What do Chelsea Manning, Dame Joan Collins and the singer Raye have in common? No, this isn’t the fiendishly difficult connections round at your local pub quiz; it’s the line-up of stars brought under the microscope for the second season of BBC One’s The Louis Theroux Interviews, in which the bespectacled beanpole applies his trademark wit and acuity to another dizzyingly eccentric array of celebrities.
Over the course of five 40-minute interviews, Theroux probes the lives, both professional and personal, of Collins, Manning, and Raye, as well as boxer Anthony Joshua and singer Pete Doherty. There was undoubtedly a time when the material here would’ve been a mere spoke in the wheel of a Weird Weekends episode (when Theroux visits the Finchley boxing gym where Joshua threw his first punches, it feels like a strand of a larger conversation about contact sports, masculinity, or head injuries) but for once, the journalist is not drawing on a large canvas – these are simple, linear interviews with quite-famous people.
What makes Theroux an effective interviewer – particularly of people who might otherwise not be so forthcoming, whether brothel owners, big game hunters or, you know, the Hamiltons – is his ability to be disarming. Whether he takes the naïf approach or exudes the classical confidence of a 6ft2 middle-class white man, as he does increasingly now, Theroux is an expert at convincing his subjects to lower their guard. “Let’s have a cup of tea,” he instructs Joshua, when the boxer appears momentarily emotional. “Are you alright?” But this tactic works better when deployed against people unaccustomed to setting the agenda in an interview. Here, however, against stars of sports, screen, stage and elsewhere, Theroux runs the risk of being overly chummy. Whether it’s frolicking with Pete Doherty in the Normandy surf (a wrestling sequence with a palpable eroticism to match Deborah Kerr and Burt Lancaster in From Here to Eternity) or trading star signs with Joan Collins (Tauruses, like Theroux, don’t make good lovers with Geminis, like Collins), it seems at times that Theroux has gone native.
It’s hard not to attribute this to Theroux’s growing cultural currency. When he and Joshua exchange a few lines of freestyle rap (“Here I am with my man AJ/ I’m asking my questions getting all cray-zay”), you can imagine the BBC’s marketing team licking their lips. “Jiggle Jiggle”, a single by Duke & Jones sampling a previous Theroux rap from Weird Weekends was certified Gold in the US. With his level of profile, Theroux’s reputation for hoisting his interviewees with their own petards is perhaps the only explanation for the failure to book better guests. Joshua is an interesting enough case study in the yips, and Doherty notorious in his own right, but Raye feels somewhat early in her career to be given the Theroux treatment, while an Oprah Winfrey-style powwow at Joan Collins’s house is entirely devoid of tension. Still, the guestlist this time round marks a small improvement from the first series, which featured YUNGBLUD, Katherine Ryan, and Rita Ora.
It feels, at times, like the BBC knows it has a real asset in Theroux and is determined to keep him in work – any work – to prevent his services being snapped up by Netflix or a big American broadcaster. Pitched somewhere between Esther Perel and Graham Norton, Theroux is undoubtedly capable of eliciting genuine feeling from his guests. Locked in a hotel room with Libertines bandmates Doherty and Carl Bârat, he pushes the combustible duo towards what must be their thousandth reconciliation. “Good session guys,” he says, as the weepy pair hug. “I think we had a breakthrough today.”
With more autonomy (the production company, Mindhouse, run by Theroux and his wife, Nancy Strang, now make his projects) and a less constrictive format, The Louis Theroux Interviews are undoubtedly more entertaining than the usual celebrity interview racket. “Talk about 12 rounds!” an off-screen producer sycophantically barks, as Theroux wraps up his conflab with Joshua – but this series has far more in common with the world of pro-wrestling than that of boxing. For all his dynamism, intellectual contortion, and sheer, expressive joy of the pursuit, it’s all too rare that Theroux manages to lay a glove on the personalities before him.
