Beaver banging and tail chasing already delayed now drifted further behind schedule as I applied myself to essay writing and wrote learning with my wanted obsessiveness.

The best I can explain it is that I was conscious of wanting to move away from my ordinary life, my upbringing London, my parents, and that even the BBC represented something too close to where I'd...

The bizarre details piled up the shock troops of the UN might be planning to grab Americans, guns or implement a mass program of computer chipping the citizenry.

The British prejudices about Yanks.

The call of the weird.

The challenge as filming progressed was how to get past the Pontifical persona to a more honest and grounded version of the man.

The children all wore uniforms and did homework. They studied French and Latin. After the relaxed all must have prizes. Attitude of my primary, it seemed exotic.

The choice of Vietnam was fairly arbitrary, far away from family friendly seeming a chance to practice my French.

The church itself was a perfect combination of mildness and menace.

The city was the reverse, aloof and indifferent. It ignored me and I fell hard for it. As a result, in pickup artist parlance, they call this negging seduction by Inc.

The city's lower income areas were full of these emporium of castoffs records. Old clothes and board games, kitchen utensils.

The code of secrecy that surrounds wrestling is sometimes called kayfabe, a term whose origin is disputed but which means presenting staged performances as though they are real.

The comedy arose from the historian O'Brien's battlement and confusion at the direction of my questions is polite and bookish, bemusement at being asked if he would be doing stupid pet tricks on hi...

The conceit was that he would be shooting our TV show, which would take us to trouble spots around the world, but he'd also be appearing in it.

The Congress is a week long event comprising of daily lectures, a UFO Film Festival and a couple of parties. I'd arrived on the evening of the meet the Speaker's party in AB.

The conversation continued. I was asking about women. He found attractive and whether it mattered what race they were, the name Roseanne came up. She's *******, ain't she? Michael said.

The corridors outside Jim South's world modelling were clogged with porn performers. A casting call was in progress, a chance to schmooze with directors, producers, photographers.

The detail that strikes me now is that Millroy Sloan complained of feeling woozy after drinking a glass of red wine, brought to her by Mahaney.

The director, Ori Pashar, was there supposedly the real life model for the Burt Reynolds character in Boogie Nights.

The directors are the motors of the film to which they're attached. They guide the research, do the wrecky they're in charge on location, and they sit in full time on the edit with the editor while...

The DJ Tony Blackburn expressed interest as did Malcolm McLaren, Steven Berkoff and Norman Tebbitt.

The Dons seemed kindly one, looked old enough for me to be concerned about his ability to live out the duration of the interview. Another a little younger in tweeds smiled, and after some throat.

The door opened to reveal an old man in a Nike tracksuit. His white hair pulled back in a ponytail and an unlit cigar in his hand.

The drive to barking side involved a long circuitous car ride through the capillaries of East London's traffic system.

The editors wrote this is just a small sampling of the literally sack loads of mail we received.

The elephant in the room, which no one mentioned, but to my mind was all but snorting and hosing us with its trunk was my total incompetence.

The encounters were stronger for my being less in control. There was comedy in seeing me diffidently probe, Michael Lowe, and in his fumbling attempts to explain away the unexplainable.

The ensuing carnage and gore of the evening's performance took place before a crowd of 70 or so, some of them small children.

The episode about male porn performers in particular benefited from this double edged approach.

The evidence in the Bible points to the fact that September 6th of 1994 will be the last day of the final tribulation period, he said.

The ex headmaster and school founder are half fossilised Edwardian leftover called Mr. Martin Hurst.

The exact nature of the quasi, whatever it was, is hard to parse in hindsight, the view is too clouded by the revelations. Certainly he was using us for a sense of relevance and possibly with the h...

The excitement wore off pretty fast.

The experience of watching the rushes with David back in the office was funereal. I looked a mess unshaven with long floppy hair. The supposed presenter. I was the least present.

The expression that comes to mind is hoping for lightning to strike.

The faces of the performers change, I thought, but the behind the scenes people stayed the same.

The fact of us making a documentary prefaced with the phrase in a bizarre twist.

The family fortunes changed in 1975 when my dad wrote a best selling travel book, The Great Railway Bazaar. The success was enough to make him a literary celebrity at the young age of 34.

The fields seemed not to have moved on a great deal in eight years. The basic script was still that the authorities are in contact with alien civilizations that they allow abductions of humans in r...

The first contacts with Jimmy that were not strictly journalistic had begun around the time we were called upon to promote the original documentary.

The first few moments were a little awkward. I explained who I was, reminded him of the TV show we made. He sounded shaky, as though he knew he'd been rumbled.

The first Gulf War had been fought earlier in the year. Margaret Thatcher had recently left office and the mood in Britain was bleak. The hectic and high paced era of the 80s, all shoulder pads and.

The first night in Cheshire over a dinner for which Christine made the same bloody Mary Jelly as she had for the alibi providing party. I put it to them that people felt there was a mystery at the ...

The flat out weirdness and sinister quality of a celebrity who until recently had sat close to the power centres of British public life.

The flat was barely furnished with a TV and a bed. It was a little like visiting a B&B. The awkward feeling of doing business in someone's home.

The flat was furnished with the mementos of a life dedicated to show business and charity fundraising certificates and trophies were everywhere. It was also visibly a bachelor's den. Most of the fu...

The flat which overlooked Battersea Park was cozy and piled with knickknacks and books. A mug in the kitchen said I am a naughty 40. There were prints and portraits on the walls and old politics.

The focal point of the militia episode was to be almost heaven, a purpose built covenant community in the central Idaho Panhandle. Founded by a much decorated ex army Colonel called Bob.

The following morning the crew left and went home for the next couple of days. It would just be me and will and Jimmy and I was imagining it would be quieter. Now the only thing in the diary was a ...

The following morning unprompted she'd masturbated him.

The following three days I attended lectures by Alien abductees and supposed government whistleblowers, interviewed experts, and asked around about Thor and the Alien resistance movement.

The following week the presenter Roy Castle came on with a pile of reference books and engraved tones assured viewers that the child had been mistaken, figuratively crushing him with the books.

The forks were so mangled that each time was splayed out and twisted.

The good news is it looks like a sitcom script was one of the more positive remarks.

The greasy breakfast was now making its presence known. I was beginning to feel nauseous. I'm going to throw up, I said and went to get a small paper cup of water from the cooler. Seeing this, Sir.

The Guild turned out to have a website with pages of magical products for sale, Aladdin's lamps, spellbooks, ritual kits.

The Hamiltons had been among the names we approached without thinking that hard about whether or not we really wanted a film with them.

The Hamiltons were friendly, forthcoming, conscious of the need to perform for the camera.

The heightened reality of the occasion meant I thought I could feel them both improvising the drama in different keys, jolly and serious and sad.

The house was full of books editions of Yukio, Mishima, Graham Greene, Patrick White, Albert Camus, Anthony Burgess, without them saying it without them needing to say it.

The idea began gestating of making more out of those contributors.

The idea of going back inside and reenacting a heartfelt farewell would have struck me as almost sacrilegious.

The idea of someone putting all their noble qualities of dedication and bravery at the service of A cause that was so weird struck me as funny, but also touching. I saw an opportunity.

The idea of the diary went in and out of focus. At times it felt like a dumping ground for my worst insecurities since some of these were to do with the idea of doing the diary. A lot of the writin...

The idea that Jimmy's good works were increasingly regarded as ludicrous and seized on as an opportunity to lampoon him, helped focus my thinking.

The idea was as much as possible to stay close to the ground, blend in and make ourselves inconspicuous like anthropologists trying to film a remote tribe.

The Ike Turner film was a misadventure. His exquisite sensitivity meant he was singularly unsuited to a format that required him to engage in cheeky badinage with the BC interrogator.

The image is that every Saturday night you put on your clan robes and go out and lynch a black person or burn down somebody's home. That's the image of a bunch of yahoos out night riding in the bac...

The impact on my parents must have been huge recognition financial security. In my world it meant seeing him on the flyleaves of copies of the book and international editions arriving from.

The implication was that Jimmy's help was making the beast feel even more desperate and forlorn.

The impression I had was that the sex was something they tolerated as the price of being part of his inner circle, and the complaints they had were less about as they characterized it. Then his sex...

The in office stuff largely took the form of we heard back from Noel Edmonds. It's a no I'm afraid.

The interventionist high concept dimension felt ballsy and brave like we were real TV makers as opposed to documentary chroniclers of a slightly dull but worthy sort.

The interview ended soon after I cycled back home. I have no idea what I thought about on the way back. Possibly Lucretius's de rerum Natura, which I was reading, or just as likely.

The interview with Karen Greenlee, the unrepentant Necrophile in which she talked candidly about having sex with corpses while working at an undertaker, made a particular impression.

The job was for two months, but for me a big part of the appeal was that my day job could be combined with the active pursuit of my destiny as a sitcom writer.

The kitchen filled up couples a handful of singles, male and female, in roughly equal measure, most in their 30s and 40s.

The last idea was for an immersive documentary Series A longer form version of my TV Nation segments.

The last mention of Thor's name was in 1998, the same year my UFO documentary aired.

The least embarrassing UK rapper was silver bullet, a verbal Spitfire from Aylesbury who like the Beowulf poet, used alliteration in some of his lyrics.

The letter which I showed to others on the production appeared to put to bed at least two hypothesis regarding his sexuality, that he might be gay or simply asexual.

The lot itself had the air of a medieval walled town with its high walls and guarded gates, and in place of a portcullis and electric pole that went up.

The lyrics went something like this.

The male performers were fewer buffed and groomed in tight sleeveless T-shirts.

The manager of the apartment was a Puerto Rican crack addict called Ray. His voice was broken and Husky from drug use and he spent the warmer evenings playing dominoes on a folding table in front o...

The material wasn't like anything I'd seen before, and Kevin seemed unimpressed. He commented that he wasn't seeing the unself conscious Yorkshire Mizer he'd enjoyed on the wrecky tape. Jimmy was m...

The Met would later claim that they had twice invited the Hamiltons to provide alibis, which would have forestalled the arrest. The Hamiltons deny this.

The mix up with the crew and the ensuing delay blew out the schedule. We were able to film the Lunarian choir singing and bizarre space song about the flying saucers coming but an interview with the.

The moment was so odd that both of us giggled awkwardly.

The mood in the room had become awkward again, and no truthfully, it really didn't matter which arm the Klan figurine was saluting with. It was as racist. Either way, the revelation of the mistake ...

The more I thought about it, the more I liked this idea.

The most intimate moments with Anne came during a cruise on a Norwegian liner.

The most intriguing factoid about Anne may have been that she was so it was said, Virgo Intacta, like Edward Woodward in the Wicker man. A possible candidate for a placatory

The most striking phrase from the morning came on the subject of his relations with women. He viewed them as brain damage. He said it with enough irony to give himself some deniability. Wonderful, ...

The next afternoon, having given notice on my legal fact checking job, I went into the TV nation offices with my bags packed to pick up my tickets and have a quick briefing chat with Michael.

The next day by our appointed channelling time, Bob seemed frazzled and I was grouchy.

The next day I followed him to the set of a movie called Twisted Shot on a sound stage. Twisted was the kind of movie that became a rarity after Gonzo, the unscripted quasi documentary.

The next day I woke to the sound of Jimmy knocking on the bedroom door, then cackling as he walked away.

The next day we flew down to San Diego on the plane. David passed along a packet of information about our next group.

The night before I was due to leave after the disaster of the first shoot, I was crazed with anxiety. I was packing and planning, cursing the world for putting me in a position that was.

The normal thing is I try to thwart the juth plan for the takeover of the world. He replied anything I can do to screw a Jew. I'll do. He paused, then added I.

The one change was a subplot to do with alternative fuel sources that the aliens have shared with the government, and which the government is hiding.

The only example of British television I found in any way relevant to what I hope to do was a couple of episodes of a series called the Ronson Mission hosted by a comic journalist called Jon Ronson.

The only identifying characteristic she could come up with was a blue dress I asked.

The only trouble with this scenario was that I didn't lead a glamorous existence, nor did I make the scene on any regular basis. My life was pretty boring.

The other celebrity panelists on the quiz, David Gower, Rory McGrath turned on him and mocked his speech impediment and a funny little hat he was wearing afterwards. Chris was mournful and a little...

The other storied side benefit of fame sexual opportunity was little in evidence, though this was at least partly due to my now being back with Sarah, my girlfriend, wife, and living.

The owner manager was Dean Puckett, a friendly mullet haired carpet fitter whose nom de guerre was Rick Diesel.

The owner, Robert Lee Warren, a droll, good old boy and Vietnam vet had laid out a selection of high calibre guns on a table like a paramilitary buffet.

The paradox of wishing for moments of unplanned jeopardy is of course that they can't be planned.

The pastor hunched over the wheel of the car and as we speed through the snow covered countryside. Jerry shared his love of English culture, the comedy of Benny Hill, the scenery around Cheltenham ...

The pastor was then in his 80s and pretty decrepit Jerry was in his 60s, pudgy, wearing thick glasses and a cowboy hat.

The phrasing which I unintentionally memorized, warmed my spirits in low moments for several years afterwards.

The place looked like a child with limited imagination had constructed it out of huge grey Lego bricks. It's only human feature and internal courtyard was closed off because shadowy figures.

The plan was for us all to drive to the future landing site of the Intergalactic Federation fleet. Charles, Leanne and I would be riding in the unarius space caddy, a bright blue Cadillac with a mo...

The planned bits of comedy had mostly fallen flat. The clever questions I'd written had mostly gone unasked. What had saved us was a quality of relaxed intimacy with our contributors, how they?

The police had spoken to him about it. Your daughter comes in here, he told them. Tell me and I'll let them slice. Have their way with them.

The production had to pay for new flights.

The production offices rang with the music of a never ending roundelay entitled what about?

The Puppyish TV presenter Keith Chegwin was on board. He was launching around the clock streaming channel from his home entitled Checkers Bedroom.

The rest of the day involved a saunter around Scarborough as dusk came on.

The result was on the 10th of August, 2001. I stood on a road near Harley Street and was blindsided by Neil telling me that he and Christine were about to drive with their lawyer to a police.

The same director made another film about the pornographer Al Goldstein called Scrooge, which had a scene on an adult film set that was both funny and imbued with the surprising dignity and pathos.

The school charged huge fees, though its proximity to the West End meant its atmosphere was arguably a little less fusty than some other public schools.

The school uniform was a black suit. The children tended to be bespectacled and hunched over in pale. They'd stalk around the yard like a phalanx of miniaturized undertakers hands thrust into.

The school was famous for its choir that by tradition, appeared on Blue Peter every Christmas, though it went unrecorded in annals and history books. 1978 was a year of great moment in our house.

The sequence in which Jimmy having fractured a leg went to hospital, but not before notifying a local photographer with a view to making it a national news story.

The shoot with air and Russo was even more lamentable. We met him at his Beverly Hills mansion. He had the over tweaked attitude of someone who's seen through the matrix of programmed reality and c...

The show was an extravaganza of ultra muscular men in boots, slamming and swinging one another around the ring and tumbling over ropes. A study in paradoxical violence. It was a ludic.

The sound recordist miked up Harold Camping. We sat in his office, me with my questions, folded up in the inside pocket of the thrift store jacket. I was wearing craggy and deep voiced camping. Mus...

The staff looked at me as if to say what could possibly be more important than finding out you are actually a trillion year old space alien.

The star wrestler fought under the name Brian Danzig, brooding and a little withdrawn. He worked in a sock factory, but for his bouts, Brian had a horror clown persona with ghoulish black and.

The startling thing was that the message, while recognizably Thorn's voice, was delivered in a fake English accent.

The strange images and random phrases from programs you liked or remembered were like flotsam and seawrack rubbish that could be reconstituted and repurposed as jokes and impressions were.

The strange reality check engendered by the call, the ugliness of his discourse and his complete inappropriateness as a candidate for what was basically a reality TV format might have.

The strange sense of the stakes involved gave the car ride a surreal quality. I wondered how long they'd known about the allegation, whether they had or hadn't done it. Both options struck me as ho...

The studio, which belonged to a sleepy young glass sculptor called Tony Devlin mainly produced cherub Goblets.

The stuff the incredible shrinking Man American Ninja 2 rimo unarmed and dangerous others I still remember fondly like Reanimator.

The subject of the paranormalist Uri Geller came up.

The success of when Louis met Jimmy, followed by series three of weird weekends and then the Paul and Debbie Film meant my stock was rising and I don't doubt that this also factored into Jimmy's th...

The summer after I graduated, I postponed my place at SOAS and flew to Boston. I did it on a whim, weary of the London jobs market which was then in the throes of a recession. Thinking I could post.

The teacher was sympathetic, but confused. She didn't recognize me in the description on the way out. My mum passed by my classroom and through the door she could see me running along the tops of the.

The term a small ceremony doesn't really do justice to the minimalism of the occasion.

The thing is, he said now, betraying a very slight speech defect. The important thing is to have fun.

The trip up to record the Jimmy Links for the DVD collection. Best of weird weekends was another time Jimmy gave hints of dark interests.

The truth is it's a lot to ask of anyone to film for days on end, with or without the involvement of a puckish BBC Inquisitor.

The UNARIUS headquarters were on a low rise commercial strip in El Cajon, a small city in the mountains, some miles east of San Diego.

The undercurrents of American culture fascinated me. The backward looking. The bizarre drawing from the then flourishing world of zines, self published fanzines like Don Decosse's.

The venue for the AIF event was a school gymnasium.

The walls of the Pastors office were stocked with racist leaflets in metal holders, cold and cluttered. It was like the office of an underfunded charitable organization.

The waves in this metaphor are the vagaries of life itself. You follow stories and people that have a likelihood of leading to actuality driven scenes. A porn star failing to get wood on set a conf...

The whole exercise was haunted, not so much by the ghost of Christmas past, as by shades of Jerry Springer past.

The whole thing is an absolute nightmare, Christine said as we thought. Max Clifford. Why would the police ask us about Max Clifford's course? He's behind it. He's got what he wanted.

The wholesome atmosphere of the school gymnasium, its association with nativity plays, and bean bags made a strange contrast to the extremity of the display.

The women were all shapes and sizes tall, short, busty flat chested Raven head pale goth girls bottle blonde girls.

The workout continued.

The workout moved outside and still feeling the need to prove my willing to the wrestlers. I joined them as they ran lengths in the gym parking lot.

The world of porn performers, on the other hand, is a village in which people live and work and even die together. It is not a hobby, it is a job and an all consuming identity, which puts its price.

The year I was due to go on there was an industrial dispute and all the Christmas programming was cancelled on the BBC. We still got Blue Peter badges, but it seemed all too typical me missing.

Their spokesperson was a past life regression teacher. Leanne Downey. Leanne was in her early 30s fawn like and bright eyed in her teacherly dress with sparkly jewellery and big ears.

Then at Cliff's command Group One put eye masks on and the rest of US groups two and three said about massaging, stroking and feeding.

Then at one remove there were segment producers, some of them distinguished documentary filmmakers with Oscar nominations to their credit.

Then he began writing a book that would appear as downsized, this.

Then he took me on a visit to a local store that made-up little pieces of branded clan merchandise, key chains, ballpoint pens, fly swats.

Then he went to work editing a scene and complaining about one of the extras who was overacting. This fucking guy at the back is killing me, he said.

Then I discovered he'd once collaborated on a book by a hypnotist friend of mine who told me Thor sometimes went by the name James Templar.

Then Michael asked, have you seen Roger and me?

Then my dad wrote to say he was coming to the country and wanted a visit. I sent him a mealy mouthed letter of non encouragement, feeling it undermined the purpose of my being there. Which was I su...

Then perhaps feeling you've overdone the compliment he added. I find all the voices of ordinary people beautiful.

Then production went into high gear, finding fresh celebrity candidates for Louis Theroux documentaries.

Then showed him on stage shouting about taking back the country for White America and doing what looked like a Nazi salute.

Then suddenly the paper began twisting first one way, then the other, as Michael conducted it.

Then the multi world title holding boxer Chris Eubank and a little after that, the diminutive Conservative politician Ann Widdecombe.

Then the performance artist Karen Finley had been in the frame, but it was said she'd wanted to bring her baby and partner making the flights prohibitively expensive.

Then their diary went a bit quiet for a few weeks. It wasn't quite clear what else there was to do with the Hamiltons, and there was a dawning possibility that they were so unbusy that we might nee...

Then there is another version of the story that sees them as part timers preoccupied with their work, delegating their responsibilities to O pairs intermittently present under interested.

Then through the letter slot of his penthouse door, I don't believe you exist.

Then we all made our way downstairs to a basement where mats were laid out and gentle music was playing.

Then we drove off.

Then we learned that Beau had a narrow window of availability. He spent his winters in Nevada, whereas we needed him to be an Idaho at his home in almost heaven.

Then with a gleam of triumph, he would say, but I did become like my mother.

There had been a wave of shock and outrage news stories and TV profiles, but by late 1996 the movement seemed somewhat in abeyance.

There has been a conspiracy for some years by a group of people that have become known loosely as the New World order. He said. The problem with the new world order and the one world government.

There is a world of difference between stumbling across funny contributors in weird situations on location and on the other hand, flying them out of their normal environment to engineer comical she...

There is no suspense left in sex anymore, Margold said. It's all right in the face. It reminds me of Rome at the end of the empire. The worst excesses at the Colosseum.

There is one that celebrates the free Spiritedness and open mindedness my parents brought to their duties a benign neglect that allowed us to find our own fun and meant they weren't overly worried ...

There still exists some video of these evenings shot by Adam. If Vladimir Putin is ever minded to blackmail me, I'd suggest he take a look at them. There's no peeing, but there are definite.

There was a celebratory dinner with the BBC Two controller at a West London restaurant.

There was a copy of the Joy of sex that used to lie around the house, showing line drawings of an old hairy man and a young woman making love and our bodies ourselves, which encouraged readers to l...

There was a general awareness that it was possible. We were embarked on a monumental folly, a failure. We were all thinking it. Everyone was worried, which meant maybe I could.

There was a house style that dictated everything should be shot handheld. When a correspondent met a contributor for the first time, you captured it for real. There were no sit down interviews, eve...

There was a scene in it in which a superfan peed in Allen's mouth as a birthday treat, causing Allen reflexively to vomit.

There was a team of writers who came up with ideas and who tended to be younger and less ideological than the rest of the staff, but who were in a way certainly at the beginning, Michael's inner ci...

There was a winning quality in the juxtaposition of mildness and malice, and the kind of maturity in the way the segment did not push its judgments too hard.

There was almost always some pretext for the visits. A bit of taping, some publicity plus whatever bit of copy I thought I might extract from my book, but there was also a social dimension and for ...

There was also a bizarre encounter on a visit to the headquarters of the Arian Nations, a white power group where my elderly neo-Nazi chaperone and guide around the compound, Reverend Jerry grew.

There was also a whiff of thows opportunism.

There was also the possibility of a UN military assault, though it was all rather vague and I wasn't sure how much of it Beau really believed and how much was a marketing pitch designed to help him...

There was an idea for a travelogue in which my brother would appear he'd been working as a camera operator and reporter at a start-up local TV channel.

There was an occasion apropos of God knows what, but possibly his volunteer work at Leeds General Infirmary and his interactions with sex workers when they'd come in to get patched up on the weeken...

There was more advice, but it was flying by and for some reason the main Pearl of wisdom that stayed with me was to be careful not to interrupt or to talk over my interview subjects as it made the ...

There was much talk of a UN backed plot to take over the world. We hoped Bogue writes might be a central character in our episode.

There was no film in the camera since the point wasn't to record the occasion, but to create a sense of TV glamour and excitement.

There was one for a millennial themed magazine show, provisionally titled the End of the World News. It would have segments about women who had sex with corpses and superfans who peed in people's m...

There was only one TV appearance on an I'll fated Channel 5 chat show hosted by the Scottish comedian Jack Dougherty.

There was something about the weirdness of Ronson that I enjoyed his sly subversiveness mixed with awkwardness and the feeling the shows had have always being in motion.

There was something exhausting and ultimately futile about this community where unverifiable stories piled up with no resolution.

There was video of me saying good night to will and Jimmy and then with me off stage and out of earshot. Jimmy appeared to relax.

There wasn't a massive demand on my time.

There we stayed for three days while the media camped outside. It was a little like the mask of the Red Death.

There were also clan figurines doing what looked like Nazi salutes. Why is he sticking his arm in the air like that I asked.

There were DVD's of crop circles you could get your aura photographed or have a psychic body scanner diagnose your ailments.

There were illustrations of LRRH as a teenager trading gnostic insights into life's big questions with Native American shamans in Montana and Wrinkly Asian holy men in Las.

There were maybe four of these visits, possibly three of them involved in overnight stay. Will would sleep on the sofa. I'd sleep in the spare room. Invariably there would be a trip to the flying p...

There were nods I imagine. Looking back, they were registering my evident anxiety and wondering whether, if pushed too hard, I might burst into flames or just short circuit.

There's a lot to be said for being avoidable, but for a couple of months for those who read papers and watched TV, I was hard to miss.

There's an early photograph from a newspaper feature about mums that work outside the home that shows her resplendent in flares and a short sleeved jumper with puffy shirt sleeves poking out as she.

There's nothing real about you, Sarah said to me late in 2000, a phrase that went around in my head for years afterwards resonating in an awful way with a put down. Jimmy Saville delivered around the.

There's too much product, he said.

These guys go through this every damn day. Sarge said sweat spanking off his shiny head and nipples.

These index cards were only ever a rough guide. They tended to feature more contributors than we would end up using, and the shape would change as characters dropped out. Still, they were almost al...

These occasions always feel haunted by the ghost of a notional future Daily Mail investigation into excessive BBC hospitality. 1 glass of wine only and check who else is?

These sentiments, interleaved with big thoughts about life, the death of God's crime and punishment, which I'd recently read a Paisley shirt I'd bought at the Great gear market on the King's Road a...

These skirts with diadems and wands and sparkly jewelry. Charles in sober suit and tie, liked her over the top clothes sense, but he had brought an unlikely accent about.

These were ostentatious gold coated ojedas, the kind of goblets Uday and Kusai Hussein might have enjoyed using to drink the blood of their enemies.

They also had a large rambling house in Cheshire, but they were in the process of selling that to pay their legal bills.

They also sent a letter to the school which my head of House was kind enough to read out to me. It made reference to this remarkable young man and I remember thinking how odd it was that they called.

They couldn't tell me what it was they said. I was fairly sure it didn't involve dressing up as Badgers, but off camera, possibly off the record they told will my director a little more.

They didn't seem to have many members.

They eventually grow weary of doing this and disappear into the real world.

They fell in love, married, and my brother followed less than nine months afterwards.

They got so desperate they drank horse piss didn't they dad Zach said all right lads, have fun, Zach's dad would say, then surrounded by the walls of dusty volumes, we'd get him.

They had brought old ticket stubs and photographs, including some that had been taken just a few years previously at a reunion of the group which Jimmy had hosted at his flat close to Regents Park.

They have some advanced technology, but they can be killed if necessary.

They liked to go for entertainment in casinos. Charles said. They're just like we are.

They made their own films. David said very far out. Space films with wacky special effects. They're rather fun.

They painted a picture of a coterie of teenage fans who would meet in studio dressing rooms and caravans to socialize and catch up.

They ran the letter. A couple of months later, there was a special letters page given over to replies, all of them - 1 began.

They sold in high class stores for large sums and supposedly were made in accordance with an age-old Venetian glass twisting technique. In fact, our guilty secret was that.

They spoke English and made frequent trips to Las Vegas, where CIA agents would chaperone them.

They thought I was making fun of them.

They took me the tests to see if I might be deaf. I was probably three or four given headphones for the first time while the doctor dropped tiddlywinks into a jar then whispered numbers into my ear...

They walked in a few minutes late too smartly dressed women in their mid 40s, both slightly nervous. It soon emerged they were worried that Jimmy might find out we were meeting.

They were called the Unarius Academy of Science and their predictions involved a cargo cult style prophecy of a vast number of flying saucers landing in the near future, bringing gifts of tech.

They were like a transatlantic cop team at Dempsey and Makepeace over the lower echelons of the TV world. Both could also shoot with the small cameras that were then still relatively new as a format.

They were like alien creatures or robots.

They were vague on when the apocalypse would happen and when Jesus was coming. They just knew it would be soon and who he was coming for. Specifically. White people with other races banished to oth...

They weren't busy as documentary material. It wasn't a lot to go on. Still, they made an intriguing couple. There was something about them. His otherworldly quality and her intensity, and we.

Think of a society where everybody's telepathic, he said. Imagine being a used car salesman when everyone knows what you're thinking.

Thinking of the then popular band Oasis and two famous TV presenting brothers, I pitched it as the Gallaghers meets the dimble bees, hence the gamble bees.

This all felt rather theoretical. I didn't lend it much credence. It felt premature to begin outfitting my own escape vessel when the mothership was still afloat, albeit listing badly.

This camera guy I'm not happy about how he shot this. He needs to stay on the interviewees. He's coming back to me too much. Remember, you can always repeat your own lines, but the go.

This didn't apply to Jimmy. I was worried he was simply irritating. What hope did we have of making him interesting?

This exchange, which I probably would not remember, had it not been in the show later came to be much repeated. It was odd because it was only at his prompting that I raised the question of the rum...

This had not previously occurred to me as a possibility, but from then on I saw it as an obligation.

This had the effect of isolating them from the rest of their older peers, making them even more freakish and socially disadvantaged, which was probably the idea behind it, to make them likely to wo...

This hasn't got anything to do with law. He said principally what this is about is a psychology game.

This I was more than happy to do. I wondered if it might be the safe word that would end the torture thinking it might help. I added. I'm a dying cockroach because I haven't got the will to win.

This involved the new boys acting as servants to the older boys, waking them up, delivering newspapers, making toast on boxy industrial machines with conveyor belts.

This is an incredibly safe space to explore, touch to, explore sensuality.

This is not a weird sexual euphemism, but technical glass jargon. As any fellow Glassworkers listening will recognize.

This is salute grand dragon. Michael replied a lot of times the media would think it's a Nazi salute. It looks a little bit like a Nazi salute. Yes Sir, but it is a right hand woman salute.

This is the honourable cotton calling on behalf of the planet Jupiter.

This is very, very pleasant, he said, then addressing imagined accusations of being saccharine, he said, might be a bit yucky for them, meaning us.

This isn't as difficult as it first appears. If you run around a hilltop during a thunderstorm, waving a long copper stick in the air, you're likely to get struck by lightning.

This made sense for a couple of reasons. One was that porn given the sexually charged material was easier to get wrong. It was also a more confusing world to penetrate, pardon the pun.

This may have been the weirdest part of Sergei's critique of my performance. His disappointment at the consistency of my vomit.

This never seemed to get anywhere with the channel. International disasters come and go, but hotspots remains uncommissioned.

This one had actually been granted.

This photo would return years later on the Internet and spread like a cancer across various media in meme form.

This refrain sometimes continued after hours with my mum, my brother, and close friends joining in. Hi Louie, I was just thinking what about Debbie Reynolds? What about Idi Amin?

This somehow exacerbated my sense of unworthiness there I sat with my sparkling wine and free packet of socks. Thinking about all the money that was being spent on a segment, I would probably end up.

This struck me as a little unfair. If anyone was responsible for turning the story into a media circus, it was surely the media.

This suited me since I never felt that comfortable telling him much about my own personal life.

This turned out to be Thorn's new theme. The disaster of the Bush Presidency.

This was before Big Brother and the idea of rigging a house.

This was my moment to elicit some vulnerability from Jimmy and I tried to slow the conversation down. Can we take some of them out? I asked what do you want to take him out for. He snapped. Do you ...

This was patent Cobblers, but evidently the best defence he could think of in the moment.

This was supposed to be my speed education in presenting fact based comedy on TV and Michael began throwing out pieces of advice how to play to the camera in reaction shots and elicit small money.

This was the headquarters of the Church of Jesus Christ Christian, a white supremacist Christian group. There were only two of them, Archbishop Carl Franklin and Pastor Wayne Jones.

This went on for several minutes, after which the resulting map was a mess of scribbles of torpedoes, tornadoes, and other hazards.

This would, we hoped, fill in some of the gaps and maybe provide intimacy and pathos, as well as giving the program a sense of range, showing the entire food chain of the wrestling world.

Thor Templar.

Thorough, I corrected him, but you can call me LaRue if you want being a wrestler.

Those fingerprints were all over it. There were several books previously credited to Thor, which now appeared with his name taken off.

Those students so minded could study their Cicero, then race up to the slots of fun on Leicester Square to play video games called Rolling Thunder and Outrun.

Those trips to the flying pizza all blur together somewhat, but they tended to be a set routine.

Though I had no doubt it was folder roll, my being included in the club inclined me to be charitable towards his unlikely vision.

Though I knew him to be a business executive and samba instructor, the poised man who came to the door in his T-shirt and pajama bottoms with his well tended white beard and faint air of naughtines...

Though I said I'd be back in September, I was secretly thinking I might bail on Louis Theroux's weird weekends get hired on Newsradio and never come back.

Though there were some areas of overlap, I was more struck by the variety of the motivations the militiamen of Idaho would regard gangster rap as a symptom of our godless society.

Three of us, me and the director and Simon the AP flew out to Lewiston, ID, then drove an hour and a half through a rough hewn landscape of farmland, rolling hills and sinuous rivers.

Thrift stores were like animal shelters and shopping. There was an act of rescue. The fact that the drawers in the dresser didn't work or the clothes didn't really fit felt a small price to pay for...

Through the subsequent days in Idaho and almost heaven among the militia families, then further north in a visit to a neo-Nazi compound.

Time has somehow erased its roguish qualities. I looked less like body than a missing child on the side of a milk carton.

Time passed, I did more segments. There were some rifts on the show and several writers departed, including Chris Kelly, who had been so instrumental in getting me hired.

To Commission.

To direct, we brought back Ed Robbins, the thoughtful and slightly eccentric veteran of the head for the Hills program. He and an English AP will. Yap began working the access, the biggest wrestling.

To someone like me who struggled daily with uncertainty about far more banal matters, her complete faith in something so silly felt enviable.

To write for an American sitcom.

Todd Phillips documentary hated the portrait of the disturbed punk rocker Gigi Allen.

Touch yourself, smell yourself, taste your own secretions.

Towards the end of the day, as the festivities were winding down, Jimmy took me and will up to his cabin.

Towards the end of the second season of TV Nation, when it became clear that the US network wouldn't be renewing the show, a BBC producer named David Mortimer took me to one side to let me know the...

Towards the end of the year feeling I might have gone as far as I could in San Jose, I made plans for another move. I wondered about joining my brother who was now living in New York.

Towards the end of the year, when Joe and Adam made plans for an ambitious staging of the children's musical Bugsy Malone, I was cast as Dandy Dan, which led to several weeks of anxiety on my part.

Trays and bowls of food were arrayed on countertops. A buffet of the type you would find in the business lounge of a regional airport, g****s and apple slices, and small slabs of cheese. But there ...

Truthfully, though, I was already having the usual bouts of anxiety and seeing a vastness of downside.

Truthfully, though, I was mainly panicked and worried.

Trying a different tack, I asked about my relationship with my dad.

Trying to be helpful, Michael Coleman said, take it in your stride. Oh Michael, it's just a game for you it's my life it's my reputation with a ridiculous thing.

Trying to get my dates straight, I asked 1 how old she'd been. You sound like Jimmy, she replied. That's the first question he would ask. How old are you?

Trying to keep my feet in the realm of the real world, I made a list of famous people who were interesting and who might actually agree to let me tag along after them for 10 days. The list wasn't v...

TV Nation was justly lauded for the inventiveness of these satirical pieces. But what made them work wasn't just the concepts, but their execution, and in particular Michael's eye for reality based.

TV nations strange mix of comedy show and political documentary was reflected in the way the show was staffed.

Two of them, Adam Buxton and Joe Cornish, went on to success in TV, radio and film, and it's striking how fully formed they were as young teenagers.

Under Joe's influence, our weekends revolved around a regiment of movie. Going of whatever happened to be on at the cannon Oxford St. Often horror, sometimes comedy, occasionally art house.

Unlike other contributors who have raged or sworn vengeance, Jimmy took the punch.

Unlike other subcultures I've reported on, UFO belief is less a lifestyle than a vague rubric under which adherents either find spiritual sustenance or delude themselves. Depending on your.

Unsurprisingly, he was not totally cool with watching JJ getting it on in a porn shoot and wandered off in 1/2 to proselytize to passersby, which then led to a set two between them about.

Until I was four, we lived in Catford, a scruffy area of southeast London, in a small terraced house.

Up it came a couple of small acid mouthfuls that went splat onto the parking lot tarmac.

Up school was Westminster ease for in the assembly hall where the walls were emblazoned with coats of arms with horses, all of them weirdly sporting erections.

Upstairs we watched the news of the arrest on television. I had a glass of red wine to alleviate the stress and strangeness of the day's events. Then I had a few more.

US against the new world order.

Usually they filmed a little taste of tape of each contributor. This might take a week or 10 days, or sometimes longer. Back in the office, they'd show the highlights of their favorite candidates b...

Was he working a lot? I asked, yeah, he was doing pretty good.

Was I giving up my own BBC TV series for the possibility of freelancing a single script?

Wash it in the sink, he said, let it dry overnight.

We also added a stop off in Beverly Hills in my reading of militia literature, I'd come across a Hollywood producer called Aaron Russo, who'd produced trading places and managed Bette Midler.

We also did some straight portrait style photos of me wearing a ribbed turtleneck jumper that I'd recently bought at Gap.

We also had a clip of Michael Lowe claiming with the display of sensitivity that Nazism turned his stomach.

We arrived at a star-studded celebration of the relaunch of the cruise ship, the Coronia. John Prescott gave a speech, random celebrities milled about Michael Burke, Kenny Lynch, Liz.

We arrived at Bose House, an incongruously bland and suburban triple wide trailer.

We arrived at his radio headquarters, Me David, the director, Chris Kelly, who'd flown out on Michael's orders to hold my hand through the four day shoot and the sound recordist and camera operator...

We asked that question of the police, Neil said. Needless to say, they hadn't thought to ask it.

We began taping segments, including the Dead Heads for Doll skit, but not much else by me since in the six or so weeks I'd been there, I'd written virtually no other usable material.

We began thinking of how we might structure the chute.

We borrowed a van from a friend and moved one afternoon with the help of a couple of Sarah's colleagues from Ridler, then sat amid the boxes that evening, eating pizza that had to be delivered from...

We bought Cokes and sandwiches.

We decided we should banish the big camera and the sound recordist and with just two of us present, the Director Alicia and myself. We would film an evening Shay Eubank as they did their evening ro...

We did in fact have other blank tapes later back in the office, David Mortimer was perplexed that we hadn't bothered to reshoot the scene to cover ourselves in the edit.

We didn't tell any friends and family. We were the only ones present and to make it legally binding we had to ask a passing stranger to witness the event.

We drove out again and when we arrived the light was going.

We drove up a narrow, winding country Rd in the early morning darkness. It was November and Snow was everywhere.

We drove up a rough driveway through a pine forest, passed a sign saying whites only into a clearing with a church and a guard tower, and scattered mobile homes.

We edited these against the blander statements they'd made when we filmed, making the point that the main difference between the old and the new clan was how careful they were about what they said ...

We figured we would put our contributors up in a hotel, but our days would involve small missions, one for each contributor that the other members of the group would help out with.

We filled time with interviews with his support staff fired, enjoyed collecting pedigreed businesses like Harrods and Fulham Football Club and he was the same with people accumulating Swanier name.

We filmed a trip down to the South Coast somewhere to meet a friend and supporter of Neals, an influential academic called Lord Ralph Harris or Ralph Lord Harris. I'm honestly not sure how you say ...

We filmed him printing out a flyer, new leadership, new ideas, new direction. We're not in the cowpasture anymore.

We flew out to the location a couple of days later.

We found another non racist, almost heaven knight, a slightly crazed born again called Don. He'd once worked in computers and donated to friends of the Earth who lived in a house made from straw ba...

We had a meeting in the office to discuss ways we might do this. It was agreed that he seemed most normal around his family and that his wife, Karen in particular, came across as approachable and n...

We had about 15 minutes and captured a short sequence of me at the landing site, an expanse of scrubby desert.

We had no photos from the locations, so we arranged a shoot with a photographer and props related to each episode. It took place in a studio in the basement of BBC Television centre in Shepherd's B...

We looked at the rushes.

We made a plan for Jimmy and I to spend the night together in a camper van, but in the event he refused my company opting to stay on his own but there was a small incident I cherished which we capt...

We made three more episodes in the first half of 1997, one on male porn performers, another on UFO Contactees a third on Christian evangelists of the healings and miracles variety.

We moved to England when I was one year old. My mum joined the BBC as an arts producer for the World Service. She was a feminist, a proud working woman and we had live in no pairs.

We moved to Wandsworth which was back then a little rough but more central and leafier than Catford with trees and Commons and Victorian housing stock built for people with servants who lived below...

We pulled the plug.

We pushed on with other, less toxic contributors. Mike Aler, who lived underground and whose political views were relatively mainstream. Other than thinking society was on the verge of collapse.

We resumed, I tried again and the interview proceeded.

We retired to their small kitchen where they made me tea. They talked about Star Trek and Star Wars. They believed that the mythology of the two franchises contained a great deal of historical trut...

We retreated to the Chapel behind his house, furnished with folding chairs and odd bits of UFO memorabilia.

We rushed to ready a first filming trip. I wrote a sheet of humorous questions to ask Beau.

We sat in a conference room with a couple of the writers on the wall with segment ideas on index cards. Pets on Prozac moved the show to New Jersey and also apply as hitmen to.

We shot the conversation in an extreme wide the two of us ascending a hillside next to his cottage, thinking some distance from the camera might encourage him to speak more freely.

We slotted in another couple of characters. I was keen to include a lefty hippie survivalist who found a man who lived in an underground home named Mike Aler. A freak flagged Mr Natural who was also.

We spent the whole day together touring his house, meeting the family, driving along the Brighton Sea front in his huge Peterbilt truck. Much of the time, Chris Pontificated about the importance of...

We spoke for an hour or so, mainly about politics, finding much to agree on.

We started filming another UK based project. A profile of the owner of Harrods, the multimillionaire Mohammed Al Fayed. His son Dodi had been dating Princess Diana when she died and fired blamed he...

We started once again in Leeds though this time with just will and myself present the three of us ate at adriano's flying pizza, a restaurant near Jimmy's penthouse that was his default hangout.

We started with a sense of location. No more jetting off to Hollywood. Aaron Russo was off the menu. The whole thing would be shot in and around Idaho.

We talked about some of the characters Jerry mentioned, liking Mrs Slocum, the Boardy old saleswoman in the lingerie department. I asked him what he thought of Mr Humphreys and effeminate sales ass...

We teach the gospel of the Kingdom which Jesus teached, Franklin said.

We tied the knot 1 cold December day at New York City Hall in a gambit intended to make it easier for her to work in America, though clearly we were in a real relationship.

We took off, appropriately enough, like a rocket, leaving the crew vehicle in our dust. Alas, it was several minutes before we realized we'd lost them, and this being before mobile phones.

We took the train down to Liverpool docks at my invitation on route. Jimmy made a verbal inventory of his accolades and honorifics, OBE, knighthood, papal knighthood.

We took the train to Scarborough Jimmy'z flat. There was in a grand old Victorian building high above the sea front with a view across Scarborough Bay. The waves rolling in and hills off in the dis...

We tried to keep the faith Dauntlessly a team of two or three apps in a couple of directors pounded the phones and brainstormed possibilities.

We visited an amusement arcade on the sea front run by a friend of Jimmy'z, filled with machines that cascaded 2P coins and then a fish and chip shop where Jimmy was approached by a young woman I w...

We walked back inside and Jimmy closed the balcony doors.

We weathered that wobble for the moment at least, though, and nearly pulled out a couple of days later due to a feeling that my questions were insufficiently serious. Possibly it was an aftershock ...

We went into the bathroom, which was also cluttered with books and tiles. With Willie Rushton caricatures of fat naked ladies running around.

We went to Trinidad on a yacht my father chartered, says one American schools are rubbish.

We went up a ladder into the guard tower and there as we stood looking out on miles of white wilderness, Jerry announced his great fondness for the TV programme. Are you being served this?

We were in the company of the Hamilton's lawyer, Michael Coleman, in his car license plate one law.

We were joined by Leanne Superior at the Unarius Academy director Charles Spiegel.

We were more like conjoined twins than boyfriend, girlfriend, existing in a feedback loop. That much of the time was loving and some of the time maligned with feelings of resentment and irritation ...

We were now three days into the shoot and clearly it wasn't going brilliantly.

We were spending some time apart by mutual agreement, sowing some wild oats, and for several weeks I mooched at my dad's house at Cape Cod, visited family, hung out with Marcel, who had taken a job.

We were, in many respects a 70s style family. My parents were attempting in a way that was in equal parts ridiculous and admirable to find a new way of doing things that.

We would hack paths through brambles and sumac trees with machetes, or go camping and build fires in the woods, or if it was raining, we'd peer into the electronic Blizzard of a small portable TV t...

We'd arranged to meet Bow at his house early the next morning. The call time was 5:00 AM.

We'd been together 12 years, our very own two person club 1830. If they offered holidays where you stay at home and get high and play backgammon.

We'd go to a club or a bar, or a friend's party, then head back to our apartment in the spirit of someone who's had their 15 minutes of fresh air and can go home.

We'd gone up the night before and made our ritual visit to the flying pizza. Then the next morning we sat watching the four episodes of the shows as well. Filmed us in a locked off shot.

We'd managed to capture on television for the first time, something we as a society had all known but never quite nailed down.

We'd put tracing paper on the record player and scratch records and improvise rhymes over breakbeats.

We'd resumed early in 2000, first like a man dipping his toes in freezing water with a day of charity work in Doncaster that was drizzly and uneventful and only gained us some shots of Jimmy luggin...

We'll have locks Lou, he said. We'll get an apartment in Hoboken. It'll be Wicks.

We're doing a little story on almost heaven finding out what life's like up here, I replied.

We're getting into circus tricks now, Anita Cannibal said. Who can stick? What up their ass? It didn't used to be like that.

We're not predicting doom and gloom or fearful of doom and gloom, she said in the year 2001. We expect the first spacecraft to land from another planet in our Galaxy.

We've been doing this since 10:00 o'clock. He shouted as I attempted a kind of human coffee table posture, pushing my belly in the air and bending my arms back like a crab.

We've been looking at the furnishings and knickknacks in her front room plates with teddies on pewter Ware, antique maps, and ceremonial swords when the subject was raised of what it was about her ...

We've been writing to each other and discussing the possibility of me joining her and us living somewhere in Southeast Asia. By coincidence, my Uncle Gene, an international lawyer, told me he had a...

We've moved offices by now. No longer in a groovy canal side building in Westbourne Park. We were installed in a block like structure on an anonymous stretch of Wood Lane next to the A 40 and oppos...

Weeks later, I viewed's rough assembly of the episode and was surprised to see he hadn't included the moments of the workout spinning out of control or the regurgitation.

Well, as long as you're not really hurt, I offered. Though truthfully, I was a little freaked out at how much Gore was on display.

Well, I didn't believe that Bob was in touch with a real being on another planet, and I took his claims of Cortona's oracular gift with a pinch of salt. I didn't view Bob as a con man either. It wa...

Well, I'll winkle away at that one.

Well, it builds brand recognition. He said we have another one. We're working on Ray Meier's Extreme survival is how the commissioners like to develop talent in the popular documentary genre.

Well, it'll be whatever they make it.

Well, of course.

Well, Paul said, rolling his eyes. Anything's possible. I've been doing this job so many years, seen so much. I'll tell you. Nothing surprises me anymore, nothing.

Well, the sun's trying to come out in it.

Well, we ended up with a little tiny spot up here. We are right here, he said, making a little cross in northern Idaho. This place is the safest place.

Well, you can come in, but I'm supposed to be doing my radio show in just a couple of minutes and I was told it would be Tuesday.

Well, you weren't really supposed to enjoy it. I offered. It's more of an avant-garde piece.

What about Tony Blair? What about Jerry Lewis? What about Carlos the Jackal? What about cannon and ball? What about chenjerai Hitler hunzvi? What about the krankies?

What are you working on, she asked.

What does that prove, I wondered?

What does this stand for?

What felt especially untoward was to have achieved success with a program that hinged on nothing. I done.

What followed was a domestic scene, both familiar and bizarre, with four young children all making claims on Karen's attention as she rushed up and down stairs, signalling her exasperation and Chris.

What happens to the performers? I asked?

What I said grandma, he said again.

What if Louis wanted to dye his hair like yours? Diane asks, yes, but that's not real. Jimmy says in words that when I see them now, I allow as perceptive.

What stays with me though is the recollection of being asked after one of the takes. If I wanted to see the control room.

What was more striking was that he hadn't packed a change of underwear.

What will happen in the upcoming election? I asked many who are incumbents will be turned away.

What will we see in the documentary?

What would you say is the traditional negative image of the Ku Klux Klan? I asked.

When a friendly rejection came back, it felt like a result.

When combined with my two sizes too big leather jacket, I imagined it gave me a roguish 70s appearance. A bit like body from the professionals.

When he is clearly being filmed by someone who presumably has sandwiches and or a buoyant vessel.

When I come in, I always go all right darling, he said it's a friendly thing. It's not morbid. It's totally friendly. So there.

When I finally got around to watching some examples of popular documentary, I didn't like them. The travelogues with comedians and raconteurs were self satisfied and lifeless, they did.

When I mentioned the Hamiltons, people say, Oh yes, there's something funny about that couple.

When I picked up the ringing phone and the voice, said Louis, Jerry Kupfer TV Nation, I put my spliff down and stood up not feeling equipped to conduct a high stakes professional.

When I pushed him harder on some of his evasions and ellipses, letting the silence play out, he looked into the camera saying he's on the ropes. He's on the ropes in a way intended to take control ...

When I saw Peter in Broadmoor, I told him thanks for burying that brass in Roundhay Park, Jimmy said I ate free for a week.

When I told my dad I was going to San Jose, his reaction was to say several times. Do you know I've never been to San Jose as though this in itself was an interesting fact about the place.

When I'd finished, I showed it to my comedy writer friends.

When it finally aired almost exactly a year after taping, the public agreed Louis Theroux's Weird Christmas was a cracker that made no noise.

When it was over, Bob snorted with his face in a towel. I wandered around the Chapel examining religious icons and pamphlets by people describing their adventures in outer space.

When it went out, I had the sense that we'd made something compelling and strange. There was a richness to the encounters, the endless game playing, and cat and mouse that put it in a different cla...

When Louis met the Hamiltons, marked a kind of weird high watermark of my professional fortunes.

When my brother turned 11 or 12, my parents gave him a copy of Colin Wilson's Order of Assassins, an Omnium Gatherum of grisly murders for his birthday.

When my brother was about 7, my mum gave him a book on the world's major religions. Partly this was to broaden his cultural horizons, though I also have an inkling she was hoping he might pick one ...

When she was dead, she was all mine.

When spy finally folded at the beginning of 1994, it was hardly a surprise. Well, we hadn't been paid for a couple of weeks, so that was a clue. One morning it was announced that the magazine was d...

When the acceptance message came, I read it with a weird blank feeling of inevitability.

When the Cherie came to see me, I put a fixed penalty parking ticket on her car.

When the episode appeared on TV, at least one reviewer thought the whole sequence faked, which I could sort of understand.

When the film eventually went out, he was jubilant. I've had all thoughts of people coming up to tell me it's a total win for me. He said. You let yourself down with the documentary.

When the finals results came, I got a first with the amount of work I did, it would have been pretty weird if I hadn't. The notice came by post. There was also a message from one of the history Dons.

When the porn and militia episodes came out, some reviewers expressed surprise at the more complete palette of emotions they showed.

When the radio show was over, the delays, the sense of occasion, the undeniable fact that I was now starting filming on my own TV show after a break from being on screen of a year and a half.

When the results came in, the verdict was not death, just loud.

When the show finally went on, preceded by a massive promotional blitz masterminded by Joads and based on the publicity campaign for Ghostbusters, it was a triumph.

When the shows finally came to air, it was more than a year since I had begun making them. I felt a little disconnected from them at the same time, I was fairly confident that they were doing somet...

When the time came to drive to a cafe in Otley, in a moment I'm fairly sure he thought was off camera. Jimmy suggested I take a more positive approach to my questioning.

When the time came to say goodbye with no real expectation of seeing him again, I felt not so much a fondness for him as a kind of grudging respect.

When the time came to see his bedroom, he duly referred to it as the altar.

When we briefly toyed with the profile of the presenter Esther Rantzen, he was dismissive with Esther is just all about ChildLine total snooze.

When we sat down, he sketched out a vision of the society we starkids would one day create peaceful egalitarian, environmentally sensitive?

When we weren't watching movies in the West End, we'd sometimes spend the evening at Benny's flat in Kentish Town. He lived with his mum, who was often away, and we'd smoke cigarettes and drink gin...

When we'd arrived at a 50 minute version, we'll travelled up to Leeds to show Jimmy as had been agreed as a professional courtesy.

When will told me jimmy'z reaction, I was mainly relieved that he wasn't annoyed. Not that it would have caused us to change anything in the finished film, but I don't like to make any more enemies...

When you learned that I was working on an entire series of celebrity profiles, Jimmy made semi regular calls to offer suggestions or advice.

When you wanted to take it out, all the children had to stand aside as he drove past like spectators at a Lord Mayor's procession.

When's it all going to happen? Do you think I asked?

Where in the hell you think you're going? No, you're coming out watching everybody else. I don't give a shit get your ass back in the ring.

Where little Indian statues of couples in coitus sat beside generic holiday snaps of cliffs children.

Whether because of my presence or for some other reason, JJ struggled to stay hard for the scene.

While I was in LA, David had found two assistant producers, Jim Margolis and Simon Boyce, and in them may have been our best hope of salvation. They were both whip, smart and funny and excite.

While many of the segments on the show were high concept satirical pieces, my own bits tended to be less stunt driven. Usually they involve me visiting a weird or eccentric character with questiona...

While waiting for someone parked up in a car, I'd asked about the difference between the Duke and Duchess of Kent and Prince and Princess Michael of Kent. How was it possible to have a Duke and Duc...

Why do you say in interviews that you hate children? When I've seen you with kids and you clearly enjoy their company and you have a good rapport with them.

Why do you see yourself doing on the show?

Why do you think that Neil last?

Why efforts at seduction put me in mind of those pictures they used to run in the National Enquirer of Tiny, Yappy dogs that have managed to mate with Great Danes?

Why I asked? Why do you think?

Will and I followed him. No one was there.

Will my director came along too? We met at the Langham Hotel on Regent Street close to Broadcasting House.

Will went and wrecked him at his huge house in Thaden. Boys the Citizen Kane of his own 7.

With many of the alpha type ideologues, I had a reassuring feeling of invisibility when I was in their presence.

With no leads, I decided to pay a visit to Bob Short the space channel at his home in the Arizona town of Cornville.

With that old footage as evidence, I'd like to make fun of Michael's appearance. But what is clear is that of the two of us. It is I in an ill fitting thrift store, sports jacket, hair shaggy and u...

With the doors of the BBC documentary Department swung wide open to me, I can understand the idea of turning my back on them to pursue a career. In sitcoms, a world where I didn't even know where.

With the full hardiness of the young, I ignored this advice. Riding the subway into the small hours, returning drunk from parties and bars the intimate mood of the carriages late at night. Their gal.

With the wrecky tape in mind, I asked why do you call it the altar? Because I go to sleep in it and I smile and it's nice to be there.

With their day jobs on the live show in their back pockets, the Miller writers were faintly dismissive of the hoary old 80s holdover. They now found themselves working on.

With thought, I felt on safer ground, I had him pegged as hard, headed a profiteer. This was what I'd sensed about him on the first visit and liked. I was fairly sure he was.

With time on my hands and enough of a safety net with the BBC's offer I had decided I wanted to take the leap of following a dream I'd been thinking about for a couple of years.

Without many friends in the city, I found myself taking an interest in the lives of these people.

Without realizing it, I began to breathe in Michael's way of making television.

Without the tug of a home life I floated around the rectilinear corridors, often chatting with the Irish TV journalist Donald McIntyre.

Without thinking about it too much, I took on the persona of a slightly hapless but enthusiastic reporter who was intent on making friends and also giving his questions answered but equally awkward...

Wooden ships by Crosby Stills and Nash played wooden ships arm the water very free.

Wordless wonders, the sound man grumbled.

Working on my own segments, I was insulated from the office politics, having been rescued from publishing drudgery and set to work in TV as a writer and correspondent, I was still enjoying the nove...

Would a blowjob go well with that a blowjob would go great with this as a precursor to an energetic sex scene.

Would the interviewees still be as friendly, having seen the programs, would they feel conned rather than a reunion tour, the trip might turn into a kind of referendum on my own methods.

Yeah it was great. I said later I discovered Michael had got his start in journalism by founding and editing the Flint Voice, which was his hometown's left wing weekly and its equivalent of metro p...

Yeah, good one, Schwarzenegger, I'll be back.

Yeah, I said stalling while I pondered this unexpected reply. That doesn't sound like an altar to me.

Yeah, thanks for your ideas Paul. Now said we're actually working on one about Dungeons and Dragons already.

Yeah, the pleasure of the food I added, hopefully.

Yeah, well, you know the food and.

Years later, when I mentioned this fact in an interview, Nick issued a statement. I have no recollection of Louis through waking me up in the morning. I didn't mind, though. It makes me wonder if I...

Yes I have. I loved it. I said it's one of my favorite films.

Yes, completely 100% normal. Christine replied. We have no deviations. Absolutely nothing. Very happy with each other. We have no problems. We've never had any problems, great.

Yes, he's lost the plot on that, I'm afraid. Totally and utterly, and I don't mind telling the world about that. Useless as most male men are, I'm afraid.

Yes, I do. Yes, do you see why I am the Sarge huh? Yes, I do speak up, say, Sir. Yes Sir Sir. Yes Sir, look at these guys. They started at 10:00 o'clock.

Yes, I said.

Yes, of course that's great.

Yet he appeared, thrilled with how it had gone beaming as a nurse, patched up his wound.

You against who?

You also weren't supposed to send a script for a particular show to that show. The writers would be so attuned to lapses in voice they'd see everything that was wrong with it.

You can't sleight of hand that.

You could put that medallion under bad wine and it'll make it palatable. Liara said it completely removes the bad stuff.

You didn't see that on a BBC Two popular documentary.

You do that by twisting it. I said no, no no. Bob said you hold it and rub it and gradually it begins to melt.

You don't want that photo out there, he said.

You learn to connect more deeply. This is an L2 event, so genitals stay covered, no genital touching, but whatever else you would like to take off. Feel free to take off if you don't have any.

You may also get burned to a crisp.

You might think it would be irritating hearing these bald claims with no backup, but I couldn't help admiring it almost as a piece of theatre.

You need to get serious or hit the road. She didn't say, but that was the subtext.

You saw the TV nation pilot and you absolutely loved it. Sure, I said.

You were singing Zulu warrior.

You will have some place to call your own, Jones said.

You're an intriguing public figure, I said. Then I asked.

You're better looking than me. You can't come in, he said anybody better looking than me. That's it.

You're bigger than Rory Bremner. The channel controller said an unsolicited and faintly surreal compliment bigger than Bremner.

You're probably aware of the boom in popular documentary programming, he said like a man at a corporate seminar. I'd never heard the term before. I was wholly unaware of the alleged boom.

You're the grand dragon of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. I said yes, Sir.

You're willing to do anything on the show. He told me. Make coffee, do messenger work, phone, bash, fine, I said.

You've been on this journey the last few days, and I've seen you grow. He said I've worked with a lot of correspondents, your voice, your inflections are beautiful because it's the voice of an ordi...

Your love life has never been discussed in the press has it? I said, why do you think that is?

Yours is the biggest yet.

Zach was in the role of Gollywog, which was questionable. Even then, while I played the wooden soldier for my climactic speech, I had to confess my forbidden love for my sister, the.

20 or 30 tables were set out. Books were on sale with names like listening to extraterrestrials, healing entities and aliens. Alien log.

30 or so budding made for TV. Monsters were already doing squats and chanting in a cavernous space. Under Sarge's tutelage, ripped and shiny and hairless, the wrestlers combined.

32 she'd grown up in Africa, the daughter of missionaries.

50 minutes each yes?