Gotta Get Theroux This by Louis Theroux

Author:Louis Theroux
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pan Macmillan

Chapter 19

You Can All Fuck Off

It was towards the end of 2001. There had been a series of false starts and abortive projects – one involved embedding with a troupe of eighties pop bands for the ‘Here and Now’ tour, another on John Noakes, the ex-Blue Peter presenter. Uri Geller briefly came back into the frame, yet again, and the boy band 5ive.

For a while we were having serious conversations about dedicating an hour of network television to a profile of Linsey Dawn McKenzie, a glamour model whose fame was based on the enormous size of her breasts. She was going on a ‘boob cruise’ with a paying clientele of breast appreciators. An AP went out to Essex to recce her. I can’t remember the specifics. But since we didn’t make the programme, I conclude that her breasts just weren’t big enough to generate a full hour-long programme.

By now all my anxieties and doubts about making celebrity profiles had coalesced into a kind of disgust. Having started out as a journalist, a humble trapper and skinner of stories with a certain knowledge of his hunting grounds and how to bag his quarry, I found myself in the position of wandering around the woods with a silver platter, waiting for a roast chicken to fall onto it. Day after day we were joylessly pushing the button on a slot machine, its wheels marked with celebrity names, hoping for a payday.

Not to mention that the whole diary-book-thing, which had seemed such a good idea, had now by its very formlessness taken over my life. In my work I’d always tried to expand the frame of enquiry, capturing more reality and greater authenticity by including those moments at the edges of an encounter that are in some ways the most real. But with the diary it felt as though I’d expanded the frame so wide that it was no longer clear where the edges were. My waking hours resembled a life-support system for a project that required me to have conversations with my celebrity ex-subjects and take notes. Of all the conversations, as ever, the weirdest and most interesting were with Jimmy Savile. But, even with him, I found myself in a place of diminishing returns, never getting closer to making his parts add up.

Then, in amongst these failures and missteps, there came an expression of interest from Max.

When he died in his cell at HMP Littlehey, Cambridgeshire, Max Clifford, the star publicist, was three years into an eight-year sentence for multiple counts of indecent assault. His death was an ignominious end for a man who had once been one of the most powerful people on Fleet Street. His stock in trade had been kiss-and-tell stories. Max would sell the tabloids scoops about nights of passion with celebrities. Rebecca Loos, a personal assistant to the footballer David Beckham, had used his services when she’d alleged that the two of them had been having an affair. The actress Antonia de Sancha had gone to him with her account of being the mistress of the conservative politician David Mellor.

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