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Louis Theroux is an acclaimed documentary filmmaker, journalist and broadcaster. He first appeared on British screens in TV Nation, and began presenting his BAFTA-winning Weird Weekends series in 1998, becoming known for immersing himself in the lives of his subjects in order to better understand them.

He’s covered a wide range of people over the years, including Black Nationalists, professional wrestlers, swingers, people with dementia, paedophiles and maximum-security prisoners.

Here’s what we learned from his Desert Island Discs.

1. His work helps bring him perspective

Louis has made his name documenting the lives of eccentrics and extremists and he thinks that this helps to bring balance to the rest of his life: “When you are on a hillside in Idaho with a gun nut and he’s predicting the end of the world, suddenly things like electricity bills or small marital arguments don’t feel so important.”

2. Enid Blyton’s books made him want to go to boarding school

Louis and his older brother Marcel both asked their parents if they could attend boarding school, despite only living 20 minutes away. Louis suspects that the pair had been inspired by Enid Blyton’s St Clare’s and Malory Towers novels: “They’re a bit like Harry Potter, but with no magic. They’re all set in girls’ boarding schools and they’re about girls having midnight feasts and sometimes they start pranks… I think based on that, that’s what we thought boarding school was like, endless midnight feasts.” In reality, Louis has compared the experience to being more like San Quentin prison.

3. He has a mischievous side

As the youngest child, Louis claims that he was often naughty and silly but that he flickered between misbehaving and feeling worried and sensitive: “I tend to think that it’s served me quite well in work, because I am acutely tuned into both how I’m feeling and how other people are feeling… but then occasionally I feel compelled to say something or do something inappropriate and then if people get upset by it then I get upset, so it’s all a bit contradictory!”

4. Having a widely-published dad has its pitfalls

Louis is the son of famed travel writer and novelist, Paul Theroux, himself a castaway in 1976.
“I’d get little insights into his other life through reading his books. It’s an odd thing reading a graphic sex scene in a novel that your dad has written, when you’re seven or eight years old. There’s quite a bit of drug-taking in some of the travel books and in some of the semi-autobiographical books there’s quite a lot of extra-marital sex… I think there’s worse things in life but you do have to process it a bit.”

5. Joe Cornish fuelled his love of rap music

One of Louis’s memorable early documentaries saw him immersing himself in the gangsta rap scene of New Orleans, but it was long before this that his love of rap music began. Choosing Eric B and Rakim’s track ‘Paid in Full’, Louis explains that it was school-friend Joe Cornish (Film director and one half of Adam & Joe) who gave him a mixtape when they were 17 that began his lifelong love of the genre. “This was really a big moment for me, this was the first time I’d listened to a rap record that felt poetic and interesting and different.”

6. Michael Moore gave him his first job in TV

After university, Louis worked as a journalist in San Jose and New York before being recruited by documentary filmmaker Michael Moore’s series TV Nation which required a British correspondent. “Although I was completely unqualified and would never have seen myself as someone who could do that… I think the level of incompetence that I brought to the job was, for him [Michael], a big plus.”

7. Cooking helps to distract him from the stresses of the job

More recently, many of Louis’s documentaries have had a more serious tone than his early work, with subjects including dementia, opioid addiction and campus rape. “I think the stressful part is probably before you go away, so I do a lot of displacement activity like cooking. Mainly chopping onions, making some pasta sauces or something, just to keep busy.”

8. He doesn’t expect to cope well on a desert island

He’s a jet-setting documentary maker who has spent time living amongst people in isolated societies preparing for the end of the world, but he still doesn’t think he’d fare too well stranded on a desert island: “I don’t do well in solitude. Also, I go a bit out of my mind, I can’t work out if I’m thinking my thoughts or my thoughts are thinking me, I think I’d start falling apart quite quickly...”